Is the e-book boom over?

by Sandra Parshall

For years we’ve heard that e-books are taking over publishing, that sales are increasing at a phenomenal rate every year, that digital is going to save writers and the book business as a whole. Common estimates had e-book market share reaching as much as 80% in the near future.

But all that is over. Digital Book World, an incessant promoter of the e-book form, is now asking “What happened to e-book growth?” A Book Industry Study Group (BISG) report has the answer: it’s stagnating. 

According to BISG, e-book market share has been flat, at around 30%, for the past year. Digital books account for under 15% of earnings.

And while a recent survey indicates that owners of e-book devices read as much as 60% more than other readers, BISG reports that the percentage of book buyers who read e-books at least once a week is stuck at around 20%. Only 25% of readers buy an e-book at least once a week.

However, BISG found that many readers plan to purchase e-book devices in the future, and say they will continue buying and reading e-books. The market may continue to grow, although much more slowly than in the first wild years of e-book popularity. Both the devices and the book format have quickly become established, acceptable alternatives to print, creating more and less expensive reading options and encouraging people to turn to books more often for entertainment. Mass market paperbacks, the most obvious victims of the digital revolution, continue to lose sales.

Digital book production is now an integral part of daily business at publishing houses large and small, and has inevitably led to changes as publishers view each acquisition as two separate entities, a print volume and an e-book. This article looks at how digital has altered production and workflow.

Agents and authors are increasingly concerned that publishers will eliminate print altogether for writers who aren’t proven mega-bestsellers. Publishers Weekly recently took a look at contracts that omit any guarantee of a print edition. 

Meanwhile, the booming world of self-publishing is experiencing its own growing pains. Bowker reported that the number of self-published titles in 2012 was the highest ever.

But in writers’ groups around the internet, what you’ll see these days are a lot of posts about a dropoff in sales and, consequently, earnings. Free books no longer lead to big bumps in sales. Lowering prices doesn’t work as well as it used to. Some writers think the answer is to write faster and put out more titles, closer together. Others point out that readers already have devices loaded with more e-books, many of them downloaded for free, than they can ever hope to read. Whether they will devote additional space and reading time to more and more books by the same writers is questionable. An increasing number of authors prefer to be hybrids, publishing in both digital and traditional print forms, rather than limiting their options.

Meanwhile, who rules the e-book bestseller lists? The same Big Five publishers who own the print lists. The top 10 e-books for the week ending October 27 were:

Allegiant by Veronica Roth, HarperCollins
Sycamore Row by John Grisham, Penguin Random House
The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty, Penguin Random House
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, Macmillan
Divergent by Veronica Roth, HarperCollins
Killing Jesus: A History by Bill O’Reilly and Martin Dugard, Macmillan
The House of Hades by Rick Riordan, Hachette
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King, Simon & Schuster
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, Penguin Random House
The Longest Ride by Nicholas Sparks, Hachette

Are you ashamed of what you read?

by Sandra Parshall

Sometimes I come across articles about writing, reading, and publishing that seem to be referring to an alternate book world that I’ve never experienced. My reaction is: Huh? Where did that idea come from?

Take, for example, a recent article on the Wired magazine website that examined the “surprising” popularity of genre fiction like sci-fi, fantasy, mystery and romance in e-book form. These forms of storytelling, according to the article, “have traditionally lagged behind literary fiction in terms of sales.”

Huh? Where did that idea come from?

A Publishers Weekly/Bowker study a couple years ago showed literary fiction had 20% of the digital market share, outselling any particular genre. But those sales included classics – the e-books that are dirt cheap (and sometimes free) for downloading. How many owners of new Kindles have bought War and Peace or every Jane Austen novel during an initial downloading spree, then never found time to read them as planned?

When it comes to traditional print publishing, can any of us recall a time when genre fiction didn’t dominate bestseller lists? When James Patterson, John Grisham, Nora Roberts and other genre stars didn’t regularly stomp all over literary fiction? The annual Publishers Weekly report on the bestselling books of the previous year confirm that genre rules. The surprising thing isn’t that genre sells well but that there’s any room at all for litfic.

The Wired article names some all-digital genre lines created recently by major publishers – Hydra (SF/fantasy), Alibi (mystery), Flirt (“new adult”), Loveswept (romance) from Random House and Witness (mystery) from Harper Collins – and says the focus on genre fiction “might seem counter-intuitive according to traditional print publishing sales.”

But it’s not at all counter-intuitive. Genre books, particularly romance and crime fiction in all their many varieties, are big sellers in print, so it makes sense to assume they’ll sell well as e-books. And they do. Some genre books sell more digital copies than print.

Why? Some sensible reasons are advanced in the article, but the first one mentioned is this: If it’s an e-book, you won’t be embarrassed by other people being able to see what you’re reading. That sounds an awful lot like: Nobody can see you’re reading trash.

Antonia Storer, a columnist for The Guardian, is quoted as saying she’s more comfortable reading “downmarket” fiction in secrecy on an e-reader and “keeping shelf space for books that proclaim my cleverness.” In a column last year Storer wrote, “The reading public in private is lazy and smutty. E-readers hide the material.” After you stop rolling your eyes, go read the rest of the column. It’s quite entertaining.

Put a cover on your e-reader to make sure nobody can see what kind of trash you're reading!

The Wired article does make some valid points. Liate Stehlik, senior vice president at HarperCollins, is quoted as saying that genre fans read a lot of books and “the audience that gravitated to e-books first really was that voracious reader, reading for entertainment, reading multiple books in a month across multiple genres.” She's not the first to point out that e-books are replacing mass market paperbacks. Anyone who follows market news is well aware of that.

Digital-first publishing allows publishers to take more chances on new authors and work that might not make a profit in print. Novellas, for example, have more chance of being published profitably (or published at all) as e-books. As Stehlik says, e-books have liberated publishers from the profit/loss limits of print – and they have freed writers and readers as well.

But it appears we still have a long way to go to free ourselves of prejudice against genre fiction. I’m not ashamed of what I read. I’m not ashamed of what I write. If you see me reading on my tablet, it’s not because I’m hiding something. It just happens to be a convenient way to carry around a ton of books so I always something to choose from.

The Smoking... E-book?

by Sandra Parshall

If traditional publishing dies, a lot of crime fiction readers will be standing over its lifeless form with smoking e-books in hand. Digital novels made up half of all mystery/detective sales in the final quarter of 2012, beating back print formats to take the lead in the genre for the first time.

According to Bowker Market Research (as reported in Publishers Weekly), e-book sales for the entire year averaged out to 35% of mystery units sold, with a big increase in the fourth quarter. In the same quarter of 2011, e-books accounted for only 38% of the genre’s sales.

As digital sales rose, the numbers for most print formats declined. In the last quarter of 2011, hardcovers made up 27% of the mystery market; in the same period of 2012, hardcovers declined to 19%. Trade paperbacks dropped from 15% to 13%.

The only print format holding its own in the mystery market was mass market paperback, remaining steady at 16% from 2011 to 2012 -- although the category across all genres has suffered a drastic decline since e-books began their relentless climb to dominance. Publishers Weekly points out that the second highest print sales for a mystery/detective novel reported to BookScan in 2012 were for a mass market paperback: Lee’s Child’s The Affair. Four other mass market paperbacks, all by major authors in the genre, also made the top 10 list for the year. Two trade paperbacks came in eighth and ninth, and only two hardcovers made the list: Notorious Nineteen by Janet Evanovich at number one and 11th Hour by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro at number four.

Other aspects of the Bowker study of mystery sales show that the profile of the most avid book-buyers remains the same: women account for 75% of sales, and 65% of all buyers are over the age of 55. Only 12% of buyers are between 30 and 44, and 16% are between 45 and 54. Readers with incomes between $50,000 and $74,999 bought 26% of the books. People at the top of the income scale, making more than $150,000 a year, bought the fewest books, accounting for only 9% of sales. (Too busy making money to find time for reading?)

Another interesting new survey, done by the Book Industry Study Group, shows that multi-function tablets have surpassed dedicated e-readers like the Kindle in popularity among e-book buyers. So it’s not surprising that Amazon’s share of the e-book market is decreasing.

A couple (or three) questions for readers: 
What percentage of the books you buy is digital? 
Are you buying and reading more since acquiring an e-book reader? 
Do you have a dedicated e-reader or a multi-function tablet? Or both?

 

What bestsellers tell us about the book world

by Sandra Parshall

If you’re at all interested in the wild ride that is modern publishing, the bestseller lists make up a fascinating map of the book world. It’s all there in the listed titles: the e-book revolution, the self-publishing revolution, the scramble to keep traditional publishing afloat by any and all means, including embracing e-books and self-published successes.

If you look at the ten bestselling print books of 2012, you might think traditional publishing is doing okay. But the first three slots were occupied by the three Fifty Shades books by E.L. James, and coming in at #9 was the boxed set of the trilogy – books that started life as self-published projects. Together, the four print versions sold around 15 million copies in 2012. Fifty Shades of Grey, Fifty Shades Darker, and Fifty Shades Freed also dominated the e-book bestseller list last year, and they’re still selling at a steady clip, rubbing elbows with the likes of John Grisham’s The Racketeer, Gillian Flynn’s phenomenal Gone Girl, and Nicholas Sparks’s Safe Haven.

We’ve become accustomed to announcements about major publishers acquiring print rights to e-book bestsellers in the hope that they can cash in on an enterprising author’s self-generated success. E.L. James is the prime example of how joining forces with a print publisher can – if everybody concerned is lucky and readers are willing – add another fat layer of sales and wealth that might not have been possible in the self-publishing world.

Some self-published writers, though, are holding on to their independence and reaping big rewards. The #3 title on the January 13 New York Times combined print and e-book bestseller list is a self-published young adult romance called The Coincidence of Callie and Kayden by Jessica Sorensen. It’s #2 on the e-book fiction list, sitting between Safe Haven at #1 and Gone Girl at #3. At the beginning of this week, Sorensen’s book (one of several she released in 2012) was #7 on the Kindle paid list and #5 on Amazon’s print literature and fiction bestseller list, in an Amazon Digital edition.

The #5 title on the Times combined print and e-book bestseller list for January 13 is a self-published book called Hopeless by Colleen Hoover. It’s #4 on the e-book bestseller list. Hoover released her debut novel, Slammed, in January 2012 and the follow-up, , in February. Both books were, and still are, bestsellers and have been optioned for film. Hoover’s books, printed in trade paperback using Createspace, occupy the top three slots on Amazon’s paperback bestseller list, with prices ranging from $8.88 for the first two books to $12.98 for Hopeless – the same prices people pay for trade paperbacks from major traditional publishers.

Yes, traditionally published novels still take most of the bestseller slots, for e-books as well as print. But when four of the top ten sellers for the past year were originally self-published, and the big imprints are offering multi-million-dollar contracts to independent authors, you know the ground under the publishing business has shifted and the industry will never be the same again. E.L. James, Colleen Hoover, and Jessica Sorensen are in the second wave of change, after Amanda Hocking and a couple of others led the way.

One thing hasn’t changed: Nobody knows exactly why one book succeeds wildly while others fail or register middling sales. It’s tempting for authors to think that if they self-publish they might parlay an e-book hit into huge multi-platform success. But good sales, let alone bestsellerdom, are no easier to achieve than they ever were, and self-published writers are starting with several strikes against them (lack of a bookstore presence being one). The writer still needs the elusive magic, the indefinable something that will ignite the interest of a vast readership.

I’m still looking for that magic myself. I can hope, can’t I? Meanwhile, I’m enjoying the constantly shifting landscape of publishing, as traditional imprints court writers they previously rejected, as friends who have been dropped by their publishers move on to independent mode, and still others shun the traditional path altogether and jump straight into self-publishing. I wish all of us well as we explore the options for getting our stories into the hands of readers.
****************************
The bestselling books (print and electronic) of 2012:

1. Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
2. Fifty Shades Darker by E.L. James
3. Fifty Shades Freed by E.L. James
4. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
5. Bared to You by Sylvia Day
6. Reflected in You by Sylvia Day
7. The Racketeer by John Grisham
8. The Lucky One by Nicholas Sparks
9. Fifty Shades Trilogy by E.L. James
10. A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

Do we have a name for it?

Sandra Parshall

Somebody tells you, “I’m reading a terrific book.”

What do you envision? A rectangular object made of paper, with decorative covers and page after page of type?

Do you still draw a line in your mind between “real” books and e-books and refuse to refer to an electronic download as simply a book?

Maybe you’ve grown comfortable with the term e-book, but do “enhanced e-book” and “interactive digitized book” make your teeth ache?

Written work is turning up in so many different forms these days that we sometimes need to string several words together to make ourselves clear when distinguishing between them. I’ve thought for a while that we need to come up with some new names for these new forms, instead of continuing to piggyback them onto the venerable and seriously overloaded word book. I was happy to find support for my view in Anne Kostick’s blog on Digital Book World. Excellent piece. Go read it – after finishing this one.

The word “blog” is a perfect example of what we need for all the different forms of bookness. English is the most elastic of languages, and when we hear a new word that fits, we waste no time adopting it. Within months, we may be using it so freely that it has become a necessity in our daily lives. Blog, of course, is short for web log, which is believed to have originated with Jorn Borger and his Robot Wisdom page in 1997. For a while, “weblog” seemed to gain popularity. Then in early 1999, Peter Merholz broke it into two words again, with a twist: we blog. By the time everybody on the planet had one, blog was part of our language. Although some purists – if one can be a purist about made-up words – insist that it be used only as a noun, blog, blogging, and blogged are widely accepted as verbs. And who blogs? A blogger.

Language changes have always been driven from the bottom up, starting with users, not from the top down. If a lot of people use a word, sooner or later the self-appointed language gatekeepers will have to acknowledge it.

When will a blog kind of magic strike the various forms of books on the market, so we will know in an instant what people are talking about? E-book has become such a commonly used term that it’s too late to change it, but to avoid confusion, shouldn’t we use it only when we’re referring to a straight transfer of words to electronic form? Audiobook and graphic novel have been around for a long time and have the virtue of clarity and precision. Other booklike creations still need better names, though, and more are undoubtedly on the horizon. For starters, what pithy names would you give to these?

Enhanced e-book
Interactive/editable/updatable digitized book
Enhanced or interactive children’s picture book
Online (not downloadable) book
Digitized art book

Book Lust, the (digital) sequel

Sandra Parshall

In May of 2007, the last time I wrote about book lust – we all know what that is, don’t we? – the publishing world existed in a universe quite different from today’s.

I waxed rhapsodic about the bookness of a book:

What in this world is more wondrous, magical, intriguing, alluring than a book? An entire world contained between two covers! But It’s not the content alone that I love. I enjoy the feel of a book in my hands, I admire a sturdy spine, I appreciate an attractive cover and an elegant design. I’m a type junky and always check to see whether the book includes a note about the type. I’m disappointed when I don’t find that information. (My favorite typeface, at least for the moment, is Sabon, which is used in Stephen Booth’s British editions.)

I admitted that once I owned a book, I never wanted to let it go. When we moved, about 20 years ago, from one Washington, DC suburb to another, we thinned our book collection and donated dozens to the Arlington County (VA) Central Library’s used book room. As soon as they were gone, I began to suffer an agonizing remorse. How could I have given them up? How could I live without them? For a long time after we moved next door to Fairfax County, I made regular trips to the Arlington Library, where -- yes -- I gradually bought back a fair number of the books we had donated. They were mine. They belonged at home with me, not with strangers.

Every reader and writer I knew felt the same way. Although they sometimes complained about the lack of space in their houses for other objects, not to mention humans, they could not part with their books.

That was May, 2007. On November 19 of that year, the Kindle went on sale. Some of us laughed at it. We already knew about e-books. We knew that practically nobody read them. After all, who would want to read off an electronic screen when they could be holding a real book in their hands?

But while earlier e-readers had languished in the marketplace, the Kindle had the might of Amazon and its breathtakingly huge inventory behind it, and the Kindle began to sell. We heard a rumble deep in the heart of the book world. We felt a faint tremor in the earth beneath our feet. The rumble grew to a roar, the tremor built to a violent convulsion that threatened to leave no bookstore standing.

And the definition of book lust morphed into something undreamt of in the spring of 2007 B.K.

People who coveted printed books in the Before Kindle era started looking askance at those piles of rectangular objects that took up so much space at home and were a nuisance to carry while traveling. To be sure, diehard fans of “real books” remain. But many have turned into hybrids, declaring that as much as they love printed books and always will, they don’t have room for any more and prefer to acquire e-books instead. E-reader tablets continue to sell, and as many as one-fourth of all Americans already own one. (At the end of 2011, Amazon sold a million Kindles a week.) E-book sales are gaining market share by leaps and bounds.

In the wake of all this change, I have noticed the parallel growth of e-book lust. Some people declare that they have more e-books on their machines than they will ever get around to reading. They troll for free e-books online and download them in staggering numbers. I suspect that a great many of those books will never be read, which is not something the authors want to hear. Electronic book hoarding has a lot in common with print book hoarding. Its one virtue is that it takes up less space.

I have an iPad with the Kindle app on it, and I’ve downloaded a handful of e-books. If a reference book I might use often for research is especially cheap as an e-book, I will download it. I stay away from the Kindle Store because I know I am a book addict and I don’t want to tempt myself. Once I give in to the urge to go browsing, I will be lost.

Now let’s talk about your book habits.

Do you own an e-reader?

How many books are on it right now?

How many downloads have you bought in the last month? The last year?

Are you buying more e-books than printed books?

How many of your downloads have you actually read?

Have you downloaded books on impulse, only to realize later that you’ll probably never read them?

Do you remove a book from your reader after you’ve read it or decided you don’t want to read it?

Have you ever given an e-book as a gift? Do you think you ever will?

99 is the magic number

Sandra Parshall

Why would a writer offer the product of a year’s work for a mere 99 cents?

Some people are appalled to see authors “giving away” their work, but many who have self-published their new and out-of-print novels as e-books are tapping into the magical allure of the 99 cent price tag. 

 

Savvy marketers know they can sell almost anything for that

price. To the buyer, it’s a bargain, whatever “it” is, because it costs mere pennies. Move the price up to $1 and the sale will become harder to make. Sure, it’s all in our heads, a perceived difference rather than a real one, but moving the price down from dollars to cents is guaranteed to increase sales.

Steve Jobs, never a slouch in business matters, recognized the attraction of the 99 cent price. When Apple launched the iTunes Store in 2003 (following the crackdown on internet music piracy), Jobs decreed that each single music track sold would cost 99 cents. Even consumers who had grown used to getting music for free (illegally) were willing to pay mere pennies for songs. The prices have since gone up – new singles are now $1.29 – but the phenomenal success of iTunes was built on the 99 cent price tag.

Even when a product costs considerably more than pennies, merchants still draw on the attraction of the 99 cent price by attaching it to the dollar amount. A new refrigerator won’t be advertised for $900. It will be sold for $899.99, which somehow seems like a lot less. A variation, 95 cents, is used in the prices of printed books, clothing, and a few other types of merchandise. We seldom see a tag bearing a rounded-off dollar amount.

E-book authors know what they’re doing when they offer new work or have a limited-time special sale of older work for 99 cents. Readers will buy a lot of books at that price. It’s such a small amount of money that the buyer won’t feel cheated if she doesn’t like a book and deletes it from her reader without finishing it. If she loves it, she’ll be back for more by that writer – at higher prices. (Those higher prices, too, will usually be a dollar amount with .99 at the end.) Writers like C.J. Lyons, J.A. Konrath, and Debbi Mack have quickly built large e-book readerships by using one of the oldest marketing tactics known to American commerce.

Everybody loves a bargain, even when it’s something intangible like a chunk of text that exists only in electronic form. Which proves, once again, that the more things change, the more they remain the same.

E-books are not the problem

Sandra Parshall

As many of us head off to Malice Domestic, where the traditional printed book is the focus, news from the publishing industry is grimmer than ever. In the first quarter of this year, while e-book sales jumped by 169.4%, sales of print books in all categories fell a total of 25%.

According to the American Association of Publishers, e-books and trade paperbacks were tied in the early part of the year as the leaders in all book sales.

Nielsen BookScan, which covers approximately 75% of retail book sales, reported that in the first quarter mass market paperback sales dropped by 26.6%. (The AAP statistics show an even steeper fall of 36%.) Hardcover fell 7.2%, and trade paperback dropped 6.4%.

Adult fiction lost the most ground among the various categories, falling 18.3%. (By contrast, adult fiction is the strongest segment among e-books, accounting for 61% of sales.) Juvenile nonfiction fell 11.7% and juvenile fiction dropped 8.1%. Only adult nonfiction, with a 1.1% drop, avoided a precipitous fall in print sales.

The soaring sales of e-books takes some of the sting out of the decline in print sales, but the sad truth is that books in all forms are losing their attraction as a source of entertainment and information. Vast numbers of people simply do not read books. Ever. In any format. However, the average Facebook member spends more than seven hours on the site every month. The average American watches more than 84 hours of television each month. Video games also claim a huge share of our attention span, and a single video game will sell more units in a month than all the top 20 New York Times bestselling books combined.

In a recent issue of Publishers Weekly, independent publisher Rudy Shur of Square One Publishers noted that our concern over the rise of e-books and the decline of print books is misplaced. The real competition isn’t between different forms of books but between books and other forms of entertainment. Putting a book on the Kindle won’t suddenly turn non-readers into readers.

All the evidence is that reading as a pastime began to fall out of favor when computers and then the internet became ubiquitous. That decline continues. But as fewer and fewer people bother to read books, those of us with an emotional, intellectual, or financial investment in all forms of publishing spend our energy arguing about whether e-books are good or bad. We should be talking about how to turn more people on to reading. We should be trying to figure out what it takes to lure kids away from video games. We should be trying to reawaken the love of reading in people who may have given it up because they were too busy raising kids and working. We should be persuading parents that reading to and with their kids is good for all of them. While we’re at it, we should support our local libraries in any way we can.

E-books, print books – what good will any of them be when no one is left to read them?

Print Snobs and E-bullies

Sandra Parshall

It was inevitable, human nature being what it is. The so-called e-book revolution is already bringing out the worst in some writers, dividing them into two equally unpleasant categories: print book snobs and e-bullies.

Not all writers are taking defensive/offensive stances, but plenty are pouring their emotions into angry, insulting internet postings.

The print book snobs are unmovable in their convictions:

Only a stack of paper bound between covers can be called a Book.
E-books are merely an additional source of income from works that have first been properly vetted and produced by A Real Publisher.
People who go straight to digital are doing so because their work is amateurish and unreadable and no Real Publisher will touch it.

On the other side, the e-bullies respond in equally nasty terms:

Writers published in print are fools clinging to a dying format.
Any writer who gives a slice of profits to a publisher and an agent is an idiot.
A writer who hands over production and sale of her/his work to a publishing company is lazy, stupid, or both.
Any writer who really tries can make a lot more money from e-books than print books.

I don’t know about you, dear reader, but I’m sick of this argument already.

E-books are transforming the way we view publishing, no doubt about it. I respect anyone who can make money from e-books without first becoming a bestseller in traditional book form. (Right now, the print and e-book bestseller lists are virtual mirrors of one another.) To me, a book in e-format is as much a book as one in print form. A “book” is the words, not the platform on which those words are brought to readers. I hope every novel I ever publish will be available to readers as an e-book. I believe e-books will help many midlist authors find an audience and keep them from giving up on their writing.

On the other hand, I am passionate about printed books. Love the smell of them, the feel of them, the beauty of them. I have shelf after shelf filled with books I may never open again after the initial reading. I keep them because they’re beautiful, and because they represent gateways into other worlds. I love libraries for the same reason, and one of the most thrilling moments of my life was seeing my first novel in a library.

I understand why people become defensive and downright nasty when their choices are challenged. I don’t understand why anyone assumes the right to challenge another person’s choices.

All writers are struggling to understand the changes sweeping through the publishing world. Why can’t we respect each other, support each other, and walk into the future hand in hand?

Start the new year with a free e-book!

 

Leave a comment this weekend and you could start the new year with a free e-book by one of the bestselling writers we hosted this week.

Five of our readers, chosen at random, will each receive their choice of a free Open Road Media e-book from one of this week's guests: Jonathon King, Jack Higgins, Lawrence Block, or Stephen Coonts.

Leave a comment if you’d like to enter the drawing. So we’ll be able to contact you if you win and tell you how to download your free book, either include your e-mail address in your comment (if you feel comfortable doing that) or send it privately to sandraparshall@yahoo.com. Winners will be notified on Monday.

A full list of available titles may be found using these links:
 
Jonathon King
http://openroadmedia.com/author_king.html
 
Jack Higgins
http://openroadmedia.com/author_higgins.html
 
Lawrence Block
http://openroadmedia.com/author_block.html
 
Stephen Coonts
http://openroadmedia.com/author_coonts.html
                           
Happy new year to all our friends – and thank you for reading Poe’s Deadly Daughters!



                                     


Just for fun, can you guess which countries these new year's wishes represent?

E-books: Are publishers keeping up?

Sandra Parshall

A New England prep school has replaced traditional books with a library of e-books and e-readers. The University of Texas at San Antonio’s Applied Engineering and Technology Library has removed all paper books and replaced them with a digital collection.

Anomalies or harbingers of a digital future? I lean toward the latter. Printed books may still be around for a long time to come, but only ostriches can deny that an e-book revolution is underway and picking up speed.

So how are traditional publishers coping with the flood of new e-readers and the consumer demand for new content? Are they shifting or expanding their focus to stay alive in a market where e-book sales may soon equal or surpass hard copy sales? Are they making money on e-books? Two surveys conducted by Aptara this year show how rapidly the market has grown in only a few months and indicate that publishers are racing – not always successfully – to catch up with demand and make their books available for numerous e-readers.

Aptara, a company that has converted millions of pages of content to digital form for the Kindle, Sony Reader, and Apple iPad and iPhone, questioned about 300 publishing professionals early in the year and did a second survey of more than 600 industry representatives during the summer. Results of the second survey were released last week. The biggest development between the first and second surveys was the release of the iPad, which provides a platform for illustrated books and educational materials that don’t translate well to text-only e-readers. Although the iPad wasn’t released until April, by summer 36% of all publishers (and 50% of trade publishers) were producing content for Apple’s tablet device.

In the space of a few months between Aptara’s two surveys, the overall percentage of publishers producing e-books jumped more than 10% and stood at 64% at the time of the second survey. The biggest increases occurred in trade publishing (the segment of interest to novelists), which saw a jump of 23%, and scientific/technical/medical publishing, which went up 24%. By summer, 74% of U.S. trade publishers were producing e-book versions of some of their products. Of those, 83% said e-publishing is an important element of their company strategy and growth plans. The new source of revenue and the chance to reach a new audience are the main reasons publishers give for making digital content available.

But are publishers making money on e-books? Only 15% of trade publishers say the return on e-books is better than that on printed books, about half say they don’t know yet, and 13% say they see a lower return of investment on digital than on print.

The Aptara report points to two possible reasons why publishers aren’t profiting as much as they could from e-books: they may not have shifted yet to streamlined procedures that would keep costs down; and no industry-wide format exists that will work with any e-reader. EPUB, the de facto standard, is accepted by almost all e-readers – but not Kindle, which has its own proprietary format (AZW). EPUB has some drawbacks, but a revised version expected next spring promises to increase function and reduce incompatibilities between e-books and e-readers.

The format of the source files can also create obstacles to fast and low-cost conversion of print to electronic form. The two most common source formats are PDF and Adobe Design, but the far more flexible XML is gaining ground. The Aptara survey points out that XML allows publishers to separate the text from its formatting, then easily and simultaneously generate e-books for a variety of e-reader formats.

Right now more than a quarter of publishers are taking a hybrid approach to producing e-books, doing part of the work in-house and farming some of it out to commercial services, while about the same number use outside conversion services exclusively.

Despite the rapid move to digitize backlists and offer e-book versions of new publications, publishers haven’t been as quick to produce enhanced and interactive e-books that would include videos and other material not available in print books. Nearly a third of publishers surveyed say they’re still investigating the possibilities, and 13% say they have no plans to provide enhanced e-books. Others say they’re holding off for various reasons.

Consumer demand for enhanced books is likely to grow, however, as more people buy devices capable of hosting them. Aptara predicts that multi-function tablets like the iPad will take over the e-book market in the next couple of years unless makers of single-function readers like the Kindle make their devices more versatile.

Will publishers ever make a profit on e-books? Yes, if they learn how to produce them economically and make their backlists available in digital form. Backlist e-books could be a saving source of income for traditional publishers. As the Aptara survey notes, “Backlists are critical assets with infinite resale value and significantly higher profit margins than front lists... Publishers are no longer dependent on one or two bestsellers to cover the cost of lesser-known authors.” 


A final note: More than one-third of the publishing representatives surveyed said they don't personally read e-books, but among those who do the iPad has rapidly eclipsed the Kindle as their favorite e-reader.

You can download the study free of charge here. You will be asked to provide a minimally invasive amount of information about yourself.

The Book World after the Revolution

Sandra Parshall

We’re in the middle of a publishing revolution, and people are behaving the same way they do when any great upheaval takes place. Some are jumping onboard enthusiastically. Some shake their heads and predict it will blow over and everything will return to “normal” – meaning, in this case, that traditionally published books will reign supreme. Others stand on the sidelines, having decided to wait and see how it all shakes out.

Those who deny what’s happening remind me of people who swore 30 years ago that they would never own a computer. Typewriters would never disappear. Yeah, right. Just like printed books and the stores that sell them will never disappear.

A few recent bits of news in the publishing/bookselling world:

In September, bookstore sales were down 7.7%, making it the worst month of 2010, while e-book sales rose by 158%. In the first nine months of 2010, e-book sales rose 190% over the same period last year.

The small independent chain Joseph-Beth Booksellers filed for bankruptcy protection and announced it will close four of its eight stores by the end of the year.

Barnes and Noble plans to close six to 10 stores annually for the next three years. Meanwhile, Borders continues its slow slide toward near-certain death.

I have to wonder where the optimists get their certainty that traditionally printed books and brick-and-mortar bookstores will survive. Those of us who buy and read books are a distinct minority of the population. If a million people watch one episode of a TV show on a major network, the show is an instant flop and gets yanked off the air. If a million people buy copies of a book, it’s a gigantic runaway bestseller. Relatively few authors sell well enough to support themselves with their writing. The vast majority sell fewer than 5,000 copies of each book. Books are not an important part of most people’s lives. They get their entertainment elsewhere. And people who do buy books are increasingly resistant to high cover prices.

Some in the publishing industry predict that e-books will make up 25% of all book sales within two or three years. (The current figure is around 10%.) What will the e-book share of the market be in 10 years? Fifteen years? Will print books be the expensive exception by then – collectors’ items?

The revolution is here. It’s happening. It’s not going away or slowing down. Why are so many people, even those who own Kindles and no longer buy print books, acting as if nothing much has changed or will change?

I have a million questions about the future. I’d like to hear more people talking about these issues, even if we can’t predict the answers with any certainty.

Will big publishers transform themselves into e-publishers just to stay alive?

With fewer print books being produced and sold, what will happen to bookstores? The indies have been dying left and right for years. Most people have already written off Borders. Can Barnes and Noble change enough to stay in business?

When will writers’ organizations, some of which currently have strict definitions of what “published” means, realize they have to adjust their criteria?

When will conferences start giving equal space on the program to e-published writers?

What will the “book room” at the typical conference look like in 10 or 15 years? Will it consist of lines of kiosks where conference-goers can purchase POD copies of books or instantly download digital books to their readers? Will signing times for authors be eliminated when they no longer have print books to sign? 

 

How do YOU see the future for the small minority of the human population that loves books? What will the book world look like after the revolution?

An Editor's Advice on Publishing

Sandra Parshall

John Betancourt’s Wildside Press is hundreds of miles from New York, but from his vantage point in Bethesda, Maryland, he has a clear vision of what’s happening in publishing and what the future holds. His wide-ranging talk at a recent meeting of the Sisters in Crime Chesapeake Chapter had me furiously scribbling notes so I could share his comments with PDD’s readers.

Betancourt is a successful science fiction author of many short stories and about 40 novels. He and his wife Kim started Wildside Press in 1989 to publish speculative fiction, but it has grown over the years and now publishes mysteries (including my friend Sasscer Hill’s first book, Full Mortality, out in May) as well as nonfiction, e-books and magazines. One of the company’s imprints, Juno Books, became a co-publishing venture with Simon & Schuster as of January 2009, with an emphasis on dynamic female protagonists in contemporary/urban fantasy/paranormal fiction. Authors like Carole Nelson Douglas are publishing with Juno. One of the imprint’s budding stars is Washington area writer Maria Lima, who began with an obscure small press but moved to Juno after Betancourt read her first book and fell in love with her captivating style and voice.

He came to our meeting to present the chapter’s new anthology, Chesapeake Crimes: They Had It Comin’, which Wildside is publishing. The anthology is a trade paperback, one of the formats that Betancourt believes will replace mass market paperbacks. “I’d like to see mass market paperbacks go away,” he said, pointing out the generally low quality of the paper and binding used in the books. He believes e-books will replace a lot of the print book market within a few years and could become the favored way to introduce new writers. He predicts that e-books will soon be making more money than mass market paperbacks. For print, trade paperbacks and hardcovers are of higher quality, last longer, and earn more money per copy for both the author and the publisher.

Online publishing, he believes, can be a good way for beginners to attract attention and break in. “Online publishing is your friend,” he said in answer to a chapter member’s question. “Even if it doesn’t pay, it can get attention for your writing.”

The inevitable questions about finding an agent led Betancourt to tell his own career story. He has sold his books himself, then hired agents to negotiate his contracts. He doesn’t believe agents are particularly good at selling books because of their limited contacts and their tendency to give up quickly. However, with big publishers that accept submissions only through agents, writers have no choice but to use them from the start. He advised meeting personally with an agent before signing with him or her. A personal meeting at a conference or workshop is the best way to find an agent, preferable to cold querying. Be at your best for such a meeting, he said. “Make them want to know about you and your writing. Be outgoing, funny, charming.” Sell yourself and you’ll make the agent eager to sell your work.

Publishers have become frighteningly quick to drop writers these days, Betancourt pointed out, so after signing with a publisher, you have to be pleasant to work with, or you might discover that you’re replaceable. He recalled a bestselling science fiction author of Star Trek novels who phoned her editor several times a week for lengthy conversations. The writer’s contract was dropped. The moral of the story: “Don’t piss off your editor.”

The internet offers a lot of opportunities for self-promotion, Betancourt said, but a heavy-handed me-me-me approach will turn off potential readers. Don’t plaster the internet with self-promotion and “don’t push yourself as a writer” on internet groups, he advised. “Be interesting, be entertaining, contribute something.” Nobody will read a blog that is about nothing but the writer and her new book, and if the only time you show up in an internet group is when you have something to sell, you won’t win over any readers.

A few other bits of Betancourt advice culled from my notes:

Make sure people remember you and your books. Memorable titles and memorable author names are always a plus. Betancourt advised Lynda Hill to use her middle name, Sasscer, for writing. He advised Maria Y. Lima to drop the middle initial to make her name flow more easily off the tongue. Change the spelling of your name if that will make it stand out.

Try to avoid selling the paperback rights to the same company that brings out your hardcovers. You’ll get more money by going elsewhere.

Never let an editor keep anything for more than three months. Always hold editors to the time limits they give in their guidelines or on their websites.

Try writing intelligent, thoughtful online reviews of other people’s books as a form of self-promotion. If readers respect your opinions, they’ll check out your writing.

Who makes money on Kindle books?

Sandra Parshall

The Amazon Kindle has broadened the market for books, and Kindle rights are making the same amount of money for publishers, and in many cases the authors, as the print editions. So why are publishers worried as they watch Amazon conquer the e-book market?

I’ve read a lot on this subject lately, but an article by Rachel Deahl in the May 11 Publishers Weekly did the best job of explaining the conundrum publishers face.

Amazon’s goal is to sell the hardware, the Kindle itself. To make it more attractive than the Kindle’s chief competition, the Sony Reader, Amazon has more than 265,000 titles available for download and is charging less for most of them than Sony’s e-books cost. In many cases, Amazon is taking a loss on the books themselves.

To understand what’s going on, you have to realize that few books are sold at the cover price, and booksellers buy books from publishers at a discount. Deahl reports in PW that Amazon pays publishers the same discounted amount, around 50% of cover price, for Kindle rights that it pays for printed books. Amazon sells printed books at just enough to make a profit on each copy. But they’re charging less for many e-book downloads than they pay for the rights.

For example, the cover price on Jim Butcher’s current bestseller, Turn Coat, is $25.95. If Amazon purchases each copy from the publisher at a 50% discount, they’re paying $12.97 for it. Amazon sells the print version for $17.13 – $4.16 more than they paid the publisher. But the Kindle download costs only $9.99 – $2.98 less than Amazon paid for it.

Right now, Amazon’s willingness to take a loss, or merely break even, on downloads in order to push Kindle sales and build its share of the e-book market is not affecting publisher profits. According to the Authors Guild, writers are also being paid – depending on how their contracts are structured, they receive either 15% of the book’s original list price or 25% of net receipts from e-book sales. According to PW, though, some agents are unhappy because publishers don’t have to spend any of their profits from e-books on manufacturing and shipping and are making a disproportionate profit on each sale, while the writer’s income remains the same.

It’s a vision of the future that’s giving publishers nightmares. What will happen when Amazon has driven its competition out of business or into a tiny and almost meaningless corner of the market? Publishers, Deahl reports, are afraid Amazon will exercise its power to demand much lower prices for digital rights that it pays for printed books. That effortless profit will vanish for publishers, unless they lower the author’s royalty on e-books. We all know how writers and agents would feel about that approach. As noted above, some grumbling is already being heard about a split of e-book profits that is perceived as favoring publishers and penalizing writers.

Amazon, with its worldwide marketing network that is visited by millions of users every day, is ideally positioned to push a product like the Kindle. According to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, 35% of all Amazon sales of titles available in print and digital formats are Kindle editions. Just a few months ago, that figure was 10%.

Amazon has just introduced the Kindle DX, a larger version of the reader designed to display newspapers and college textbooks. Amazon will soon launch a pilot program at six universities, but this effort faces significant obstacles in the education market. The DX is big, it’s clunky, it’s black and white only, and it costs $489. Students who already have access to full-color digital references through their schools, and are accustomed to using laptops and miniature netbooks to retrieve information, may not be enamored of Amazon’s latest version of the Kindle.

One thing seems certain, though: the original Kindle for popular books is here to stay. What it means for publishers and writers is an open question. Stay tuned, and if you’re a writer, you might want to have a talk with your agent about it.