KTC:
Just wanted to ask everybody what they thought of YA e-publishing. I read an article recently that it is something that is going to take off in a big way.
As a general comment, people have been talking about epublishing taking off/taking over for a number of years now and while I think that it's more likely to become a significant market in the long run, I don't think it's there yet and will be surprised if it really happens in the next 5 years or so.
In the YA market at the London Book Fair last month a number of publishers were apparently touting the possibility of doing all-out epublishing with links to videos, websites and other content within stories. That's all great but no one seemed to be thinking about who would be making that additional content and who would be paying for it.
My personal take is that people read a book because they want to read a book, not because they want to be taken off somewhere else to be shown a shiny thing. It's the same compulsion that makes people skip through the backstory segments in computer games (i.e. they want to get on with playing the game).
Basically, the technology is getting out there, but we're still at the stage where no one really knows what to do with it. Certainly in the UK, I don't see many people on the Tube using an ebook reader - most people (kids included) are still reading physical books. I'm told that's different in cities like New York, but I wonder if that's because there are more people there who have to read a lot of text for work and so are using the technology to review documentation supplemental to their work (I'm throwing it out there for discussion as I don't know).
Amazon's biggest ebook sales happened on Christmas Day last year and that was down to people getting the devices and wanting to immediately use them. While sales are up on previous years, the saturation isn't there and sales of big titles like the last Dan Brown book on eformat weren't a patch on those in print.
I know all this makes me sound like a Luddite and I'm not against technology for the sake of technology. Equally though, I don't think that new and techno shiny automatically means that it's going to work. Look like 3G mobile phones - back in the 90s (for those of us who were around then), everyone was going on about how WAP enabled phones were the future, but it wasn't until the iPhone came out a few years ago that people really started to use the internet via their handset because it came with Apps that they would get a direct benefit from. My point is that people are slow to adapt to change and they have to be shown how the technology actually makes a difference to what they'd otherwise do by some other means.
That's all a bit rambly. But I hope it kinda makes sense.
KTC:
what are your thoughts? Would you consider doing it? Do you think it's a viable market? I'm asking as YA writers what you think...not as writers in general. Is YA e-Publishing something you would consider? And, if yes or if no, why?
It depends who you're epublishing with.
If you've got a big commercial publisher who wants the e-rights then yes, I'd sell it to them because I know that the ebook is going to get the same marketing and distribution attention as the print book and someone else is worrying about the technical platform stuff.
If we're talking about self-publishing in ebook format then I think that you end up with precisely the same problem as when you self-publish in print format - how are people going to hear about your book? Where is it going to be available? In what format is it going to be available?
In fact, I wonder if it might actually hurt sales to only publish in eformat because a lot of self-published children's/YA authors rely on school visits to make sales and physically take their books there. That's not possible with a book only available in ebook format.
MM
