One of our high school districts recently went strictly to Ipad downloads for their texts. The thinking is that an Ipad and text downloads will be considerably more cost effective over four years of high school. Which brings me to my question. I would like to know who believes the pursuit of E-publishing is the wave of the future. I wonder if our time would be better spent pursuing this approach than spending so much time and energy trying to find an agent who will promote our books. Perhaps our query letters will be read and acted upon by our potential market if we self promote. After all, it's the reader who ultimately decides what is good or bad.
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Speaking for myself, I believe self-epublishing is the wave of the future for a variety of reasons. I started epublishing in Oct 2010, and while I'm not a massive success yet, I certainly can see a future point where I will be (as long as I keep writing).
You can read all about my experiences and sales numbers on my blog.
You can read all about my experiences and sales numbers on my blog.
I definitely think that as time goes on, more and more books will be ePublished (some exclusively, some in conjunction with their paper counter parts).
My guess is that it will take a long time for paper to go away, though, if it does at all. Reasons why:
1) Sentimental - some people like paper. Some people won't give eBooks as gifts, even if they love them (and the recipient loves them).
2) Status - Readers will still want to display their books, and there will probably continue to be a market for signed copies, first editions, etc.
3) Cost - paper really doesn't form that high a percentage of a book's price, so the incentives for getting rid of it are low.
4) Legal control - As long as publishers can make eBook vanish off devices, there will be a reason for having physical copies of beloved novels.
5) Libraries - They're still a big buyer, and while they're moving towards digital, they're not there yet.
Also, even in a world that is more heavily dominated by eBooks, I suspect that we will still have publishers. Why? Because it's both 1) a way to get through the slush (i.e. to let readers like me avoid reading 1,000 bad manuscripts) and 2) editing really does improve most stories.
My guess is that it will take a long time for paper to go away, though, if it does at all. Reasons why:
1) Sentimental - some people like paper. Some people won't give eBooks as gifts, even if they love them (and the recipient loves them).
2) Status - Readers will still want to display their books, and there will probably continue to be a market for signed copies, first editions, etc.
3) Cost - paper really doesn't form that high a percentage of a book's price, so the incentives for getting rid of it are low.
4) Legal control - As long as publishers can make eBook vanish off devices, there will be a reason for having physical copies of beloved novels.
5) Libraries - They're still a big buyer, and while they're moving towards digital, they're not there yet.
Also, even in a world that is more heavily dominated by eBooks, I suspect that we will still have publishers. Why? Because it's both 1) a way to get through the slush (i.e. to let readers like me avoid reading 1,000 bad manuscripts) and 2) editing really does improve most stories.
For most writers, and most books, I think you're better off pursuing commercial publishing. Your publisher and agent take care of producing and selling your books; you then can concentrate on writing more of them.
My publisher sells books in print, .pdf, ePub and Kindle formats, as well as Web subscription, and translations. They sell in independent bookstores, chains, and online vendors, as well as from their own site.
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I think the fault in thinking this way is that it ignores the fact that commercial publishers work in e-publishing. If you look at the bestsellers on Kindle, half or more of them are from commercial publishers. Publishers are adapting to a digital world. Maybe slowly, but they are. So, by getting your book into commercial publishing, your book is sent off into the electronic world by default. But then you have advantages of your publisher on top of that: print publication, promotion and marketing, branding, editing, cover art, and more.
It is the reader who ultimately decides, but not all readers read ebooks. You're only tapping into a small market of readers if you decide to go purely electronic. I agree with Mutive - print won't disappear for a long time.
I think your chances at success in electronic self-publishing world are just as slim as your chances at success in the commercial publishing world. For completely different reasons, of course, but it's a lot of work either way.
While this has been true for many years, I think we've hit the point where there is a decent argument that's no longer true for first-time genre novelists producing a decent word-count per year. There are some real concerns right now about the traditional publishers. Their business is in flux. Some of them will potentially undergo significant change (including the possibility of going out of business) in the very near future. There's talk that they're cutting back on acquisitions. What were one very standardized contract terms are now in flux due to author demands, publisher rights-grabs, and the emergence of Amazon jumping into publishing themselves with very different terms. There are established authors saying now is a very bad time to sign a typical genre contract ($5K-$10K, full print and e-rights) for a new writer that could lock up your work virtually forever with you seeing little to nothing beyond that advance.
So it might be the best possible time to give the alternative a try. While indie success will bring agents and publishers coming to you, there's still the possibility that indie failure could also send them running if you continue to try that avenue. If that's your major fear, use a pseudonym. But the indie method should not be thought of as having greater odds of superstar success or an easier route. It's very different, and still a lot of hard work. On the plus side, it's a lot easier to find out if your book really doesn't cut the mustard with readers. If you learn that, well, you wouldn't have had a shot with agents/publishers either so nothing lost.
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Cite, please. Because that sounds like the same old rah-rah crap being quoted and requoted from the same self-pub advocate blogs that have been quoted ad nauseam, with no real numbers to back up any of those rather broad assertions, oh-so-carefully couched in evasive language, passive voice, and terribly vague about details.
And just saying it over and over and over again doesn't make it any more true.
On the other hand, flying directly in the face of this sort of propaganda, the Washington Post reports:
Likewise, the New York Times reports:
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Dude, I helped invent "the alternative." I published--self published--my first ebook in 1989.
You're talking about self-publishing, which in print terms is about six hundred and fifty years old, and in terms of ebook publishing, goes back at least to 1988 and Steve Miller and Sharon Lee's etexts of their novels on a floppy.
(You will doubtless note that Lee and Miller, after years of self-publishing, are quite happy with mainstream publisher Baen.)
I don't know about you, but I make my living from writing.
I have since 2007. It's what I do.
I'm not screwing around with this stuff.
When my publisher can get my books on end-caps, here, in Europe and in China, and does ebook versions in multiple languages in .pdf, Kindle, ePUB and Web subscription, I'm going to be really glad to let them keep on doing that for me, while I write and sell another book or article.
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I think there are two fallacies with this particular thinking as it's presented here. One, it assumes that the only ebooks are self-published ebooks, and as someone else said most of the ebooks selling right now are actually commercially published. Publishers have gotten behind ebooks in a big way, and they aren't languishing in the dust. As such, while ebooks are likely the way of the future, that doesn't mean self-published books are necessarily the way of the future.
Two, many authors who are successfully self-published have talked about how incredibly time consuming it is. On of Amanda Hocking's main reasons for going with a commercial publisher was to have more time to write because she spent so much time on promotion, etc.
Self-publishing (right) takes a huge amount of time and resources. It requires finding editors, artists, etc. and coordinating (and paying for) those things, finding people to do reviews for you, and putting a ton of effort into various types of promotion. Much of this is something that commercial publishers do for you. Now, if you want to do all of those things yourself for one reason or another that's another story, but it from what I've heard, self-publishing well requires a lot of time.
In a similar vein, what you're discussing--the time and effort spent pursing an agent--is generally done before one is published. In other words, you spend that time and energy before you have a contract or anything else. And once you've done it, it's done. You don't have to continue searching for an agent every time you write a new book, and actually having an agent really frees up some extra time (it did for me anyway) because you are no longer worrying about submissions, etc.
Also, agents don't really promote our books. They just help take care of all the details so we don't have to, submissions, negotiations, etc.
I'd substitute "will" for "might if you're very, very lucky and all sorts of forces conspire to help you".
Yes, self-publishers have been approached by agents and publishers: but it is statistically a very rare event indeed, and perhaps no more common than an unpublished writer being spotted by an agent.
Hoping an agent will find you is not a good reason to self-publish.
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This is sooooo not true. An amazingly great book that has been self-e-published can quite easily get drowned in the rubbish. When 95% or more of the self-e-pubbed books are crap (as is the case today), it's pretty hard for a brilliant book to get noticed.
Not doing well in the self-e-pub arena is absolutely NOT a sign that a book wasn't good enough to get picked up by an agent or publisher.
With respect to ebooks and print books, I find it disturbing that a lot of the talk on it seems to be revolving around an 'either or' situation. Why should it have to be? Why should one exist and the other have to die? I can see both existing side by side for a long time to come for many of the reasons outlined above.
As for self publishing, I agree that even a good book can end up lost in the morass of not so good books these days and that is not a good thing for anyone who wants to make a serious living as a writer. As above, I am also disturbed by the polarity of the arguments between self and trad publishing. Ok, I am a notorious compromiser regardless of the polar opposites involved (it was once said that I should be parachuted into Jersusalem to sort out the Middle East problems - I'd either solve them or get shot, either way the world would benefit) but I don't see why this needs to be as antagonistic as it seems to be from my reading of many threads in this forum (particularly the one about the author who turned down a perfectly good book deal because her publisher wanted her to stop self publishing). It is almost as if (and here I answer my own question, I suspect) there is a dissident group of anarchist self publishers who are hell bent on destroying traditional publishing as some evil corporate entity...
As for self publishing, I agree that even a good book can end up lost in the morass of not so good books these days and that is not a good thing for anyone who wants to make a serious living as a writer. As above, I am also disturbed by the polarity of the arguments between self and trad publishing. Ok, I am a notorious compromiser regardless of the polar opposites involved (it was once said that I should be parachuted into Jersusalem to sort out the Middle East problems - I'd either solve them or get shot, either way the world would benefit) but I don't see why this needs to be as antagonistic as it seems to be from my reading of many threads in this forum (particularly the one about the author who turned down a perfectly good book deal because her publisher wanted her to stop self publishing). It is almost as if (and here I answer my own question, I suspect) there is a dissident group of anarchist self publishers who are hell bent on destroying traditional publishing as some evil corporate entity...
Sorry, speculative elements will indeed be speculative as that is the nature of prediction.
I didn't intend to sound rah-rah. But I don't think dismissing it is wise either.Did you see the latest AAP numbers? June off ~25% year over year is dismal (even if you figure in Borders closure as a blip and factor in that some publishers aren't yet reporting e-books, the one uptick, month-to-month.) And over the YTD down 10% or so is not good either.
Sorry to cite one of these blogs you find so suspicious but it's the best and simplest organization of the AAP numbers, so for this purpose, ignore the commentary surrounding and just trust that the numbers can be verified from less biased sources:
http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/...nt-slump-continuing-ebook-explosion/#comments
Do I think print is doomed? Not at all. But I don't think it's much of a stretch to say they're in transition, and struggling to an extent with the change.
I'm happy to hear about your success. I've been writing in one form or another since the mid-90s but mostly in-house tech writing where the paycheck is predictable, and benefits are included. The freelance fiction stuff is just a hobby for me.
I accept your change in wording as an improvement. The point being that self-publishing typically made you something of a pariah in the past (though Midievalist appears to have made the transition intact) which that isn't necessarily something to be as afraid of today. I remember sitting in a bar at Worldcon in the mid-90s with authors and editors who were using dealer-room excerpts from self-pubbed books as objects of humor and scorn. That seems less true today (thought a lot of indie authors are trying their best to restore that to status quo with some of their behavior, but I digress...)
Sorry, what you're saying is completely possible and I didn't mean to imply otherwise. I was getting at the point that even excluding financial concerns you have the opportunity to collect real reader feedback. If you're getting all 2-star reviews you probably jumped the gun, and if you made $50 to learn that rather than wasting a year of time and $50 of postage through the traditional system and still be wondering if you're ready but just haven't happened upon the correct agent yet. It's an option worth considering, rather than one that more than likely should be dismissed outright as I would have advised for many many years.
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I agree. I wish more people thought that way. The most important thing is to discover what's best for you, and your book. And to understand that that might mean that not publishing it at all is the best way to go.
The problem with the blog post you refer to is that it fails to spot the bleedin' obvious.
If you look at the figures provided, it shows that compared to June 2010, in June 2011 print sales fell from about a tenth to a third (depending on which print format you look at), while e-book sales nearly trebled. Wow! That must prove that print is dying and e-books are going to take over the world!
Except that it doesn't.
There's been a worldwide financial crisis, which has affected all businsesses including publishing: it's not surprising that sales are down a bit. I bet you could look at just about any trade and find the same. In fact, many businesses have gone to the wall over the last few years but guess what? Most publishers haven't. Most of them are not only still in business, but are making profits. That's a significant thing.
What about those e-books figures, though? They're stunningly better than the print figures. How to explain that? Easy.
A few years ago there wasn't really much of an e-book market. The e-book readers that we have now are relatively new devices (especially when compared to the devices required for reading print books!), and the market is new, and growing. So that market is bound to be increasing. And as it's small, even a minor increase makes the stats look spectacular.
You could look at those figures and say, wow! trade publishing is doing great! despite the worldwide financial crisis it's managed to create a whole new line of business for itself, which is not only thriving and bringing in a lot of new money, it's also generating all sorts of interest online and in the media. Clever trade publishers! Aren't they great? Only many people aren't doing that. They're using the success of this new format to "prove" that trade publishing is dying, e-books are taking over, and self-publishing is the prettiest girl on the block. Which is a load of baloney.
Let's look at the stats which Dave Gaughran used in his blog post. A better way to present those stats would perhaps have been to show that e-books are taking a greater share of the market--which they are, as their popularity increases.
For example, in June 2010 the total market value was $450m, of which e-books was responsible for $30m. They had 6.6% of the market.
In June 2011 the total market value was $347.2m, of which e-books was responsible for $80m, which represents 23% of the market.
Now, that's still a respectable increase in e-book sales: but it's nowhere near as spectacular-sounding as the 167% increase in e-book sales makes it sound.
You could also consider it like this. In June 2010 book sales were $450m, and a year later the sales were $347.2m. That's an overall drop of 23%. That wouldn't tell you anything about print vs e-books, but it would show you how tightly publishing's belt is pulled right now.
The only thing that has ever remained the same in all the decades that I've worked in publishing is that it's in a constant state of change. Pubilshing is no more struggling with this latest change than it did decades ago when the price of a good trade hardback reached £5 and the newspapers announced that it wouldn't be long before no one published hardbacks any more. The newspapers were wrong. Change happens. We, and the markets, adapt.
I don't see publishers struggling with this change. I see publishers who have waited to make sure that e-books are going to work well, and how they're going to work (who wants to invest in the e-book equivalent of the eight-track?), who are now investing heavily in this new format and are, as Gaughran inadvertently proved, doing very well with it as a result.
What's interesting is that the figures he posted only include sales statistics from trade publishers, and none from self-published authors: he makes this clear when he writes,
It seems odd to me that a blogger so focussed on self-publishing wouldn't show a comparison between trade and self-publishing stats. Perhaps he can't find them. Or perhaps he can't make them look good for self-publishing.
*curtsies*
I don't think it did. I think what self-publishing has always done is allow people to publish their books no matter how good or bad they are; and if their books are bad, then that's what's going to reflect badly on them, not the route they took to get them into print.
You don't seem to understand just how terrible many self-published books are. They are almost unreadable they are so bad. I've seen some that were apparently written in English but I couldn't follow a single paragraph, let alone a page.
Those authors and editors were behaving with a huge lack of respect towards the writers whose work they were reading out: that's why I very rarely quote the books I review. I don't want to point and laugh, it's not constructive.
But the point here isn't that self-publishing made the writers of those books a laughing stock: the point is that the books that were being read from were awful. They were laughable. And yet their authors still published them.
When something is published, you don't get to control what happens to it. You can't embrace the people who like your writing but be angered by those who laugh at it; which is why you have to be certain that your writing is good enough before you send it off into the world. And very few self-published writers do that.
A lot of excellent points above and a lesson to be very careful of any statistical evidence. I learnt in research that it is easy to manipulate numbers to show whatever the hell you like and it is sometimes hard to spot these misleading statistics (something as simple as expressing a value as a percent increase instead of a raw number can make a massive difference in emphasis, for example). So it is always best to follow the advice of D'Isreali (and Twain, whichever one you beleive said it first - though I think Twain was actually quoting D'Isreali) and be aware of those 'lies, damned lies and statistics'.
The internet is, at the moment, less a place of useful information and more a place of rumour and bias. Unlike academic publishing, there is no peer review authority viewing all the information posted there and judging it based on its merits. So, we as users of the internet have to learn to be more discerning and assess each piece of information. This is something I always teach to students - never rely entirely on wikipedia, always get several sources for each piece of information you get from the internet and always consider the writer and what bias they might have in this issue.
But this is an aside... Old Hack's comments above about the majority of self published work being sub par were what led me to think about peer review (thank you for those bitter flashbacks, I really appreciate it ) and it occurs to me that this is what is missing in self publishing. In trad publishing, however flawed you may think this is, there is a process whereby each piece of work is assessed by successive reviewers - agents, editors, proof readers etc. Those that fail to make the grade don't get published and even those that survive to land a contract usually end up changed by it. What if there could be something similar in self publishing? What if there were a more stringent system? How could it be possible to encourage a greater quality in self publishing? Does anyone think there is a way to do this?
The internet is, at the moment, less a place of useful information and more a place of rumour and bias. Unlike academic publishing, there is no peer review authority viewing all the information posted there and judging it based on its merits. So, we as users of the internet have to learn to be more discerning and assess each piece of information. This is something I always teach to students - never rely entirely on wikipedia, always get several sources for each piece of information you get from the internet and always consider the writer and what bias they might have in this issue.
But this is an aside... Old Hack's comments above about the majority of self published work being sub par were what led me to think about peer review (thank you for those bitter flashbacks, I really appreciate it
) and it occurs to me that this is what is missing in self publishing. In trad publishing, however flawed you may think this is, there is a process whereby each piece of work is assessed by successive reviewers - agents, editors, proof readers etc. Those that fail to make the grade don't get published and even those that survive to land a contract usually end up changed by it. What if there could be something similar in self publishing? What if there were a more stringent system? How could it be possible to encourage a greater quality in self publishing? Does anyone think there is a way to do this?
If you want all those people to devote their time to reviewing the work of others, you have to pay them to do so. Which means, realistically, they have to be paid from the proceeds of pubilshing the books which get through. Which means the system you've just argued in favour of is... trade publishing.
You could argue that the writer should pay: but then the people reviewing the books have no incentive to be honest about the books' value. They get paid regardless of what they say about the books: but if they don't say good things about them, people aren't going to send their work to them: they'll just select someone else with a reputation for being kinder, and pay them instead. Which leads us to vanity publishing.
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What Old Hack said. See, for all the moaning about gatekeepers in publishing, gatekeepers are essential. If you remove them from some part of the publishing process, they just have to be reintroduced elsewhere.
What we have now is a set of slightly different filters which are designed to pan flakes of gold out of the gravel and silt that makes up most of what flows through the business. Agents sift, publishers sift, and so do retailers, reviewers and readers. Most of those people are getting paid - and you need to pay them more the further back in the chain they are. You can tinker with it, but you can't really do away with it.
A good look at a world without gatekeepers is PA. And without the monetary incentive to actually be discriminating, you'll see that nobody really has a bad word to say online about any given PA book - anyone who doesn't have a vested interest in being an uncritical support system for it probably never heard of it in the first place. As a consumer, how are you supposed to find a good book in the PA catalogue?
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I agree that there's a lot of self-published material that isn't very good. Much of it will sink into obscurity quickly. Some will do well, not because of its quality from an editorial standpoint, but because it has an "it" factor that makes it popular anyway.
This might be useful to publishers, since the "it" factor is that elusive thing they're all seeking. It's hard to pick out of the crowd of manuscripts on an editor's desk. Without it, many so-called high quality books have gone unpurchased.
To me, it seems like an opportunity for an alert editor. If something's selling well and is editable, why not snap it up?
This might be useful to publishers, since the "it" factor is that elusive thing they're all seeking. It's hard to pick out of the crowd of manuscripts on an editor's desk. Without it, many so-called high quality books have gone unpurchased.
To me, it seems like an opportunity for an alert editor. If something's selling well and is editable, why not snap it up?
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Not quite sure how I'm going to notice what's selling well. Nothing self-published ever shows up in the top few hundred bookscan listings for print (and there are no ebook sales charts worth looking at as yet.) Also, as the barriers to publication break down - because ebooks mean low risk for self-publishers - the number of books published explodes, and there's consequently a lot of noise and very little signal to tune in to.
A book can have all the "it" factors in the world: but if no one notices that book, it's not going to sell.
And that's where most good self-published books fail. People just don't hear about them, and so they don't buy them.
Self-publishing done well has never been a pariah. The problem is that even though technology has made it much easier to do it well, few people do.
Self-publishing for specific niches has worked really well for, well, at least the last fifty years. One of those niches is cookbooks; another is scholarly books.
My favorite example of self-publishing done well is a book by Dr. Ruth Mellinkoff; she was a stellar medieval art historian, with an international reputation as a top-notch scholar. She wanted to publish a two-volume coffee table sized book about medieval art; the book was going to be so prohibitively expensive to produce that publishers told her they couldn't afford it.
She'd already published a fair amount of scholarly books via academic presses, and had, just for the fun of it as she said, self-published several cookbooks.
She finished the ms. She licensed the images. She hired a professional scholarly editor, a book designer, and an indexer.
She paid to have the book published; she sold it at first herself, via contacts. It was a gorgeous two-volume hardcover that sold for more than $400.00.
It got picked up by a scholarly press that specialized in reprints, and is now available via bookstores and online with the usual returns etc.
The technology has improved, but you know all of the NYT and similar best seller print books are available in multiple ebook formats. Most are available on day-and-date release.
Commercial publishers are figuring this stuff out, and they're getting better and better.
Mine actively promotes my books in both digital and print formats. They get the book translated, the resell it in a variety of "packages," including educational text excerpts, which they sell, and send me a royalty check for.
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Well, as an example, I read on Kindle a lot of teen romances and girl books, because that's what I write. I noticed that very quickly I started getting recommendations from Kindle -- "here are other books you might like," that sort of thing. I started to realize that many of the recommended books were self-pubished.
That got me interested, so I went into Publisher's Marketplace. It lets you track and compare the bestseller status of almost any book, including SP books.
(There's also a Kindle bestseller list, by the way, for ebooks.)
You have to be careful, because a book's bestseller status changes over time and there are different lists, etc. In all honesty, it's hard to compare apple and apples when you do this.
But if you compare trade books vs SP books in similar genres that are released at roughly the same time, and if you look on the Amazon bestseller lists, where SP books have equal distribution clout, you can compare performances a bit. And some SP books are doing okay.
I'll try to come up with something more specific for you, as an example of what I'm talking about.
I agree, this is how things stand at the moment and I think any viable alternative is going to be difficult. I am just wondering if there isn't a way to more actively use things like comments and ratings on Amazon to give more solid feedback.
Of course that would assume that SP authors would actually respond positively to constructive criticism, which I assume at least some would...
Probably another of my idealistic pipe dreams
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