Something of a lighter note to hopefully take your mind off what’s going on in Eastern Europe right now, though I do hope that Eurovision isn’t the only contest that Ukraine manages to win this year.
It’s very probably a sign of the times, at least in the world of publishing, but this blog post is another one about what many authors and the vast majority of publishers still regard as the darker side of the industry: ebooks.
Ruth Ann Nordin
About a decade ago, various writing magazines were regularly producing articles and news items about the then relatively new phenomenon of electronic publishing, and the way that this new method of getting your work into print was undermining the traditional author – agent – publisher route. A route that was and is extremely difficult for a new author to traverse.
One article that I remember focused on an American housewife and mother of four named Ruth Ann Nordin, a lady whose writing ambitions centred around the production of romantic fiction which incorporated Christian values and a limited amount of tasteful – and obviously marital – sex.
What’s perhaps slightly unusual is that, unlike most budding authors of the time, she didn’t write a book and then try and get an agent or publisher to take her on. Instead, when she’d written her first novel in 2002 she decided to make use of the newly available POD – Print On Demand – technology to produce the book herself, which she then tried to sell to friends, acquaintances and anyone else who expressed even the slightest interest in reading it. She didn’t sell that many copies, but between 2002 and 2008 she wrote and had printed sixteen books, copies of which graced her bookshelves and which she said gave her a tremendous sense of personal satisfaction.
In 2008, Ruth realized that to be taken seriously as a writer she really needed to find a traditional publisher to take her on and began sending out the usual enquiries. The majority, as every author would anticipate, fell on deaf ears, and no agent was prepared to accept her as a client. She then tried publishers, sending out sample chapters, but again got nowhere. Those who bothered to reply at all insisted on having major changes made to the books, changes that would very probably include steamy sex scenes, illicit liaisons and the kind of words that don’t get uttered in polite society, and that didn’t fit in at all with Ruth’s ideas about what she wanted to write.
By this stage, she had some twenty novels completed, which made her by any definition a very experienced – albeit traditionally unpublished – author. And she was clearly a lady who knew her own mind. So she switched her attention to self-publishing her various books on the Internet, as ebooks.
At first, her work made little impact. The first year that her books were available – 2009 – they generated no income at all until December, when she received her first cheque for a fairly modest $1,400. But she was putting in the necessary background work, the marketing, communicating with readers, and anything else she could think of that might help to drum up sales. The following year, she sold some 110,000 copies, which generated an income of almost $19,000. And in 2011, she earned more money than her husband, who had been in the American military for twenty years.
By 2022 she’d written over 90 books, about 75 of them romances, and available as ebooks and paperbacks through Amazon and elsewhere. She even wrote a series of ‘how to’ ebooks available through Smashwords.com to help other writers emulate her success.
This is an interesting, instructive, and actually quite inspiring tale, almost a rags to riches story, showing what can be done if you are prepared to make the effort. And Ruth Ann Nordin certainly made and still makes the effort.
And that essentially is the real secret of her success because, despite her Christian beliefs, she’s very fond of two common four-letter words which a lot of people never seem to associate with the process of writing. In her case, these two words are ‘HARD’ and ‘WORK’.
More about ebooks, again
Most people involved in the world of publishing, in whatever capacity, are worried. Authors are concerned that their contracts may not be renewed because of uncertainty by the publishers over the level of sales likely to be generated. Publishers are eyeing the seemingly inexorable rise of the ebook with something akin to alarm, and probably wondering if there will still be such a thing as a publishing house at the end of the next decade or so. And agents, who are essentially stuck in the middle of this, acting as a conduit and a buffer between authors and publishers, really have no idea which way to turn. Or what to do. Or what business model they should be embracing.
My personal opinion, for what it’s worth, is that publishing houses and agents are going to be around for quite a long time to come. Despite the increasing popularity of ebooks, there are a number of book types which will simply not easily translate to the Kindle, though they work better on the high-definition colour screens of tablets and smart phones. Cookery books are an obvious example. You simply cannot view the pictures on a Kindle in anything like the same detail as you can on the printed page, and pictures are what sell that kind of book. The same applies to what used to be called ‘coffee table books’ – large format and lavishly illustrated books covering a whole range of subjects – and also most books which include detailed diagrams or photographs, such as textbooks.
An author I was talking to recently suggested that within about ten years it would be the norm that most novels would be published on the Kindle as the principal medium, because novels are essentially ‘read once and give away’ books and producing them in an electronic format means that no trees have to die in order for them to be read. Most non-fiction and reference books, he thought, would probably continue to be printed as physical volumes. He may well be right.
Books everywhere
Most people will be aware that readers these days have more choice of books than ever before, but exactly how much more choice is quite surprising.
A bit of history to chew on: at the Digital Book World conference in January 2012, it was pointed out by one of the speakers that more books had been published that week than in the whole of 1950. In America, over three million new printed titles were produced in 2010, and an almost uncountable number of electronic titles. Readers really were and still are spoiled for choice.
And that is one area which will, I think, become even more important in the future. How exactly does anyone choose a new book to read? My agent likens it to walking into a vast warehouse and seeing perhaps a million books stacked on the shelves, few of them coming from publishing houses that you recognize, and even fewer bearing the name of an author that you have ever heard of. How do you decide which book to buy?
His point is that the only guarantee anyone has of the quality of a particular book is the name of the publisher. And for a commercial publisher to take on a new author, both the publishing house and the literary agent involved have to be convinced that he or she can write something that other people will want to read. Because unless they are convinced, they won’t issue a contract for the book or pay an advance.
And that has now resulted in a kind of two-tier publishing world on the Kindle – books from independent authors and unknown publishers selling for, typically, about £3 and ‘proper’ books from commercial publishers being sold for perhaps two or three times that amount. That does not, of course, mean that sales of commercially-produced novels will be higher than the independent efforts because cost is still a factor.
A book selling for under £3 is a genuine impulse purchase – it’s less than the price of a cup of coffee, and even if it’s complete rubbish, it really doesn’t matter – but a book at £9 or so is a different matter. For that money, a reader can buy a full-price paperback or even a couple of discounted books, and that’s something most publishing houses still can’t seem to grasp.
I had a discussion with one of my editors at Transworld on this topic, and she stuck rigidly to what was then the party line: the content of the paperback as the same as the content of the ebook and therefore both should cost about the same. I took the opposite view. The reading public are not stupid. They know that to produce a paperback involves considerable costs – for printing, storage, delivery and all the rest of it – and they also know that once an ebook has been hosted on Amazon or wherever the net cost of delivering a copy to a reader is nil. Nothing. It’s all pure profit.
And that, I believe, is why independent authors stand far more chance of selling substantially more copies of their ebooks than even some of the biggest of the big-name authors out there.
