It’s undeniably true that the impact of the ebook and this new form of reading technology has alarmed the publishing world more than most people who work in it are prepared to admit. Sales of Kindles, tablets and especially smart phones have been spectacular, and for people who enjoy reading on holiday the reason is not difficult to find. Why an earth would you go on holiday and take a dozen paperbacks along with you, with all the weight and inconvenience that that implies, when you can slip a smart phone that contains your entire library – and allows you to make and receive calls and surf the Internet as well – into your jacket pocket? Smart phones are everywhere these days and almost everyone seems to own one.
I remember having lunch with my agent in London in that bastion of celebrity, the Ivy Club, a few years ago and talking about this very subject, when to my surprise he reached into his jacket pocket and flashed his own Kindle at me. I don’t now own one of these slim grey devices, though I have an extensive library – well over 1,000 titles – of Kindle books on my smart phone and duplicated on my Android tablet, both of which do much the same job as a Kindle, but in Technicolor rather than shades of grey, and of course both with a much reduced battery life. The phone and tablet need plugging in every night, but the Kindle lasts for weeks on a single charge.
The publishing world was frightened when ebooks first appeared and as far as I can see publishers are still frightened of them, because they’re still relatively new and they don’t quite know what effect their proliferation is going to have on mainstream publishers, and indeed on literary agents. In five or ten years’ time, will there even be such a thing as a publishing house? What’s the point of an author going through all the aggravation and hassle of writing a novel, finding an agent, letting the agent secure a publishing contract, doing all the editing and fiddling about with the cover design and all the rest, which will take months even if it all runs smoothly, when he could just as easily spend a few hours at the computer converting his words of wisdom into an electronic format that would be acceptable to Amazon, and then sitting back and waiting for the money to roll in?
And if an author goes this route, there’s no agent sitting in the middle to take his 15% or 20% of the author’s meagre income, and we’re not talking about the author receiving revenues of 7% of the cover price either. He or she can pitch the price of the book exactly where they want it, and once Amazon has taken its fairly modest slice of the pie, all the rest is pure profit. A successful indie author has to sell a whole lot fewer books than a commercially-published writer to achieve the same level of income.
Some time ago I read an article in a British writing magazine which covered this topic rather neatly. The contributor quoted as an example a young female American author – using the word ‘author’ in its loosest possible sense – who had written some twenty ‘novels’ (I’m again using this word extremely loosely, as they were between 8,000 and 12,000 words in length, meaning that they were actually longish short stories) and was selling them all on the Internet. He even quoted a few sentences from one of these ‘books,’ which made it abundantly clear that the girl was almost completely illiterate, couldn’t spell most words longer than five letters and had only the haziest idea about grammar, punctuation, plotting and pretty much anything else to do with writing.
But, and this is the real point of this story, she’d priced her ‘works’ at well under $5 each, and had sold in total some 200,000 copies. Even after Amazon or whichever company was handling the sales had taken its cut, this girl, with no readily discernible talent or ability, had achieved the kind of annual income that most British mainstream authors can only dream about.
So is that kind of thing the future of writing? I really hope not. The most important single thing that literary agents and publishers achieve at the moment is to act as gatekeepers, providing an unspoken guarantee that when a reader goes into a bookshop and chooses a printed novel, that novel will be of an acceptable standard. Of course, not all readers would agree with this statement, even if we decide to leave Dan Brown out of consideration. But I think most would accept that a book which has taken about a year to write, and has been accepted by a literary agent and then bought by a publishing house is far more likely to be worth reading than one which has been knocked together in a few hours by somebody sitting in their bedroom and then flogged as an e-book on the web.
What does the future hold? Nobody knows, obviously, but I do think it’s fairly clear that ebooks will occupy an increasingly large share of the market over the next few years as the technology proliferates. We may even see the demise of some of the High Street bookshops as increasing competition from the online retailers hits harder. But I still think we’ll find both literary agents and mainstream publishers in business. Perhaps a slightly different business from the model they’re used to, but they’ll still be there.
At least, that’s what I hope. As the Chinese say: ‘may you live in interesting times’. And I certainly think we do, and not just because of Covid.
