Phantomimic's Blog

Will E-Books Replace Print Books?

12/7/2012

We hear a lot these days that e-books will replace print books, but the folks at TeachingDegree.org have researched the available data on the subject and put together a graphic that indicates otherwise. They suggest that e-books and print books will co-exist occupying different niches. Take a look at the graphic below and let us know what you think.

Please Include Attribution to TeachingDegree.org With This Graphic

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Not giving readers what they want

11/3/2012

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When an author writes a series of books in one genre he/she develops a fan base. This can be both a blessing and a curse. It can be a blessing because the author has a group of people out there waiting to buy the next book. But it can be a curse because invariably these fans expect more of the same. Some authors are happy to oblige. For example Lilian Jackson Braun wrote a series of “The Cat Who…” mysteries till the end of her life. But what if an author wants to write something very different? The problem with this is that readers will not like it. This may have happened recently to no other than the author of the Harry Potter books: J. K. Rowling.

As many of you know, the Harry Potter books began as children’s books and progressively turned into books for adults. But still, apart from the violence and darkness that you get in the never-ending battle of good vs. evil, the books by and large had nothing objectionable. There was kissing, some veiled references to couples hanging out together, and the only curse words in the series were “effing”, “damn,” and “bitch” (this last one only said only once). After finishing the Harry Potter books Rowling wanted to write something very different, something more “real.” And that she did.

Her newest book is called the Casual Vacancy. I have not read it because I think the e-book is overpriced, but according to several reviews I’ve read, it is set in the microcosm one finds in a small town with all its maladies. The book has drug addiction, suicide, rape, domestic violence and abuse, adultery, and pornography. The “F bomb” is dropped everywhere, there is a vivid description of a used condom, and a reference to a “miraculously unguarded vagina” that has gone viral on the internet.

By all accounts the book seems to be good. It has received very high praise from many major outlets of the publishing world, and it contains very sharp social commentary. Rowling was not naïve about what she was doing. This IS what she wanted to write about, and she knew many readers would not like it, which is exactly what happened. Even though readers knew this wasn’t Harry Potter, many still expected the high-flying themes and heroics of the Potter books, not the bleak landscape that they encountered in The Casual Vacancy. On Amazon The Casual Vacancy has a rating of 2.9 on 1,382 reviews. On Goodreads the rating is more favorable; 3.4 on 9,622 reviews. Compare these figures with the last book of the Harry Potter series (Harry Potter and the Deadly Halows) which has 4.6 on 3,766 reviews on Amazon and 4.53 on 741,168 reviews on Goodreads. Regardless of this, the book has become a best seller. However, I wonder how many of the readers turned off by this book will read more of her writing in the future?

Of course Rowling is rich and has a huge fan base. She can afford to lose some readers. But the same may not be the case for lesser known authors with smaller fan bases. How can a writer harmonize his/her desire to write something different with the desire of the fans for more of the same?

What do you think?

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Book publishing for new authors: what is the return on your investment?

11/3/2012

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Recently I became embroiled in arguments on a couple of blogs regarding how much authors should pay to publish their books (I’m always getting in trouble). I mentioned that the cost of professional editing, formatting, and cover design, can be in excess of a thousand dollars, and then I went on to argue that not all self-published authors could justify paying for this, and that it is acceptable to publish without meeting these requirements.

I got several replies to my argument. I was told that if I did not have my book handled by professional editors, formatters, and cover designers, I was asking readers to take a risk on poor writing just because I, the author, decided to penny pinch. I was told that my mindset is what hurts the reputation of Indie authors. I was told that polishing my work can only help retain my audience. I was told that if I am putting out a product that I am asking people to buy, it is my duty to make it perfect.

Let me be clear about something. If you feel your book SHOULD be perfect then yes, by all means go out and spend whatever is needed to make it so. If you feel making your book as good as possible will give you an edge when your lucky break comes along a few years down the line, then likewise go ahead. I respect this; no problem. Everyone has their strategy. Let me tell you about mine.

I reason that when you are considering making an investment you always have to gauge your chances of success. Why would you spend money if you are not likely to make a profit or even recover your investment? Books can be viewed as an investment, and they are a very high risk-investment. The majority of books will not sell well, this is a fact. I wanted to publish my short stories. But as new author I had never written a book, published it, or promoted it. I felt it would be unrealistic of me to assume that my book would be a success even a modest one. Thus it was clear to me that sinking 1,000 plus dollars into a book with five stories that I would sell for $0.99 or $1.99 was a very risky proposition.

I decided that I would publish my first book The Sun Zebra for free. With the help of friends I got the editing, formatting, and the cover design done. I made mistakes along the way and corrected them. My book is not “perfect,” but readers have liked it. I am proud of this. I did it without spending a single dollar on publishing the book, and I even made a modest amount of money. Now that I know more about writing, publishing, and promotion, I reason that the risk associated with publishing my next book is less. Because of this I plan to invest the money that I gained from the Sun Zebra on my next book. I plan to keep on doing this (using the gains of one book to finance the next), and if my earnings keep increasing I will be able to pay more for editing, formatting, and cover design in the future.

As I wrote above, this is just my strategy. I accept that there are many other equally valid ones, and I respect them. However, I cannot agree with the notion that every new author HAS to spend a large sum of money on professional editing, formatting and cover design services for their book, with the alternative presumably being not to publish at all. This in effect sets the bar so high that we are back again to a gatekeeper model, which is what we are trying to avoid by being independent authors to begin with.

What do you think about this, and what is your strategy?

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The Strange World of E-Books

10/13/2012

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If you buy a print book, the book IS yours. You bought it, it belongs to you. No can one can take it away from you and you can sell it if you please, or family members can inherit it if you pass away, and they can later donate it to a library. This is not the case with e-books.

Many readers don’t understand that when they buy an e-book from Amazon or other businesses they are not buying a book, they are merely entering into a licensing agreement. You don’t own an e-book, you are just leasing it. And legally you cannot sell your copy of the e-book, have your family members inherit your e-books, or give them away to a library.

Amazon created a huge stink back in 2009 when it deleted (of all books) George Orwell’s “1984” from Kindles because the book had been placed for sale on Amazon by a company that did not have the rights to sell it. After some readers brought a lawsuit Amazon clarified and limited the conditions under which they could delete digital content from their customer’s Kindles. This happened again in 2010 with books that contained fictional accounts of incest. This time Amazon deleted the books from the Kindle archive. If customers had the book in their Kindles, the books were not affected, but if they had moved the books to their Kindle archives, the books vanished and could not be re-downloaded. In the first case Amazon gave refunds to their customers, and in the second case they reinstated the book to the archives of readers who had bought them (although they deleted them from the general store due to content violation). But the point is that Amazon HAS the ability to delete the e-book you purchased.

In an earlier post I have also covered the fact that Amazon monitors what you read with your Kindle, how you read it, and the highlights or notes you make.

In many ways this is a strange new world. I am sitting typing this next to a bookshelf that contains some books that belonged to long-dead relatives. Now these books belong to me and my family. The publishers or vendors of these books cannot take them away from me, in fact they don’t even know I have them, and the books have marks on them whose nature is only known to me and my relatives. These books are in many ways a connection to the past, a bridge between generations.

As most of you know I am all for self-publishing and e-books. In fact I believe that when it comes to e-books, their sales pattern is more natural than that of print books. But I wonder what sort of world we are creating. One hundred, or two hundred years from now, what will reading look like for families? Will everything be electronic? Will people be able to inherit and read the books (files?) read by their ancestors and see what comments they typed on them or what passages they highlighted? Or will the reading performed by one generation be cut off from the next?

What do you think?

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Print Books Are Unnatural

8/4/2012

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I was thinking the other day about how the rise of e-books has revealed something peculiar about how books sell. Some e-books become best sellers in the moment they are published while others sell much less but consistently overtime. Some e-books do not sell very well for a stretch of time and then “take off” while others sell irregularly alternating between periods of good sales and bad sales (peaks and valleys). There are multitudes of sales patterns and which one will regulate the “sale’s life” of a book is determined by multiple variables. Thinking this about e-books I realized something: print books are unnatural.

Let me explain.

First let me clarify that by “print books” I don’t mean those printed by POD (print on demand) services. I am writing about traditionally published print books. There is an aspect of the publishing of these books that is often not understood by people and this is what I call here the “time factor.” When you publish a print book, in the moment the book hits the stores a clock starts ticking. If your book does not achieve significant sales in a few weeks then it gets removed from the shelves along with your dreams and gets sent back to the publisher for a refund. Why is this?

In the brick and mortar store, your print book is a physical object that occupies space and competes for said space with other books. The book stores obviously want to make money and what they do is that they give preference to the books that are selling better. So your book has a very narrow window of time to be a success. This is why print books are unnatural. These books cannot develop their natural sales pattern because there is a selection process in favor of the books that sell well from the beginning.

This hurdle is overcome by e-books for the simple reason that they are virtual and therefore don’t occupy any space, which means they won’t be “removed” if they don’t sell that well compared to other books. And this is the way book selling should be because each book is different, and it is also the reason why e-books have a greater chance of success than print books.

Thus we come to the paradoxical conclusion that an e-book, something that does not exist in the real physical world, is actually more natural than a print book!

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Why I will Not Buy J.K. Rowling's New Book

8/4/2012

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As many of you know I am a serious Harry Potter fan. I think the books are brilliant and that Harry Potter will be remembered as one of the greatest characters of all time. That is why I was interested in J.K Rowling’s new book, “The Casual Vacancy.” Whereas the Harry Potter series started out as books for children, this is a book written for adults. The book will be out in September but the Amazon’s book page is already up and running. So I stopped by to take a look and what I saw left me speechless.

Whereas the hardback will sell for $20.93, Rowling’s kindle book will sell for $19.99! I couldn’t believe my eyes. This price even has the old trick of proclaiming it is being “discounted” from the original list price of $35, so you “save $15.01 (43%),” yeah right. It seems that Jo has willingly or unwillingly walked into the traditional publisher’s dishonest scheme of pricing e-books the same as print books. How could she have allowed this to happen?

I admire(d) Rowling because she did things differently. She insisted on retaining a certain level of control over the movies to make sure directors would not do crazy things with them and was willing to give up a percentage of her profits in exchange for this. She was a visionary in allowing fans to write fiction based on her characters, and she also opposed the over-commercialization of the Harry Potter franchise.

In the discussions on the book page people have pointed out that it is the publisher (in this case Hachette Book Group), not the author, who sets the price. Although this is true, Rowling could have tried to negotiate this beforehand. I can only surmise that she is either ignorant of the whole e-book/print book controversy, she doesn’t care, or she agrees with the publisher’s point of view.

Whatever it may be, I am very disappointed. Jo, you gave us Harry Potter and for that I will be thankful forever. However, I will not buy your overpriced book no matter how good it is although when the book does come out, it being a JK Rowling book, I expect it will become a best seller. On the meantime I should take some solace from the fact that in the book tags 326 people have so far voted for the tag “overpriced kindle version,” so for what it is worth I am not alone.

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Is the Amazon Prime Program Benefiting Lower-Priced Books?

7/13/2012

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I want to address an interesting phenomenon I’ve encountered in my experience with Amazon’s KDP Select Program. As many of you know, if an author enrolls their book in this program, in exchange for exclusivity they get to give away their book for free for 5 days. And this has been a great promotional tool. Additionally, any book enrolled in the program is included in the Amazon Prime library where it can be borrowed by readers participating in the program. Amazon has allocated a pool of money to the program ($600,000 to $700,000), and this money is divided by the total number of borrows that take place within a given amount of time. Based on this ratio, Amazon then pays their KDP Select authors a certain amount of money per borrow.

A reader who joins the Amazon Prime program pays $79 a year and is limited to borrowing one book from the Prime library per month. I remember that when this program got started many people argued that the program would not benefit authors who sold their books at low prices. The reason being that for that $79 investment to make sense, a reader would have to borrow 12 books a year each costing (79/12) $6.58 just to break even. Therefore, it was argued, Amazon Prime members would only borrow the more expensive books.

This has proven to be false. Many authors selling books at prices lower than $6.58 have reported a substantial number of borrows for their books. So far Amazon has been paying $2.30 to $2.50 for each borrowed book. If you are an author selling your book for $2.99, Amazon gives you a 70% royalty, which means you earn about $2.00 per sale. But if your book is borrowed, you actually end up earning more ($2.30 to $2.50, instead of just $2.00). What is not clear is the situation with books that are priced even lower. Here is where I want to share my experience.

My book The Sun Zebra is priced at $1.99. Out of every sale I make Amazon gives me a 35% royalty, which means I earn $0.70 per book sold. If my book were to be borrowed that would be a great thing. For me to earn $2.5-$2.3 per borrow is equivalent to selling 3.6 to 3.3 copies! But who would use their allocated monthly borrow on my book that costs $1.99 when they are paying $6.58 a month to belong to the Amazon Prime Program? The answer is: many people. I did my last free promotion from April 11 to April 13 of this year. So far about 45% of the income I’ve earned from this promotion alone comes from borrowed books!

So why is this? I think that participants in the Prime program feel they are getting the return on their $79 investment from other things. If you belong to this program, among other perks you also get free two day shipping of Amazon Prime items you buy plus unlimited instant streaming of thousands of movies and TV shows that are available on Amazon (this is cheaper than Netflix which charges $8 per month). This is why I believe Amazon Prime participants have no qualms in using their monthly borrow on lower-priced books.

But what about books that are priced even lower? I have anecdotal evidence from other authors reporting that their books priced at $0.99 are being borrowed. This is huge as in terms of royalties each borrow yields an income equivalent to the sale of 6.6 to 7.2 books. Unfortunately I haven’t found any hard numbers regarding this matter. Ideally I would like to know what percentage of royalties do borrows account for at different price points. Do Amazon Prime participants indeed borrow more of the higher priced books, or does price not affect their borrowing rate?

Please leave a comment if you have any information about this or if you want to share your experience regarding borrows.

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Reading a book is no longer a private act

7/6/2012

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I recently read an amazing article by Alexandra Alter in the Wall Street Journal. Its title is “Your E-Book is Reading You.” In a nutshell, she writes about something that many of us don’t consider when we read an e-book. It used to be that reading was a private act. How the reader read a book was an event far removed from the prying eyes of publishers, retailers, distributors, and even authors. Well, not anymore. E-readers and apps for devices like tablets are recording how we read and generating massive amounts of data that companies are mining for crucial nuggets of information.

Think of that e-book you read last week. Did you read it all in one sitting? Did you jump ahead to the juicy stuff? Did you search for key words? Did you read it more than once? Did you highlight any passages or read them over several times? Well, all this was recorded in the bowels of a computer somewhere, and while you are reading this blog it may well be being analyzed by someone who wants to understand reader behavior in order to improve marketing and promotional strategies.

Many will feel alarmed at this sort of intrusion, and certainly this is an argument in favor of only reading print books. But this does offer a great opportunity for authors. Think about it. When you log into your author page and you see someone has bought your book, have you ever asked yourself what that person did with your book? Did they read it at all? Did they quit halfway through it? Did they reread certain sections several times? Did they highlight certain passages or search for certain words? All this information could be made available to you along with the software to analyze it. That way you could change your writing to better please your readers.

I am constantly amazed by how fast things are moving along in this wild new frontier of e-publishing. I hope these changes will result in a better future, but I am troubled by some of the possible implications. Is Big Brother watching us?

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The Author's Guild Takes A (Wrong) Stand

6/28/2012

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As many of you probably know the Department of Justice (DOJ) has sued Apple and 5 of the big six publishers for collusion to keep prices of e-books artificially high. Now that the case is getting close to a settlement, the Author’s Guild has jumped into the fray with a letter directed to the DOJ where they blast Amazon for its business practices and criticize the proposed settlement.

Who is this group? According to their website “The Authors Guild has been the published writer's advocate for effective copyright, fair contracts, and free expression since 1912.” This claim confused me. Does this mean they have been criticizing traditional publishers for the lopsided contracts and meager royalties they impose on writers? The answer is no. Now that Amazon has demonstrated to the world how e-books can be published faster and cheaper earning authors greater royalties and giving readers lower priced books, this “Author’s Guild” has come out from under its rock to defend the inefficiency and unfairness of traditional publishing, and the way in which these publishers colluded with Apple and each other to keep the prices of e-books artificially high when e-books should cost less. I share their concern about Amazon taking over the market but I cannot sanction stupidity and unwillingness to evolve. Those businesses that don’t adapt to new realities, compete hard, and reward their clients should not be protected from those that do.

Consider the following example that I have written about here before. Traditional publishers did not want to make their e-books available for lending at public libraries because, get this: it was too easy for readers to borrow books! I’m not kidding you. They were concerned that readers who were not “inconvenienced” enough would turn into borrowers and not buy enough books thus cutting into the publisher’s profits. Well Amazon kept making their e-books available for lending at public libraries and guess what? A new study by the Pew Internet and American Life project has revealed that e-book borrowers are also avid e-book buyers with 41% of them saying they bought the last book they read. While this rate is lower than the larger population of e-book readers (55%), it is not the profit busting nightmare that traditional publishers were concerned about. Those companies that have the vision to see the future should be rewarded with it, not their slower dimwitted competitors.

Personally, I cannot complain about Amazon. They have provided me with the platform to become a self-published author, they pay me 35% on e-books under $2.99 and 70% on those above, and with the KDP Select program they have given me a powerful tool to promote my books. They have also made e-books available to me and other readers at the lower cost these books should have compared to print books. But, being an author, I was curious as to what the Author’s Guild had to offer me. However, before learning about all the wonderful things they could do for me, I checked the eligibility criteria to join the guild and I found out that:

“Self-published works and works published by subsidy presses do not qualify an author for membership.”

Well…just substitute “guild” for “job” in the video below.

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Self-debunking of the debunking of the "myth" that e-books are less expensive than print books

6/23/2012

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In a recent piece entitled “No, Virginia, e-books don't publish themselves” (subtitled “Ken Auletta addresses one of the popular myths of the Internet”) Philip Elmer-DeWitt quotes an article by Ken Auletta in the New Yorker (only available by subscription).

"E-books are cheaper to produce, by about twenty per cent per book, because they do away with the cost of paper, printing, shipping, and warehousing. They also eliminate returns of unsold books—a significant expense, since thirty to fifty per cent of books are returned. But they create additional costs: maintaining computer servers, monitoring piracy, digitizing old books. And publishers have to pay authors and editors, as well as rent and administrative overhead, not to mention the costs of printing, distributing, and warehousing bound books, which continue to account for the large majority of their sales.”

So there you have it. E-books, although cheaper to produce, do not cost much less than print books because they end up generating “additional” costs for publishers. But what are these “additional cost?” They can’t be to “pay authors and editors, as well as rent and administrative overhead.” These costs are not unique to e-books. What about “maintaining computer servers, monitoring piracy, and digitizing old books?” What servers is this guy writing about? Traditional publishers are not paying to maintain the servers of outlets like Amazon or B & B. The cost of monitoring piracy again is not unique to e-books. It is also incurred with print books. And digitizing old books is not as costly as it is made out to be here, but this is a particular case.

I believe the real reason is in the last sentence: “not to mention the costs of printing, distributing, and warehousing bound books, which continue to account for the large majority of their sales.”

This in effect suggests that part of the cost of print books is transferred to e-books, and this is why e-books are not cheap. In other words “our e-books are not cheap because we are also publishing print books.” The thing is that this has nothing to do with the cost of e-books, which is the issue that we are dealing with! I am amazed how this article intended to debunk a myth, ends up debunking itself in just this paragraph.

Let’s stop this silliness and repeat what is known as a fact by the writing community: traditional publishers are charging more for e-books to protect their paper sales. Making an average e-book is much less costly than making an average print book. This is not a myth. Traditional publishers are in effect saying “we are charging more for e-books because we are still selling print books, and we don’t want the lower costs of e-books to undercut print book profits.” In doing this traditional publishers are making a lot of money, and by the way, they also pay e-book authors less than they pay print authors.

If you want to dig more into the numbers you can check for example the posts by greengeekgirl at Insatiable Booksluts. She lays out her case that traditional publishers could charge much less for e-books and still make a handsome profit. She also makes the important observation that, unlike print books, e-books can generate income for years without the added costs of additional print runs.

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<<Previous

Will E-Books Replace Print Books?

Not giving readers what they want

Book publishing for new authors: what is the return on your investment?

The Strange World of E-Books

Print Books Are Unnatural

Why I will Not Buy J.K. Rowling's New Book

Is the Amazon Prime Program Benefiting Lower-Priced Books?

Reading a book is no longer a private act

The Author's Guild Takes A (Wrong) Stand

Self-debunking of the debunking of the "myth" that e-books are less expensive than print books

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