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I agree with you.

Exactly. Reading a book should be something anyone can do. It shouldn't require a device, which means we ought to have both print and ebook available.

Publishers need to rethink their positions in the form of partnerships with authors, flexibility is what makes some industries survive and some die a slow death. Books will endure, regardless.

I really like your comparison to transportation and traditional publication being perhaps like the old stagecoaches.

Oh, boy, do I ever agree! No business has any special right to exist. If they serve the customer (and their suppliers) well, they will thrive. If not, if they fail to adapt to a changing marketplace, that's just the free market system at work.

Wow, Nathan. Mega-bravo!!

Brilliant post. Great clarity of thought.

The irony is that if Publishers stopped treating authors and books as commodities, and they started understanding you can make more money pricing lower and selling at higher volumes, they would acheive their
goals, and be much more likely to weather the storm of technological transition.

Slow clap.

Great post, hopefully your brand of thinking will spread.

Yes, yes, and yes.

Great post! I agree a well.

Wish you were still agenting, Nathan. You are fearless and wise. Agents are fearless (they have to be) but they aren't all as wise as you.
As you so rightly point out, ONWARDS.

Funny. I posted this comment on a different blog today, and it is equally apt here, verbatim: Well argued. You always know an industry is at risk when they turn to protectionism to legislate or litigate success rather than adjust to market pressures.

You are 100% correct. Publishing is not special.

The example of "Book X might not be written in the hypothetical future" is specious. One might ask the converse hypothetical question: "What incredible books did not get published in the past because they did not fit in the channels that served the publishing industry?" The original argument presupposes that the publishing industry is perfect today, or at least that whatever harm it does is outweighed by the good it does. There is no way to prove that, and in fact there are solid arguments (made in this blog post!) that point to the opposite.

Noticed recently vs. the 'before times': the tone of agents and publishers to budding authors (me) in query/book proposal mode, is noticeably more generous and considerate of MY time and effort committed to not only years devoted to producing my best work possible, but also to dedicating and educating myself to the understandably competitive requirements of the literary world and profession. Said approach albeit necessary, could -at times- be said to resemble the court protocols of Louis the XIIII; Now thanks to the increasing legitimacy of online publishing and the recent P&RH merger, a much needed re-evaluation of the necessities of each side of the business can flower. To Quote Martha: "it's a good thing".

So agree Nathan. This is a great post. Loved the analogy to stagecoaches. It's so true that the industry has to grow with the times.

Ironically, your example of Walter Isaacson finding a wealthy patron to sponsor a Steve Jobs bio is the way publishing worked before there were publishing companies. Back then, an author would find one or more rich people to underwrite the production of some number of copies of the book he'd written, and in return they'd get copies.

Read the fawning introductions in some 18th-Century non-fiction books singing the praises of someone long lost to history, and you're probably reading an author's suck-up tribute to his "publisher."

Nathan, I've always liked you. Now I like you more.

There are so many quotable lines in this piece, I want to share them all with everyone I know.

This is a good post. Books do need to be cheaper. I buy my books on Kindle mostly but when I do decide to purchase a physical book, I'm usually bothered by the high price.

Now that I think about it—I guess I'm like the inverse of the people who think ebook pricing is too high.

yes, but it's not just about money -- it's also about culture, and the dumbing down of the collective unconscious by removing the "gatekeepers", the agents and the editors and the publishers, who, whilst making money, also have, hopefully, an eye for quality and who would, I suspect, not accept a majority of self-published books because they are rubbish. I don't want to read badly written books -- I don't care how cheap it was to download. Books should be expensive; not prohibitively expensive, but I think they should cost enough for one to consider them a luxury item, to revere them, and treasure them, to acknowledge the toil invested within those pages. I don't want books to become acrylic -- I want my books to be cashmere.

Sam, you might notice that some products today are acrylic yet cashmere is still accessible to those who prefer it.

Last I looked, the textile industry was not given special protections to ensure the availability of cashmere.

Just sayin'.

There are some well reasoned arguments here... but also a huge loss of credibility by comparing the vomiting onto the page that is NaNoWriMo with actual books.
It's nice for self published "authors" that they can come to your blog, and so many others, and know they'll get to hear all the things they want to hear.
The fact that so many people type words then say they wrote a book and describe themselves as authors is undoubtedly driving down the quality of books in general, and the only people who disagree are those who are doing that, or gaining something from it.

Excellent post, Nathan, and I like your comment Peter Dudley.
Nathan, I'm glad you pointed out how the publishing industry is increasingly treating the work produced by writers as a commodity. I've seen quite a few writer friends produce fabulous manuscripts, but they can't get them published b/c there are no vampires, werewolves or zombies (I'm talking about YA). These well-crafted "quiet" books are unable to find a home. As you pointed out, in the age of the celebrity book, the arguments set forth in favor of special treatment are disingenuous.
If J.K.Rowling decided to write another Harry Potter book, we'd all buy it and likely I'd pay $20+ for it. Why? Because we want it. Just like with all products, some are worth more than others. Cashmere and nylon. Mercedes and Ford. A coffee from Starbucks versus the swill at your local Circle K.
I see no reason for books to be any different.
But here's the rub. If publishers want to continue to obtain $15, $20 or more for a book, they are going to have to make that book worth the price and give a reader reason to spend that versus downloading a book for 99 cents (or free) from an Indie author. That $15+ hardcover better have great editing, a fabulous cover, quality pages inside - the whole package better be top notch.
I'm not seeing this. I'm seeing quality -overall - going way down, while the prices are the same or going up.
Big publishing should focus on what they can do best - when they set their mind to it: Produce quality books and charge a fair price.

Do books really need to be cheaper? There are so many books already available for free (at libraries, or online) or for pennies (rummage sales, used bookstores, or online).

One unintended consequence of books being cheaper could be that they'll lose their value. (Sam Albion touched on this, though Peter Dudley has a nice counter; maybe there will still be a range of prices for a range of books.)

The publishing industry doesn't deserve special protections, but like any business, they will try everything to save themselves. This is an industry that never had a high profit margin to begin with, and they're threatened with having products that they used to sell for $20 now having a price point of $2.

They've all seen what has happened to the music industry, and I'm sure it's their biggest nightmare.

I think the publishers are just working our emotions and the historical attachment we, as humans, have to books. They're milking that for all it's worth and saying, "Don't you want to preserve thousands of years of historical significance? Do you want to be the cause of the collapse of something so venerated?" But in reality, anything we humans truly value has proven remarkably tenacious and capable in whatever form is best its survival. We love books. Books won't die just because there is a new way to get them to market. Maybe those traditionally responsible for delivery will die, but not the product itself. That's what the publishers fear, at least the big ones. The new pubs are much more nimble and quick to evolve.

Anon 7 p.m.

You said:

"...but like any business, they will try everything to save themselves"

Yes, but what they did was commit a felony criminal action to try to keep prices low. And the article Nathan references defends that felony. It calls for 'Special Protection' for Publishers, saying they should be allowed to break the law, because they perform a necessary and important function.

If I can paraphrase him - hopefully correctly - Nathan's point is that the function Publishers provide is necessary, but others can and do provide it. Publishers do not deserve exemption from the law because they are not irreplacable. The reality is that they are replaceable.

When people are in competition to provide a service, the market should decide who wins.

Very well said, Nathan. For any industry, if your business model no longer works, change it or go out of business. Only those who adapt to a changing environment deserve to survive.

Books. Cheaper. Why fight it?

Well, as a reader, I wouldn't, but as a writer, I have some concerns. Within the current publishing system, a smaller cover price means the author makes less money.

Unless, of course, the author goes indie and snags a higher percentage of a smaller cover price, which can preserve income. But if indies lose their price advantage because the traditional publishers are charging less, the indies may sell fewer copies, reinforcing the problem for authors to make a living.

Great post, Nathan. I also agree with you. This past weekend I attend and spoke at the Avondale Writers Conference (just outside Phoenix,) and the keynote speech was given by Gordon Warnock, senior agent for the Andrea Hurst Literary Agency. In his speech he said that those who viewed change in publishing with pessimism did so because they're focusing on how things used to be. Those who are excited about the current state of the publishing industry feel that way because they're looking at how things are now and how they could be in the future. I think your post tonight falls right in line with that same line of thought, and traditional publishers are just going to have to get used to it.

YES! (And as Forrest Gump says, "That's all I have to say about that.")

One of your best posts ever!

I applaud your take on the publishing industry and its future - that it should be prepared to adapt rather than continue down well-worn paths of yore. I wonder, though, if in the push to price commodity cheaply as possible, will less risks be taken with publishing choices. Will publishers choose more often to go with trends and low-risk publishing options like celebrity books and biographies than risk publishing dollars on a worthy work that's left of field and which might, or might not, sell well.

I agree, too, that people will still write books even though decades pass in the journey to their completion. It's the journey that, in retrospect, is the most pleasurable for the author. I believe Tolkien took twelve years to write his saga, and I've taken longer to write mine.

On reflection, though, I suppose mainstream publishers have always tried to stick to the tried and true to one degree or another, and the big break-throughs have come when those with risky literary ventures have self-published like Lord Byron his work of epic poetry which, I guess, wasn't expected to become as popular as it did. I wonder if the work was helped by the charisma of the author who probaby held many public readings in order to make his public aware of both his work and his name.

But I digress.

Excellent post.

I really can't see why publishing should have special protections (just like I still can't understand why baseball has their special protection as well). Survival of the fittest.

If you can't change with the times to make yourself leaner and meanter, and more importantly, relevant (see the newspaper industry on how not to make yourself relevant), then you have no one to blame for your own obtuseness except yourself.

One argument that traditional publishers keep bringing up is this idea that the publishers were ‘gatekeepers’ or guardians of literary quality, that the reader needs them to be protected from bad books. The question is actually asked, “with the wave of indie publishing, how will we know what’s good?” Ironically, most submissions editors have told me that they know within the first paragraph if a book is good.
Big six publishers have access to high dollar editors, top graphic talent, massive distribution infrastructure, sales reps, years of experience, etc. but it is all wasted when they use their resources to publish books by empty-headed, vacuous, reality TV stars that have nothing intelligent to say. I don’t know that they have done anything more for America’s intellect that TV, radio or any other medium of pop culture.

I think it's Visigoths, with two Is.

I totally agree with this... with respect to fiction. Fiction can be written for free, and excellent fiction produced at no (substantial) cost to the author. But certain non-fiction (the research required to write it) does usually cost money.

It's why I got into fiction. I wanted to write narrative non-fiction, along the lines of Bill Bryson (as a familiar example) or Pete Dunne (a favourite author of mine) - studies of a subject that were part informative, part memoir/travelogue. The problem? I don't make much. I can pay my bills every month but there's pretty much nothing left over to be able to spend - especially with no guarantee of publication/return! - on travel.

Without that advance up front, there's no way for me to write these books. I don't actually have the platform/pub record to get the advance anyway (learning this was what prompted me to try writing fiction - serendipity, as I love it), but for people who do, it may be their only means of covering their costs.

I think we'd suffer a great decline in both the quantity and quality of such non-fiction books if the authors were left to fend for themselves. Not everyone (possibly very few) would be able to secure wealthy sponsors to take a chance on them.

The one thing that always bothered me was that when people spend hundreds of dollars on tablets or dedicated e-readers they expect e-books to be less expensive. And it's a plain and simple fact that e-books are less expensive to release. I've done it and I know from personal experience. So why they think they can get away with charging these ridiculous prices is something I don't get.

But I also think that as long as the big publishers charge these prices they only make it easier for smaller e-presses and indie authors who are pricing their e-books competitively. I have passed on more than one e-book by large publishers just because they are over the line and I've purchased quality books from small presses instead.

As for the Steve Jobs book. Of course that would have been published. I've read that book, and it was practically put together by Jobs and his wife before he died. It was a great book, but there were no surprises.

You're right, of course. But my question is: Why does it take hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop any book? Writers who demand those kinds of advances will find themselves left out of a competitive, realistic industry.

Bravo! No industry is any more deserving of protection than another! If we "rescue" the traditional publishing houses, then who or what is next? And who bails them out? Government (taxpayers)? The government is in worse shape than publishers.

The free market, with a minimum of regulations, always tends to produce the best product at an affordable price.

The publishers need to learn to adapt like all other industries.
Years ago color TV's, cell phones, VCR's (remember those?) cost hundreds of dollars more but now are far more affordable for the average American...

"There's a moment when Jacob goes inside to warm up some corndogs (natch), and the narrative stays with the kids outside." Great example to the approach.

If anything, when it comes to any kind of protection, real publishing companies - as opposed to accounting entries for multi-media conglomerates might POSSIBLY be in the running.

Companies who actually pay taxes for the streets they use, hire locally and support their host communities, and don't allow their executives to have offshore accounts... MAYBE.

Tariffs, protective legislation, and financial assistance should only apply to the health of the company regarding maintenance of community integrity.

@Seabrooke - maybe it's time to rein in some of ridiculous litigation around defamation and libel.

I don't want to comment on the issue as a whole, rather leave some thoughts about what Nathan envisions as alternative futures/realities for the evolution of publishing (or rather, the adaptations in its absence). I think it's important to consider that there could be such a thing as devolution--that not everything will be advanced as evolution of an industry.

"All of the mechanisms and expertise of traditional publishing, other than paper book distribution, are now available to any author. Want professional editors? Tons of great freelance editors are standing by. Need cover design? A graphic designer will be happy to help. Need money in advance to pay for all this? Take a gander at Kickstarter, or at the universities and nonprofits who currently support the publication of literary fiction and academia."

This paragraph in particular made me think of this. While freelance offers lots of people the autonomy it desires, it heaps a lot more costs on the back of the worker him/herself. In other industries, you would hear the decrying of the rise of contractual labor, in which companies are restructuring their workforce so they are free of responsibility. A freelance editor has to hustle jobs, pay for their own benefits (which often means less of them), and live paycheck to paycheck. A freelancer, is in effect, a single business and in seeking business success, every project can be a career-effecting. Will freelance editors shy away from literary risks in order to take safer projects? Also, where do successful editors come from? I would wager many of them gained their experience through traditional publishing. If becoming an editor means taking on increasing costs to oneself (along with increasing risk), then we should consider how the demographic of would-be editors will narrow socially and economically as a result.

Kickstarter? Academic Presses? Do you think people are going to kickstarter intellectual literary classics? Or Zombie/Vampire/pop-lit? (No preference for either, but you're surrendering to the whim of the masses--if you can stand out of an already saturated kickstarter pool, to appeal to increasingly cash-strapped, donation-weary clientele. As for academic presses--where do you think their money comes from, and what is the mission statement of the presses? Do academic presses have extra room on their lists they've been reserving all this time? I'm not saying these are bad ideas, but as the only systems to prop up an industry--are we going from stage-coach to train? Is that the most proper metaphor? Or would this be more like going train to plane, or train to bus? I don't think it's very clear that these mechanisms (by themselves at least), are necessarily positive, effective, or anymore sustainable than the publishing industry in its current form...

As for this:
"I mean, if Walter Isaacson came to me and said, "Nathan, I have secured exclusive access to Steve Jobs to write his bio, I just need $500,000 to write it in exchange for a share the profits," I would say, "I don't have $500,000." But I'm confident Isaacson would be able to find a member of the 1% willing to take the bet."

This seems like an endorsement of feudal-era patronage. Is this really advisable? Does this adhere to journalistic principles? What if the member of the 1% is an enemy of the biographee? Etc. etc.

At face value, I don't disagree that "publishing is not special," but I just wanted to raise some concerns about some of the mentioned alternatives. I don't believe the freelancification/guerrilization of industry is necessarily a good thing for ALL parties. Sure, the consumer will likely benefit in cost, as they do from all cheapening products, but let's consider the true cost of that cheapening: labor, benefits, wealth stratification. Perhaps the analyst is right: Publishing is NOT special, and perhaps lots of industries need protection from the extreme pursuit of the bottom line.

Hear, hear...and amen. This genie is out of the bottle and it's not going back in. And that's a very good thing. Too many wonderful authors out there that keep getting kicked to the curb -- and now have their own voice, their own platform, and are doing quite well. We may never be rich, but then being trad published isn't a guarantee of steady money coming in either. I'm happy with my choice and I'll take my chances. I've nothing to lose and everything to gain. And Indie Publishing is not going to go away or lose the respect that it's been owed for a very long time.

Yup. It's cheap and easy and getting cheaper and easier, and the stigma that once went with "self-publishing" is diminishing, not because there's no trash coming out, but because good things are.

They said the same thing about web-serial shows, that they would eventually lose their popularity, and with Hulu and YouTube they are actually more popular than ever. I think people are essentially pragmatic and will continue to use what mediums are available and effective.

I think self-publishing is here to stay. To many agents and publishers are not giving new authors a chance. And so more and more people have to do the self-publishing route. Which isn't a bad thing I don't think. It gets their names out there, it gets their stories out there. It gives us as readers new and wonderful stories.

We're still a long way from e-reader saturation, so there's still room for growth. It feels more like the rocky early stages.

eBooks are the future, and the future has arrived. As for self=publishing, the Amanda Hawkings of the world have proven it is a viable option.

Thanks Nathan! I self-published last year and have a new book coming out soon. I certainly hope you're right. I guess we never know what will happen in the future, but I know that after a long haul with an agent/without an agent and no sales with the big 6, I was ready to self-publish and see if my books with "no market," actually had a market.

So far the answer is yes. But, I realize things could change...for now, it feels good to write and get my work out there. I couldn't have imagined how good the "stamp of approval," from readers buying and liking my book would feel. That was always the end goal for me, to have readers, not just to have books that had run the trad. pub. gauntlet. Thank you, Readers! That's my mantra these days.

That felt like a warm hug.... so needed on today, my half-century mark. Gives me the kick I need to drag out all my notes on my life in Italy and get to work. Thanks!

I call it choices. Now authors have many more.

Amen, Nathan. Books are part of our culture. As e-reader technology and deliver ability modes expand, books will remain with us. So will the self-published authors who are willing and able to work steadily on their books and take advantage of easy upload and distribution processes. I do believe there are some who wish there would be a bubble...but that's a comment for another blog post.

More than folks writing books, there is no end to readers! People don't have a threshold for the number of books they're willing to read in a lifetime ... well, people who aren't Seinfeld characters don't anyway.

No one reads a single book in their lifetime. If JK Rowling writes 100 books, I'll read every one so long as I have eyes. Self-published, big-published or no. Same goes for any author I enjoy.

So why then, should there be a cap on the number books that can be written if there is no cap on the number of books that can be consumed?

Your logic makes sense to me. I think blogs are quite different from books, and some of the decline in the blogoshpere can probably be attributed to repetition of content (especially in writing blogs) as much as other social media siphoning away readers. Can we have just one more post about dialogue tags and adverbs? (NOTE: You do a good job at keeping things fresh here, Nathan, which may explain your loyal following.)

Many authors are taking the indie route seriously; self-publishing is not as much a vanity project anymore as it is an entrepreneurial effort. Indie authors are a new wave of small business owners. I think it's a great representation of the American dream. What's even greater is that the traditional route still exists for those that prefer it.

Opportunities, people. They are everywhere if you look for them.

Check out my blog.

Check out my book.

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There may not be a bubble in the sense that writers are going to get bored and go do something else, but there may be one in the receptiveness of the reader. As the glut of self-published books continues to grow (and I agree it will!) I think the reader will become more discerning out of nessecity. It is a buyers market if you will.

I, as a reader, do not have to spend my time reading a poorly edited book. So as my demand decreases due to a natural desire to be selective about what I spend my valuable time reading. Wouldn't it naturally cause a slow down in self publishing as only those commited to producing a quality product will continue to self publish? It seems to me readers will begin to sift the chafe from the wheat causing fewer dreamers to spew out a book and post it for the world to read.

I agree self-publishing is here to stay, but I highly doubt that the market will continue to support the glut of books we are currently seeing. I hope not, as it would be nice to see self-publishing recieve its rightful place as one of three platforms for any successful author in any genre.

I think self-publishing is here to stay, but I still believe 99% of the people who try it will make absolutely nothing. And these same people would have made absolutely nothing in traditional publishing, either, but will probably have put out less money up front to try. There is no evidence people are willing to read twice as much all of a sudden. There's a limited supply of eyeballs.

"Get used to the self-publishing boom. We're just getting started."

I completely agree!

I scanned the Guardian article and the response, and although I do think there are some who are jumping on the self-pubishing band wagon as a "get rick" thing, I think those articles are missing the point of what is happening in the world right now.

We are not seeing a "gold rush" boom, we are seeing a re-distribution of the labor force.

As we move from paper to digital, labor is moving with it.

With paper, the only "employment" available to authors was to "sell" their work to publishers who then sold it to distributors.

With digital, the options of "employment" for authors have opened up. Authors can choose to continue the old model, or they can sell directly to the distributors (Amazon, etc.), or they can even go it on their own, if they want.

I think there is a natural tendency for labor to move in the direction of the best working conditions and compensation model.

As long as Amazon continues to offer the best "employment" options, the movement of authors to that labor model (self-publishing) is pretty much assured.

Whether that continues, will really depend. If legacy publishers matched or exceeded Amazon's terms, the movement toward self-publishing might signifantly slow.

This part is hard to predict, since it depends on what they major players decide to do.

Although I will say that I think self-publishing is here to stay, regardless. There are some authors who may value freedom over any other working condition, and they will most likely keep self-publishing alive and thriving, even if legacy publishers step up their game.

What may be needed for the successful future of epublishing is some system to weed out all the "noise" in the ebook world -- in other words, the mountains of crap that crowd out the well-written books. There will need to be some sort of gatekeepers to divert the crap to the dungheap. Traditional publishing has agents and editors and marketing gurus; epublishing is going to have to come up with something that produces a similar result. Otherwise, breaking out your ebook from the pack is only going to get harder than it already is, as those of us who have epublished have already experienced.

Sorry to add to my post, but the other thing that will keep self-publishing alive is unlimited access. There is no cap on how many people can publish. This is what you talked about, Nathan, and I completely agree.

I agree, Nathan. It perplexes me when people talk about a 'self-publishing bubble', because clearly, books aren't going anywhere. And with e-books (also not going anywhere), self-publishing is the most accessible form of publishing for many people.

I agree that self-publishing is here to stay.

But I think those who self-publish just because they think it's an easy way of making money will realize it's not so, and give up.

That will leave the rest of us, too many still, who are cursed with the need to write.

And as Susan put it, the problem is there are not more readers than before. And those who read won't read more.

So self-publishing is here to stay, but, unfortunately, that doesn't mean writers can make a living this way.

I want to agree with you, Nathan, but I have to be honest and say that I have never bought a self-published book. I'm sure I'm missing out on some great works, but my (wrong? outdated? uneducated?) assumption when an author self-publishes is that they have done so because they grew tired of rejections from the traditional publishing world. Until that stigma changes for the general public, I'm afraid the majority of self-published writers will continue to struggle to be taken seriously.

Bubble = Marketing term.

Usually when too many people rush to board a ship, it sinks. If the bubble bursts, some other latest trend will replace it.

I like choices.

As for the blog bubble, some will survive, some won't. I agree with Rick D.'s comments about repetition.

That was sane and sensible; thanks.

BTW, you find the cutest pictures!

www.VermillionRoadPress.com

I don't believe self-publishing is a bubble. Blogging was just the next new toy. Self-publishing is where writers have increasingly had to go as publishers narrow their sights tighter around the Next Sure Thing.
Publishing has been shaken up and is trying to figure itself out. To that end, I hope self-publishing matures quickly and finds a process that creates credibility. I find myself nervous to purchase self-published books. Which makes me nervous to publish one.

I agree with you. We're not in a bubble. We're at the beginning of a revolution.

I agree with Nathan -- self-publishing is no bubble. Plenty of authors take self-publishing very seriously, and the process is similar to setting up your own business. You don't need to go through traditional publishing houses to create a professional product. You can hire your own cover designer, and actually control how your novel is portrayed artistically. You can hire an editor, and because of recent cutbacks you may well hire someone who has worked for the big six. You can even pay to get on blog tours or handle other marketing aspects. The difference between self-publishing and traditional publishing is about control. You control how much you invest in yourself, and as a reward you also reap the profits. Nathan has done the math before, there's a good chance that a mid-list author would come out ahead. Self-pubbing allows writing to have an entrepreneurial spirit!

I feel this blog has changed directions. I remember when it was more partisan for traditionally published.

I respectfully disagree.

I think we are about to see a boom indeed. A cataclysmic explosion of desperate e-authors in the next couple of years--who will ultimately exit the business when they realize no money is to be had.

I find it hard to believe most writers are not fame and money motivated.

If you are not, I congratulate you. You are amongst the 1% of us who do it freely and without expectation.

As I peruse my Twitter followers' posts, nearly EVERY one of the ebooks I see mentioned are a giveaway. Not a one-hour, or a one-day giveaway, but weeks on end.

The VAST abundance of free material is encroaching rapidly on the living of the few who are trying to actually make money.

I am an economist. I realize we use loss-leaders to generate enthusiasm, but we are not doing this. Loss-leaders still have a price, albeit at a loss to the producer. But this is making no business sense.

When was the last time you stepped into the cereal aisle of the supermarket and saw half of them being given away? Why should I bother buying?

We are creating a free book landscape where one can accept any number of books, at any time, thus creating a highly unlikely branding of authors. This, in other industries, is referred to as price-fixing--but at what price? Zero!

Allow me to share this link from a literary agent: http://bit.ly/A96qoq

This is exactly what is happening.

I am getting bombarded by free ebooks. Why should I pay for ebooks anymore?

I ask you, yes you, since when did we stop competing on quality, and started selling based on price?

Promotion is a silver bullet, not a religion.

Respectfully,

Rashad.

I think of the flood of self publishing as equivalent to the sudden flood of personal computers. What happened there was that when critical mass was reached, the buzz became "customization". I think that is what will happen with respect to self publishing. For many, the cost barriers are coming down, so you don't have to write a mass market novel to be successful. You just have to identify a group of people that you speak to and publish customized work for your particular group. You will still make money---a reasonable amount but not the runaway riches of a mass market blockbuster. It will be a living, and readers will be happy because they will be getting books closer to what they want.

This is a great time for writers. They finally have control over their careers and are not at the mercy of the old ways. It's great and it will only get better as time goes.

So agree with you. And there's nothing wrong with people independently publishing their stories.

Some stories are good that just don't make it the traditional way. And if people have the time and money to get their story published and market it, that's great. Because they are just actualizing their dream a different way. We have to be careful not be prejudiced against anyone path to publication.

I'm on the fence about how I feel about self-publishing. I've self-published two collection books, but I only put them out there for mainly friends and family to read. My novels, I hold securely and have been patiently waiting for a publisher/agent to embrace them. I know self-publishing has come a long way and is continuing to grow, but something old-fashioned in me still clings to the traditional route. Give me another three years with no agent and/or no publisher, and I may be singing a different tune, though.

I agree that it's not a bubble, but I do think that self/indie publishing is going to go through a lot of changes in the next few years. A lot of authors seem to think they will be the next Amanda Hocking with one book. Most of those authors will quietly go back to their day jobs, and we'll never hear from them again. The authors who will find self-publishing success will be the ones who have the patience and work ethic to stick with it for the long haul, producing book after book with great content (and great editing). There is plenty of talent out there, and this really is an exciting time to be a writer.

i think we're at the beginning of something new, much like musicians were when they realized that they didn't record labels and could do their own thing about 5 years ago. I've just self-published my first book, not because I didn't think it wasn't good enough to go the traditional route, but because I wanted the control of doing it myself, on my own time, and with my own ideas. Is it a lot of work? Absolutely. But so far, it has been immensely rewarding and I'm looking forward to being an indie entrepreneur.

Self publishing has offered writers a fantastic, not hitherto experienced opportunity. Especially self publishing ebooks. This is the dawn of the age of selfpublisharius.

I'm not sure I'd call it a "bubble," but I do agree with others who've posted that many will try it and only try it once.

SP takes a lot of work to do well. Those who look to it as a business endeavor will find it easier and easier and increasingly welcoming. Those who are hoping for a get rich quick scheme, or a way to suddenly have millions read their novel...eh. They'll probably decide their energy is best spent elsewhere.

So, I'm not sure it will just keep increasing and increasing. Sooner or later, enough people will have self-published that the stories people are hearing aren't the Amanda Hockings but the Jane Smith from their church group who put out her NaNoWriMo fictionalized memoir and didn't make back the cost she paid for her goodreads ad. So perhaps then folks will step back, think, and see self-publishing as the business it really is and think for a moment about whether they want to get involved.

I think it is great that self publishing is so easily accessible and affordable, however I wish authors would spend money on better covers and editing. I just downloaded five self published books on my kindle and only one of them is polished enough. The rest are formatted poorly, have horrible covers, and desperately in need of editing.

I loved reading this today. It's something I'm considering doing for a few shorter pieces of work, more for the personal satisfaction than anything else.

Agree that technological model (or "platform" or "channel" or "market") has changed forever. However, there is and will be a bubble effect in volume of content and players. New players will come and go quickly. Some old players will go, slowly or quickly.

At end of day, the lucrative end of the industry is the same: GREAT PRODUCT + GREAT MARKETING. How the product looks, how the product is marketed, and who shares the rewards are all in flux.

Great post, and I fully agree with you, Nathan. I did the unthinkable one year ago and decided to start a publishing company (under a brand I have always dreamed of building), publish my first novel THE BREEDERS, and see where the experience took me. Man oh man, it has been incredible. Not only did I learn more about publishing than I ever thought I would know, but I now have a new day job because of it (at a small indie/hybrid press here in Minneapolis). I will be building their eBook department, designing print books, and teaching authors social media. I would never have come to this point had I still been twiddling my thumbs, waiting for my dream agent to take me on.

A few things: self-publishers absolutely must invest in their books to make them matter and to keep this machine rolling. I think true self-publishers will only get smarter and savvier, and it really will change this industry. Two years ago, I never would have considered self-publishing. Now, I'm hard-pressed to pursue the "normal" option for my next projects. That said, the process of self-publishing was so extremely taxing, and it isn't for people who don't have the ambition or ability to grab it by the balls and run with it. I think there will eventually be a perfectly-accepted "breed" of self-published author who can gain respect on par with any other traditionally published author--the one who spends his or her time and money to do it right.

I'd like to see some stats that confirm the blog bubble is deflating. I have five and plan to have about 50 by the end of this year. What a great device to practice writing and hear how much you suck from people you don't know! Every writer should have at least one blog if not many of them.

But please don't confuse blooks, I mean blocks, I mean books and blogs. A book you spend a lot of time working on so it is ready to be seen for others, a blog you spit out in chunks and hope each post is worth reading. If not that's ok, you just post again tomorrow. A book can cost you some money to publish on your own, where a blog can be done for #10 a year for hosting, $100 a year for hosting, and 15 minutes of your time each day.

You'll be lucky if your SP book breaks even, where putting ads on your blog can earn you some extra cash each month.

My point is that most writers will want to do both and they should. But talk to writers about self-publishing, and talk to an Internet consultant about blogging. Then talk to other writers about blogging so you get both sides of the story. :-)

I'm not sure I agree with a bubble, as in it's not something that's going to burst. I do believe we'll peak at some point, reach a saturation point, where the perception develops that self-publishing is not the viable career/make-a-living option they had thought. That 1% success rate will become common knowledge and become a deterrant. At this point, self-publishing is too new to have reached that.

Another aspect that I think will happen is that there will just be so many choices out there that it will overwhelm and readers will funnel to places where books have some curation value attached to them. In the end, we may just see things become much like publishing has been. If your work doesn't end up in a curated location, you will be ignored. Come to think of it, publishers might do well to really embrace the digital content and become curators beyond the limits of their contracted authors.

I don't have an ereader at this point, but I can say now that I won't wade through the thousands of choices on Amazon looking for something to read or B&N for that matter. I will got to places that I can trust to have pulled in books that are worth my time and money. If I want a new thriller to read, I'd want to go to Joe's Crime Shack site where they don't have everything under the sun, thrown up there by anyone who thinks they can write crime fiction. I'll go to the reviewers who are thoughtful in their choices. To me, places like Amazon are not ideal places for curation. There's no control over the process, as anyone can toss up a 5-star review or a 1-star one for that matter, who haven't even read the book. There's no trust there.

So, in the end I guess, I think this change in the industry will settle itself out. The bubble won't burst, but will probably gradually bleed out to a point of stability, and though the players may change, I'm not sure the structure will be a whole lot different. Because as wonderful as the rise of the amatuer is in the world of writing for people who want to write, readers will get to a point where they can't handle the flood. They'll want structure. They'll want the stability and convenience of trusted places to find stories that are worth their while. In the end, quality plus convenience will trump quantity. At least I hope so.

Anything that reaches outrageous proportions usually does, indeed, burst eventually. In the past few years I've seen more self-published authors give up and move on to something else than I've seen continue.

It was the same with the housing bubble. The hobby flippers lost and jumped ship. The serious investors bought with care, did not over-extend, and are sticking it out for the long haul.

I'm more curious about the social media bubble, based on ads. I have no idea whether or not it will last. (As I sit waiting for my invitation to join pinterest :)

Nathan,

Is a publishing civilian a failed literary agent?

David

David-

Totally, everyone who changes jobs failed at the last one, amiright?

Nathan

Nathan: I couldn't possibly agree with you more.

And Mira: I sort of agree with you, except I don't think a distribution of labor is exactly the right description.

Again, a brief history:

Prior to Guttenburg's invention of the printing press, Bibles were painstakingly reproduced by hand (and with illumination).

After the invention of the printing press, Bibles could be reproduced with less time and effort and on a much greater scale.

In 1920s Paris, a guy named Robert McAlmon and some friends purchased a printing press. McAlmon's "Contact Press" was born. On that press, he published a 300-copy run of "three stories and ten poems," Ernest Hemingway's first book--a collection. He also published Hemingway's "in our time," which was then handed to friends to bring to New York to try and find a "major" "traditional" publisher for it.

Boni & Liveright, a small printing partnership, agreed and signed Hemingway on--for an advance of $200, maybe something like $2,000 in today's dollars.

Not everyone has friends like Robert McAlmon. But no one else was publishing Hemingway, as he was too unknown, too young, too whatever it was that caused the majority of "traditional" publishers to not take a risk on him.

In short, if Hemingway had not had McAlmon as a friend, he might never have been published. If he'd never been published by McAlmon's Contact Press, he might never have come to Boni & Liveright's attention. If he'd never come to Boni & Liveright's attention, he might never have come to F. Scott Fitzgerald's attention...need I go on?

As the publicist for Melville House notes, tons of people have an idea they have a book in them, or that a book is their way to make their mark or leave something behind. It is an ego trip. Just like blogs, or social networking, or the idea that anyone actually might be interested in something you might have to say.

But the possibility exists--remote as it might be--that someone REALLY good, or maybe even new, inventive, creative, engaging and inspirational or merely emotionally moving MIGHT have been overlooked by traditional publishers because they could not take a risk or thought at the very least, this writer is not going to make a lot or enough money for us to justify the contract.

And for that writer, self-publishing, if you can't get a friend to publish you, has reached the point of virtually having a printing press in your home at your disposal. Painters don't need approval of someone to put their ideas on canvass. They just need to sell their paintings.

Book selling is, of course, another matter.

I agree with you that self-publishing isn't a bubble. Readers love it too much. :)

A bubble? Sounds like fear mongering.

What we are in is a time when folks don't need to lug around books that weight a ton. Electronic books are awesome!

As for this self-publishing thing, I think a lot of this has been caused by the publishers--changing up their advance payment schedules, paying less via the agency model, and holding off on purchasing new books while Borders imploded last year.

Plus, it's not incredibly difficult to produce an eBook with InDesign and some freelance artwork via artists found on Deviant Art.

I suspect we are in the midst of a bubble. It may be cheap and easy to self-publish, but it's difficult to make any real money from self-publishing. As more books flood the market, readers will become increasingly intolerant of poor editing, design and layout.

Some of those things will be made cheaper by software or online services, but good editing won't get any cheaper; the time spend starting to master the craft won't get shorter.

Just like the blogging boom, people are finding a reason to write and discovering some joy in it. However, many of the people who are excited by it now—when tales of million dollar sales are in the air and the sense that anybody and everybody is doing it—will find the limited returns (few readers, little or no money) outweigh their desire to keep at it.

I wonder how many blogs that came and went were full of poems and short stories? I know a lot of people who were writers who aren't now. Not a single one of them is less happy as a result.

I do think that in the next year or so that we will see the number of writers self-publishing books diminish. As people realize that it isn't easy and that it takes a lot of work to be successful going the self-publishing route, those writers who were only in it for the money will give up and go do something else.

Is it a bubble? Well it isn't like the dot com bubble or the housing bubble. It won't have a negative impact on the economy when the dilettantes go do something else.

I think the overall publishing scene both traditional and self-published will get better once those less serious writers give up and move on.

I don't think epublishing will go away. I don't think the bubble will burst but I do think there will be a pendulum swing. It will settle into a pattern but that first swing may be a doozy. Blogging may not be the craze like it was but I don't think blogging is going anywhere either, it's just settled into it's groove. Hope I wasn't too confusing. If not ignore me, I'm on pain medicine.

I had to laugh at the Guardian article.
There may be a bubble of these companies that make money on the hype of epublishing, but the idea that books and reading are part of a bubble ready to burst is silly.
I know lots of writers, some published and some unpublished, who work hard at writing. Some have been doing it for decades and some are new. They are driven by artistic passion not millions of dollars. They spend those long hours laboring over their manuscript because they are writers and it doesn't matter if they use a pen, typewriter, computer or stylus on clay tablet.

They people who read books want good books with no regard for any bubble.
The bursting epub bubble will only affect people who are moved by or invested in the hype. A perfect example is people who spend time writing about how it's all just a bubble ready to pop.

After the froth of every man jack horse writing his/her/its dream horror chick lit fantasy and the inevitable shenanigannery twixt trad and indie, the future for writers and writing (and readers and reading) can only be advanced by this new-found means of allowing people to do stuff.

It's messy right now, and as bubbles are inflated and burst there will be bizarre gains and losses on all sides.

One thing is certain: like the very best friendship cakes, there can be no unmixing of the ingredients.

Interesting times for all.

In the last 8 months, I've read a lot of great indie pubbed books. I only choose ones that have compelling covers, some good reviews and that have a killer premise. And I made sure that the first novel that I published this way, was flawless, a page-turner, and written well. I loved that I could art direct it, and illustrate it, as I am also a published illustrator.
Is self publishing a bubble? No. Will the cream rise to the top. Yes. The filters will be online indie publishers and collectives that promote only the best of the genres they like.

I agree completely. All those people frequenting used bookstores and taking home sacks of books? They're turning to cheaper ebooks now and still buying, still reading. Most of us can read more than we can afford.

I do think the bubble bursting will be that of traditional pubs who are trying to market and price ebooks like print books. You know, the pubs who can only do so many books a year costwise. The ones who once picked and chose the authors to be published.

Two years ago, I saw self-publishing as a last resort, but right about then, I started reading Konrath's blog. In fact, I think I first linked to it from here, so I should be thanking you. Anyway, I don't think there is a bubble. Like any venture, some will succeed and continue, some will find it's not for them and stop writing/publishing.

I've been at it 20 months now, and can't foresee quitting anytime soon. In fact, I'm doing well enough to cut down on my day job hours to part-time.

It's tempting to look at times of rapid change as a "bubble" but what's happening is essentially a technology revolution touching the book industry. Every industry that technology has "touched" hasn't been a bubble - it's been a fundamental change in how business is done. That's what I see happening here.

And I think we're a long ways from done. Self-pub (and the rest of the industry) is still evolving rapidly. 2012 still has many changes ahead of us.

The mother is not only the selfish,she always take care of her child's.

Why did Mary's garden grow? Because she was quite contrary and she uprooted everything that wasn't a silverbell, a cockle shell, or a pretty maid.

Economies are the same way. I think the self epub trend is more of a rush than it is a bubble.

It's new and there IS a lot of profit (insert your definition here) to be had. When the dust settles, the successful will have elbow room and the others will move on to other things.

As someone who works with indie authors, I have to agree that self-publishing isn't going anywhere. Where traditional publishers are reshaping and adjusting with sales numbers declining, our business is thriving. The desire to become an author is a dream for so many that I can't see the self-publishing trend as going away.

Terrific post!

Great post Nathan. I completely agree. One of the biggest things keeping me from buying an e-reader is that I can't then transfer over any books from, say, my e-reader app on my iPod or phone. I understand the need for DRM, but I'm sure there are ways to make things a little more user-friendly.

Also, I've always wished there was a "package deal" system where you could purchase a hard copy and get the e-book for a small additional fee, because I just can't bring myself to give up physical books. Although, from the way things seem to work as you described in your post about e-book costs, maybe that wouldn't be possible.

I agree with sharing among friends and familiy, but a copy of an ebook costs a fractiion of a physical book and it won't break anyone's wallet if they paid for one. And I think that is what the industry tried to achieve with this technology.

I think a file should be able to be read on any type of reader. Books are loaned to other people all the time, and it didn't affect publishers that much, did it?

DRM's worthless. It's strippable in under a minute. A digital watermark which tracks who uploads/downloads is a more viable feature.

Key word: Reasonable.

Agree with all you suggest, including the difficulty of implementing some of it.

Mr D-

But they were loaned one at a time. This is what this provides for. The problem is that digital files can be endlessly reproduced and shared without restrictions in place.

Yeah, Nathan, that occurred to me after I posted. Such is the modern age. I'm still getting used to it.

Nathan, while your suggestions are very reasonable, they're still not going to have any significant effect on ebook piracy and will only end up inconveniencing legitimate customers.

Is "encouraging" a handful of customers to not illegally share an ebook that they've already purchased really making a dent in piracy? Are the people buying and sharing ebooks with friends really the "pirates" the industry wants to be going after?

Steve Jobs was right. DRM doesn't stop piracy. But it does make honest customers pay for it. This is backwards thinking and needs to be thrown out entirely.

Nathan, I love it! iTunes seems to have made this work with a limited number of devices.

I would love to see e-books become interchangeable between nook and kindle with a limited number of devices. Great post!

How is sharing an e-book any different from passing along your paperback? That's why I like the idea of giving it a limited but reasonable number of device allowances.

Hear, hear! Great post. I completely agree.

There needs to be some gatekeeping function, but it should be flexible enough to protect the seller while still providing real ownership to the purchaser.

I like your solutions here.

Immediately after this item by Nathan, my feed reader had an article on how to put iBooks on a Kindle by cracking the DRM. What DRM is doing is inconveniencing the folks who would never steal the book but who want to be able to transfer it to a new device. I agree that a watermark is probably a better deterrent.

Ahhh, thank you. I've always had issues with the fact that books aren't tradeable between devices. I feel like once you own a book, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. The lending option was big when Nook first came out for that reason.

I also agree with Jory on the Package-deal bit. When I travel, I want to be able to take my favorite books with me on my Nook, but I hate the idea of having to rebuy them. My copy is perfectly good. It's just not digital.

When I am on the Barnes and Noble website, too, sometimes it amazes me the price of their ebooks vs. their regular books. They average around $9.99, but in some cases, that's more expensive than the actual book....

I think there's just some bugs still in the ebook system.

One problem with lending an ebook "just like a regular book" is that doing the former requires virtually no effort, while doing the latter requires that the two parties meet, or at least that one of them go to the post office.

So many readers of ebooks already expect to get books for free that you wonder how writers will ever be able to support themselves in the future (as hard as it is now).

Perhaps the solution is to keep one's library on the digital cloud somewhere, able to transfer it to different devices, or permanently to someone else's cloud-library.

leah-

How are honest customers punished by DRM? Still wondering about that.

I just don't believe a digital file should be shared endlessly. I mean, I do you think people should be able to print a million copies of Harry Potter and pass those around to everyone they know?

Carmen-

But that's the point of this post. People shouldn't have to crack DRM to transfer their e-books. Otherwise I don't see why you would even need to crack DRM.

Interesting ideas toward finding middle-ground on the DRM question ... not one in which middle-grounds are very popular positions.

I'm reminded of some of what Adam Gopnik wrote in the 30 Jan issue of The New Yorker, in reference to more serious crimes than copyright violation (emphasis is mine):

And, in a virtuous cycle, the decreased prevalence of crime fuels a decrease in the prevalence of crime. When your friends are no longer doing street robberies, you’re less likely to do them. Zimring said, in a recent interview, “Remember, nobody ever made a living mugging. There’s no minimum wage in violent crime.” In a sense, he argues, it’s recreational, part of a life style: “Crime is a routine behavior; it’s a thing people do when they get used to doing it.” And therein lies its essential fragility. Crime ends as a result of “cyclical forces operating on situational and contingent things rather than from finding deeply motivated essential linkages.” Conservatives don’t like this view because it shows that being tough doesn’t help; liberals don’t like it because apparently being nice doesn’t help, either. Curbing crime does not depend on reversing social pathologies or alleviating social grievances; it depends on erecting small, annoying barriers to entry.

(From Adam Gopnik, The Caging of America, The New Yorker, 30 Jan 2012.)

Books should be able to be lent more than once. Honestly, I share most of my physical books 3-4 times - with siblings, good friends, etc. Only being able to share them once is going to make me less likely to share them at all.

I remember something my dad said: "locks are for honest people." The more barriers (locks) we have in place the more inconvenient it is to pirate. Thieves will always be thieves and a culture of entitlement will always breed a significant number of folks ready to exploit an easy mark. At a certain point, the level of security required to protect something as basic as creative properties becomes a study in the inane and ridiculous.

I'm just dipping my toe into the waters of self publishing, and I made the conscious choice to not DRM my title. I have the luxury of a day job, and maybe that makes the difference -- I'm not depending on my writing for a living -- but I don't believe anyone is served by assuming that my customers are criminals, and by essentially locking my story into whatever the technology is at the time. DRM effectively puts an expiration date on my work, by ensuring that some kind of upgrade cycle it going to be required for the words to migrate to the successors to todays e-readers.

Besides, as a fledgling author, I want people to read my book. If someone discovers my work through less-than-honest means and also finds out that they like it, then I've got a Reader, the most valuable part of this transaction. DRM does not prevent piracy, but I can see it as a hindrance to discovery.

"Here's the thing that the anti-DRM crowd rarely adequately acknowledges: It's way too easy to e-mail your 1,000 closest friends a copy of a non-DRM e-book."

I hear this argument a lot and my response is always the same: Who does this? Who is out there emailing thousands of people books? I've never randomly gotten an email from someone with a book attached. It's nonsensical. If someone is out there emailing books to thousands of people, my guess is they'd quickly find their emails sent to the spam folder because who wants random books? And who reads a book that's emailed to them along with thousands of other people? How can that many people get together and have the same taste in books?

The reality is most people may email a book to a friend or two, which is no different than lending.

I don't think it's fair to restrict a book to 6 devices. Between myself and my husband we already have 5 registered Kindles ( a Fire each, an e-ink each, and a keyboard for me). I like being able to sync between them. If we decided to get each of his 3 kids a Kindle, that takes us to 8. I know families with 11 kids, do they just need to pick their 6 favorite kids to get e-readers?

DRM does nothing to stop piracy and just inconveniences legitimate customers, period. If anything, it encourages pirating. It's like telling a kid they can't do something, it just makes them want to do it even if they had no desire to before.

I have yet to see someone give a real life scenario of how DRM has stopped someone from pirating. If you want to curb pirating, give people your product in the format people want at a reasonable price. It reminds me of this comic from The Oatmeal http://theoatmeal.com/comics/game_of_thrones

anon-

Books, maybe not as often. But I've definitely had albums e-mailed or Dropboxed to me with quite a bit of regularity. As we move toward critical mass with people reading e-books it will only get more common.

I think the key with DRM isn't to ignore it but to make it unobtrusive and fair. The Game of Thrones example is way different - that's HBO's decision to make it only available via a single distribution channel. It has nothing to do with DRM.

I think you've come up with a pretty fair system, but I wonder how do-able it is. Partly because of all the programming involved, and partly because I can't see Amazon cooperating.

Out of curiosity, a side-question: does anyone know how much money the book publishing industry is worth nowadays? Is it comparable to the music industry? My guess is not - which would beg the question of whether the effort (and money) necessary to come up with a better DRM system would be worth it, in the eyes of those burdened with the cost of doing so.

"leah-

How are honest customers punished by DRM? Still wondering about that.

I just don't believe a digital file should be shared endlessly. I mean, I do you think people should be able to print a million copies of Harry Potter and pass those around to everyone they know?"

I believe you answered the question yourself below:

"But that's the point of this post. People shouldn't have to crack DRM to transfer their e-books. Otherwise I don't see why you would even need to crack DRM."

People are being inconvenienced at this very moment due to DRM (which would certainly lessen if the changes you've described were to come into play).

On one hand, I understand the fear that books will go the way of images and music, whereby once they've been digitized and uploaded there's really little that can be done to prevent the product from being duplicated and shared over and over again. But on the other hand, locking users into one device for the rest of their lives isn't practical either. I've already downloaded several e-books for class from Google Books. While a Kindle or a Nook sounds tempting, there's no way I'm going to re-purchase all of these class materials if they do not transfer over. The universal file format issue is just so different than what it was like for music. And unfortunately I don't think the big guy (Amazon) really has any incentive to make their materials transferable to any other device.

DRM is meant to stop piracy. I brought up the Game of Thrones example to show that people in general don't pirate...unless they can't get the content they want the way they want it at a reasonable price.

The answer to piracy isn't DRM, it's making the product available in the format consumers want at a price consumers want. While there will always be people who pirate because it's what they do, the rest of the people who pirate do it because they feel the price is too high or they can't get the content the way they want it, which is why the Game of Thrones example is relevant. If publishers made their books available at reasonable prices and made it available on the platform I want (in this case giving up DRM so I can use it on whatever platform I want) then there would be no need or reason to pirate. Yes, piracy would still happen because some people are just jerks and nothing is going to stop them, but for the vast majority of people they would no longer have a desire to pirate or strip DRM (which is just as illegal as pirating).

For the person who asked how DRM hurts legitimate customers I have an example. A friend of mine gave me a B&N gift card. I read on a Kindle. With DRM that gift card is now useless to me. However, since there are some publishers and authors smart enough to not mess with this DRM nonsense, I bought their books and converted them for my Kindle :).

With all the bookstores we've seen go out of business, it's not out of this world to think that there might not be a B&N 5 years from now. For people who bought into the Nook and bought all their books through B&N, they would be out all the money they spent on ebooks (except for the non-DRM ones that they could transfer to another reader once their now defunct Nook dies). That scenario can happen with any e-reader and any company.

Since DRM and format is controlled by retailers, I don't see there ever being a way to make it unobtrusive. There's no uniformity in the ebook world and retailers want it that way. Amazon doesn't want you buying your ebooks from B&N and putting them on your Kindle and vice versa. There's no incentive for them.

For the most part, I think that as we've moved online and to everything being digital companies like to point their finger at pirates and say piracy is the problem because it's easier than changing the way they do business.

Piracy has been around as long as books have and it hasn't stopped publishers. I guess my point is that instead of focusing on something you can't control (piracy) and putting resources into something that at best is a placebo for publishers and at worst is a deterrent to people buying their books (DRM), publishers should be focusing on what they can control: the quality of their product.

anon-

I don't think anyone really believes DRM stops piracy. Anyone who wants to pirate is going to pirate. DRM isn't going to stop that. As Robert alluded to above with the locks analogy, DRM is about keeping honest people honest.

As we've seen from things like Napster, if pirating is way easier and way cheaper than buying honestly, people are going to do that. If it's really easy for someone to e-mail the Harry Potter books to five of their friends, they're going to do that. But that casual sharing of a digital file can snowball.

DRM is a speedbump, not a barricade. I think you're saying it's obtrusive right now, and I agree with you. What I'm saying is that it could be better if the steps in the post were taken.

Great ideas, Nathan. The six-device rule is a real winner to me.

Given that the solutions you propose, while all entirely reasonable, would be difficult to implement, I wonder if keeping the prices low, but still restricting lending, is a workable idea.

I've seen so many self-pubbed authors see more success than they ever thought possible, simply because they can price their ebooks at $.99-3.99. Readers looking for a romance or a murder mystery are just as likely to find a good book by purchasing a self-pub with a lot of good reviews as they are by going with traditionally published books, and what they find is cheaper by far.

Selling Tina Fey's memoir for anything more than about $5 (for the ebook) AND restricting lending amounts to telling people to go ahead and steal it. And yet, *Bossypants* is currently $12.99, lending not enabled, and Amazon is claiming that purchasing it is a "savings" of $14.00 (compared to the print edition).

I'd rather pay less and NOT lend it than pay more and maybe lend it.

Thoughts?

Oooh. I love this. You are brilliant. Especially being able to send it to a friend.

My opinion--I should be able to use my purchased book on any device that I choose. I feel that Steam (electronic distributor of computer games) handles this well. Steam lets me download my games onto as many computers as I want, but I can only be using Steam games on one of those computers at a time. When I log into my Steam account on a second computer, it automatically logs me out on the first. I have no objection. That's fair.

Another thing I like about Steam is that if my internet connection is down and it can't validate my account, it chooses to trust me and let me play anyway (it syncs up and validates later, when the connection is back online). A little trust goes a long way towards building goodwill.

This is probably the most reasonable solution I've seen to the DRM problem, and one publishers should consider. I have a Kindle, and while I'm quite happy with it, the idea that I won't be able to transfer my books to another platform should I choose to get a Nook or other device when my Kindle dies someday is quite concerning. And I've already had several moments where I want to loan an ebook to someone only to remember that I can't! Other than your suggestions, I want ebooks to become easier to lend between libraries as well. We're able to borrow physical books from around the world, and it doesn't make sense that we can't borrow an ebook as well.

Tangential to the blog posting...

The issue of lending to friends and family will probably be fading away on its own. A number of people I know have already "traded up" their e-readers and have an older one. They just load the e-book(s) to be lent on the old unit and loan the unit.

With e-reader prices rapidly dropping, it probably won't be long until most people can afford to buy an additional unit for lending purposes if they do much lending.

All of the DRM systems permit at least six devices to share an e-book, so that should pretty well handle the "legit" lending needs. At the same time, it doesn't promote the Lendle/eBookFling lending to people you never even heard of.

The problem with DRM is that you immediately hand the pirates the better product. No matter how reasonable your restrictions are, their version has none, and it's free.

The games industry has been demonstrating recently that a significant number of people will choose to support an artist whose work they enjoy, even if they can pirate it, especially if that artist steps forward as a real person, rather than a faceless corporation.

I think the question is how do you make money on something that is free or can be easily "stolen"?

Purists will find this hathotic, but I think the answer is to inject each ebook with advertising.

This could range from "product placement" in the story to a popup that says, "Drink more Cola! Click to turn page...!"

Personally, I think Micropayments are a much better solution for most of us, but the free options need to be available because as such as people will steal anything; there will always those that want something for "free".

I think all can be possible. :-)

I'd be happy to sign your suggestions. I guess ideally, I'd like to add the odd friend, but then we get to that blurry borderline of how many that could be. But give an ebook away permanently may be that working compromise. And, I refuse to buy a kindle because of the restraints.

Nathan, I like the idea behind your system, but it seems technological and politically challenging at best. Every publisher would need to agree to a single, interchangeable format, much like MP3s have become, and then there would need to be a central registrar for the DRM codes. Amazon is not going to sell books that can be read on competing readers without using an Amazon app that ties the reader into the Amazon store. Their entire business model is based on selling you a reader at a loss so you'll not only buy ePubs from them, but everything else.

Looking at the mess of patent lawsuits in the mobile field, where patents that are vital to interoperability are now being used as weapons (despite agreements against that), its unlikely the industry would align around a single DRM registrar.

London-

I agree, though it also seems like there could be an opening for something like Steam (as one of the Anon mentions) where publishers or a third party band together to create a system that is fair and works.

What's kind of amazing about the landscape at the moment is that because of the agency model e-booksellers aren't competing on price (e-books have to cost the same), they're competing on convenience and user experience. Amazon's closed system is a weakness that others haven't yet been able to exploit. It sure seems like a big opportunity if others can match the Kindle app on usability.

I think, since ebooks are generally much cheaper than paper books, that less maneuverability is a fair tradeoff. You pay less, you can't share as much. If you want to share it with someone else, buy it for them. Or be very convincing and entice them to buy it for themselves. Oral book reviews! See? Good for the industry. More sales, more book talk.

Of course, I'm a Paperite, so everyone should probably ignore me.

Both your article and the one you referenced did not explain what DRM was in any way. I had to look it up.

I think that would have been worth a sentence, if not a paragraph, and this post was sorely lacking because of this oversight.

Samuel-

No?

"those digital pesky restrictions that, among other things, prevent you from easily taking your Kindle book collection over to a Nook."

Anon has mentioned the issue of a reasonable price several times. I believe this is the core issue. Publishers and booksellers ought to realize that the reasonableness of the price is in the eye of the customer. This means that the producer cannot simply add up his costs, add a profit, and arrive at what is to be charged.

In the old days we all subscribed to a daily newspaper. Everyone on the block got their own paper. There was no pirating. But I'm certain that if the publisher added up his costs and concluded that he had to charge $20 for each issue, many neighbors would band together to share one subscription and pass the paper around. No one even considered sharing a newspaper, but make it expensive enough, relative to what seems reasonable, and it will be shared.

In the early days of software, programs that we now buy for twenty or thirty dollars cost three or four hundred dollars. At the latter prices, friends often banded together to buy a program and shared it. But this practice stopped being a significant problem, at least in the US, when the developers dropped the price. At the lower price there was enough incremental benefit, including the satisfaction of doing the right thing, for each customer to buy his own.

As long as publishers believe that, after avoiding the costs of printing, shipping, warehousing, and returning, they can still charge anywhere from 25% to 100% of the cost of a paper book, pirating will be an issue. It doesn't take much time on an online bookseller's website to learn that ebooks are often offered for sale at a higher price than the mass market paperback version … the mass market paperback version that must be printed, shipped in heavy boxes, and stored.

I wonder if manufacturers of televisions sat around trying to justify charging a thousand dollars for a TV when technology had allowed TVs to be profitably sold for a couple of hundred?

You'd be amazed how quickly those "six devices" go, even between two people, in a multi-device household...

My iphone. My husband's iphone.
My kindle. My husband's kindle.
My macbook. My husband's macbook.

Which leaves no space for the desktop computer we use as a media server... Not to mention our iPads. Or any Windows laptops we might need to use for, say, work.

Or any devices we replace without remembering to de-authorize our entire media catalogue, which can be really time-consuming, considering there's DRM from Amazon, Apple, Steam and goodness knows how many other DRM'd files. You'd think just deleting the files would be good enough, but nope, that's just plain not how it works.

Which is why, frankly, despite actually loving to put money into the hands of artists and writers, we *frequently* end up pirating content. Why? Because we can't USE the content we've purchased legally -- and once that happens, we're never going to purchase your content again. Anyone remember those Sony CDs with the rootkit installs? Yeah. No thanks.

Whether you're a fan of DRM or not, you've gotta admit that keeping people from being able to, say, play a video they've PURCHASED (oops, wrong region! oops, too many devices authorized! oops, wrong OS! oops, you haven't installed our special DRM-player!) is just plain ridiculous.

Sparrow-

I don't know, have to say I'm not really swayed by that and don't think it's a justification for piracy. If you're really sharing across that many devices you're getting way, way more use and portability out of a digital file than you would plausibly get out of a physical copy. So does the fact that you can't instantly share a physical book across two locations with your husband mean you steal the second book?

I get that DRM can be annoying in many cases, but I also think there has to be a reasonable standard on the part of readers too. Maybe six isn't quite enough, but I don't think we should all just run out and pirate because we can't sync across every device under the sun at the same time.

I was doing some research on what Aussie publishers charge for an ebook and found there were major differences in prices due to format. Apple ibooks was consistently $6 above Kindle. Some publishers had an ebook out on ibooks, others didn't, nearly all had their ebooks on Amazon's Kindle. Very few publishers placed them on Google ebooks. It's all a bit of a mess really.

I'm tech challenged, admittedly. But I buy all e-books on Kobo and have epub. I have three e-reading devices and Kobo apps for all...plus my PC. I can sync my Kobo library to all devices, and not all are Kobo devices. What I'm trying to say, and not well, is that I can read e-books on more than one device. Maybe you are talking about Amazon? Or Apple products? And I buy everything. I don't pirate.

One way DRM hurts honest people is when those honest people have disabilities such as visual impairments that require then to break the digital locks if they are to run the book through their reader software. Perhaps you intended this to be covered under "the right to transfer your library," but I think it's important to note the was DRM, as currently implemented, generally renders print media quite inaccessible.

My other note is that DRM is dangerous when it, rather than copyright violation, becomes the focus of discussion, especially in legal circles. The talk of writing DRM protections into copyright law is as ludicrous as passing a law that prohibits breaking physical locks. It creates a false sense of faith in the wrong thing (technological protections) that eliminates the perceived need to have copyright policy that works well.

Matthew-

If I were in charge a major publisher I'd do a brand awareness survey of the imprints and only keep the ones with sufficient recognition. Then I'd rebrand the others "Major Publisher Children's Books, Major Publisher Business, Major Publisher Wellness," etc. etc.

Doug. Yes, the author is the brand and sometimes the title / franchise (Such as Star Wars, Star Trek, StarCraft, Mass Effect, etc, etc... so what you can't connect to one specific author.). But I never heard that the brand would be the publisher and only the publisher as they love to advertise it sometimes.

I have mixed feelings about this. I think that, if anything, publishers don't have enough cachet. Readers I've talked to also don't know/don't care who publishes a book. They'll look at the quality of the cover, maybe the design inside, but they're not going to assume that a Big 6 has more cachet than a small press. I think they figure if it made it on a bookshelf and the cover/printing looks decent, it's not complete amateur hour. The only publisher that I've seen that does active branding is Harlequin, often emphasizing line recognition over individual author. I think some small publishers might be able to use branding to their advantage, but it's a weird issue.

That makes sense.

Such is the pain of self-publishers. :(

I'm not a social butterfly or anything, but for all the people I know, they don't read anything that doesn't have a major publisher behind it. It's not that people will recognize all the names of a publisher and their imprints, but the fact that the imprints/publisher exist behind a book is enough for the average reader. Again, it's yet another wall self-publishers have to try to break down.

You're right, and Michelle is right.

It's indeed "ugly," but true. One of the first questions in many contests is "name of publisher." It even, I suspect though don't know for certain, is indicated in the ISBN number of a book.

And I'll admit, as a writer, I would still prefer to have the cachet of a "known" publisher to help attract readers.

That said, many small imprints were around--far more than now--during the literary flowering between WWI and WWII, as I mentioned in another post. Perhaps that's what will happen again--and readers will have to rely more on reviewers than publishers or even an imprint's cachet to guide them to great writing?

And then, as in the past, writers will have to pay a reviewer (as the publishers have)...and it all gets ugly again...

Too true. The imprints mean nothing to me, but the name of a major publisher means something.

To a certain extent, Nathan, I'd agree with your suggestion of identifying which imprint brands should be retained and which should be dumped.

But based upon the excellent comments many have made, I'd expect that few imprints have sufficient brand awareness to make such a survey reliable.

Publisher brands have never really been marketed as consumer brands. Authors have always been the forefront, and lacking any branding effort by publishers, consumers have had to rely on their familiarity with authors rather than publishers.

Since the cost of developing a brand is relatively low for something as highly targeted and personal as fiction, it would be better for publishers to work on developing communities of loyal author fans... then work on drawing those communities together under the imprint brand.

GEORGE: (rage) Oh, it's got cachet, baby! It's got cachet up the
yin-yang!
http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheSeven.html

Nathan -

I get what you're saying. But doesn't the majority of the buying population continue to shop in bookstores or check out books from libraries? eBooks are still a smaller percentage in the grand picture.

As for online sales & self-pub - sure, branding might make a difference. I always look at a book a little harder if I know it came through Harper Teen.

Some of us indies also have our own publishing imprints (I belong to DarkSide Publishing). We do hope to snag readers through brand recognition. All of our titles are YA or MG, but they run the gamut in genres.

So maybe we're doing what you suggest traditional publishers should do? Consolidate. Create recognition through quality offerings. Make readers aware not just one author, but the whole body of work put through the publisher. That's what we hope for.

I just had to giggle for a moment when I realized you might be suggesting the same model for traditional publishers. Good thing our members have a strong background in business and marketing, not just in writing and editing.

By the way, can I say that your blog continues to be one of my favorites? It's the only one I regularly read. Even though I'm self-pub, I seek you out more regularly than I do Konrath (*gasp* Blasphemy!). :D

Megg Jensen

Oh, and pre-curated books in libraries & bookstores is a whole other blog post, my friend.

Barnes & Noble is paid for shelf-space. That's not curation. That's retail advertising space. Smaller, indie bookstores pride themselves on connecting readers with local authors (usually pubbed very small presses). I know, I used to work at one of those stores.

How many librarians read every book they put in circulation? Not many. I know some of who do, and they take great pride in their collection. Most (again, not ALL) libraries are put together simply through bestseller lists and catalog choices.

Megg

Oh, and the use of 'my friend' wasn't mean to be condescending. I really do think you're a cool guy. :D

(shutting up now....)

Megg

Great post, Nathan. Another thing I've noticed is that when I said I was published by Shadow Mountain (an independent based out of Utah) it was hard to get much respect when it came to scheduling school events, libraries, conferences, etc.

Just in the last month, since I signed a book deal with Harper Collins, I've had those same people coming to me.

It's a tough world no matter what path you take. But being able to mention you are with a large publisher definitely makes it a little easier.

"So maybe we're doing what you suggest traditional publishers should do? Consolidate. Create recognition through quality offerings. Make readers aware not just one author, but the whole body of work put through the publisher. That's what we hope for." - Megg Jensen

That's exactly what I'm suggesting publishers should do to develop a consumer brand.

Doug mentioned Baen Books, and it is an excellent example. Looking for more of David Drake's "Lt. Leary" series, I found Elizabeth Moon and David Weber through Baen's website. I've never paid attention to publisher brand before, but when I'm in the mood for space opera, I check Baen's web site first. My expectation is that Baen authors put out good product, especially when I discovered that Baen publishes Asimov, Heinlein, and several other authors I like.

The same is true for publishers with a diverisifed portfolio. Hunting my local library for more Horatio Hornblower style naval fiction, I stumbled across Robert Macomber's series set in Civil War Florida. Having learned something new about consulting publisher websites with Baen, I checked out Pineapple Press and bought a history of the Florida Keys and a variety of Florida non-fiction.

Both Baen and Pineapple Press are now my "go to" sites along with Amazon, all because I have a certain expectation of what those publisher brands will deliver.

When the world's biggest booksellers are not bothering to sort or prominently label books based on publisher at the point of sale--their web sites--it has a huge impact on consumer awareness. Or in this case, lack thereof.

I see no evidence that most readers can distinguish between publishers at any grain finer than self-pubbed vs. not-self-pubbed (and even that, not often). The indie/micro/university/e-presses, once differentiated by their physical distribution limitations as compared to the Big Six, are now on even footing in the digital marketplace.

I completely agree with Nathan that large publishers *should* capitalize on cachet to distinguish themselves in this crowded bazaar. And I don't think that will happen by de-emphasizing imprints, but rather emphasizing the connection with their parent publishers: "Grand Central (An Imprint of Hachette Book Group)" or "Minotaur (St. Martin's/MacMillan)" should be prominently displayed in product metadata. Currently, Amazon just lists the imprint itself.

The irony is the dissociation of a specialized imprint with its parent press was once a selling point, a means of distinguishing itself as an independent voice separate from its corporate backing, but now the reverse may be more desirable: that corporate backing is a guarantor of quality control.

Cool discussion and post! Love the differing opinions.

In terms of your recommendation that publishers drop imprints to strengthen their brand name - absolutely!! I shudder to speculate on the internal politics that would trigger, but I agree that it would be absolutely the right move.

In terms of whether consumers care about publisher names, I think it's speculative at this point, and it would be good to have some actual research on this. Otherwise, we could go back and forth, but either side could be right.

My personal speculation falls in the middle. Excluding writers and insiders who are part of the publishing culture, for the general public, my speculation is that this is a class issue. I suspect that the upper class and upper-middle class care about publishing cachet, since those classes tend to be trained to recognize cachet.

The cachet given to a publishing label has not been earned through general advertising, but is instead is a concept of "expert elitism". That will appeal much more to the upper classes.

If publishers want to create brand recognition in other classes, they need to advertise in a way that will appeal to them. And, imho, they should have started doing that years ago, but they didn't because they prefer their elitist status, to be quite frank.

So, the above is speculative, and a gross generalization, individuals within any class will be individuals and I truly hope I'm not offending anyone other than publishers who prefer to remain elite. I'm okay with offending them.

Thanks so much for the fascinating topic, Nathan!

Consumers need to get over the whole brand thing and learn to step outside their comfort zone. They might be pleasantly surprised.

I see this all the time with Romance and I wonder. It's so bad it's hard to tell who's publishing anything nowadays.

And, like you said, I prefer buying what I know, not what I don't know. I've been taken several times on books that were poorly written and I won't do it again. I'd rather stick with the "brand" I know.

"And, like you said, I prefer buying what I know, not what I don't know. I've been taken several times on books that were poorly written and I won't do it again. I'd rather stick with the "brand" I know." - Anonymous

Ahh... rem acu tetigisti. You have touched the matter with a needle.

That is the basis of brand loyalty. It gives a marketer leverage to launch a new product, to support a premium price, to raise barriers to competition, and to build intangible value in the company.

At present and in general there really isn't any such thing as publisher brand - not in the way brand is used to grow a publisher's market share or revenues.

But building brand loyalty is a two-way street. For long term success, publishers must deliver a consistent experience that their stable of authors are better.

Regarding ebooks, readers determine quality in authors, regardless of if they have a publisher. You just have to look at how many books the author has out, the quality of the cover designs, the number of reviews they get and the ratings they get.

In this way, authors develop their own brand, so even an author without a traditional publisher can have a rep that is better than the traditionally published.

Readers certainly won't balk at buying a lauded indie author, just because they have no real publisher behind them.

Good point.

The experiment of asking 100 people to name a major publisher is misleading. There is a difference between being able to name a publisher by heart and choosing between a traditionally published book and a self published book.

Given that choice, all other things being equal, more people will choose the traditionally published book. They may not know the names of the publishers by heart but they'll recognize the name when they see it and the name will remind them (perhaps subconsciously) of previously published quality books.

You're right. It seems like the big publishers are making a mistake. If brand loyalty is a factor then they should be careful not to sabotage it.

As many people have said, I think it all depends. In the end, I think I agree with Nathan in the whole keep imprints that are popular but relabel the ones that aren't as Major Publisher's Kids Books. For example, I've been in love with Tor books since I was 11. Go back and time and ask my 11 year old self who my favorite publishers are, I would've said "Scholastic and Tor." But what seventh grade me didn't know was that Tor is only an imprint. I didn't know until I started researching publishers in college that Tor was an imprint of Tom Doherty.

Tor--by labeling books with the imprint--has brought authors to my attention. It's a brand that I trust. Re-label the books "Tom Doherty" and I no longer associate it with the Wheel of Time, Sara Douglass, John Scalzi, David Weber, and the dozens of other authors that I've picked up because they were Tor books.

And that was as a teenage consumer. I think we need to give the average population more credit. When people find a brand they love, they stick with it. Tor is my brand.

While I agree with those who've pointed out that readers don't walk into a bookstore and ask themselves, "Gee, I think I'm in the mood for something from Scholastic this afternoon," brand recognition does go a long way for a debut novelist. And since that's what most of us are trying to become, we should care about this more than anyone.

Consider two debut novelists. One went the traditional publishing route, and her agent ended up selling her novel to Scholastic (or one of its many imprints). The other decided to self-publish.

In conversations with friends and family - and, hopefully, random acquaintances - Debut Novelist #1 can tell people Scholastic is publishing her novel. (And even if that doesn't ring any bells, she can add, "The same company who published Harry Potter and The Hunger Games.") Instant credibility.

Debut Novelist #2 is going to have to explain what self-publishing is and how that works - and maybe even why one of the Big Six DIDN'T publish her novel. And while others might respect her go-get-'em attitude, that explanation isn't going to lend itself to instant credibility.

So yes, I have to agree with Nathan that publishers aren't doing themselves any favors by slice-and-dicing their household names into unrecognizable bits. Heck, I've been following this industry pretty closely for more than three years now, and I'm only just starting to recognize certain imprints and remember which publisher they go with. Not the best way to build your brand.

I think the publisher only matters (at least for me) when looking for new authors online.

The reason I look for a recognizable publisher: it means that more than one person, someone other than the author, someone who works in the publishing industry, has read the book and thinks it's good. As a slush reader for a SF/F magazine, I read a lot of terrible stories. The ones that get through me, and through editor, are usually pretty good because we weed out the bad stuff. Maybe you don't like the stories we picked, but believe me, there's a lot worse out there.

Granted, I've read some books from publishers that I hated. Books that I thought were poorly written. But on the whole, they're high quality.

Anybody, and I mean anybody, can publish a book on Amazon these days. A book that no one but them has read or edited. Maybe it's the first thing they've ever written. Maybe it's some of these writers who sent me their terrible stories, but they think they're publishable. And just maybe, they can get 200 of their best friends to give it a 5-star rating.

THAT'S what scares me about self-publishing.

Speaking as a reader and buyer of books, I disagree that who the publisher is or the imprint of the publishers is that important in selling books.

I buy a lot of books both fiction and nonfiction. I don't have to worry about weeding out the self-published books, because I shop in brick and mortar bookstores not Amazon. I rarely buy books from Amazon because I hate trying to browse through their site. It's time consuming and frustrating when one only wants to browse. If I browse at a brick and mortar bookstore then I come across books that I never would have encountered on Amazon. Books that I wasn't aware that I was looking for and wanting to read by authors that I had never heard of. It's like a treasure hunt and I always come away with an armful of treasure.

I also borrow books from the library. I use the card catalog to get me in the general vicinity of what I am interested in and then I browse the shelfs. And find books that I didn't know that I wanted to read by authors that I have never heard of.

The number of times the publisher has influenced my buying decision is almost never. I think there was a Jane Austen book that I bought several years ago because it was published by Penguin classic, but that is a rare exception.

The author is the brand. When I buy a book written by one of my favorite authors, I know what kind of book that I am getting. The author can switch publishers and I couldn't care less.

I try new authors all the time. I'm always on the hunt for new authors to add to my favorites list. Because the ones that are on my list can't write fast enough to fill my need to read. I never use the publisher of a new to me author as the basis for trying their book.

It's only writers who know who the publishers and imprints are. The majority of readers who are not also writers probably couldn't tell you who the big six publishers are. I know a lot of people who read and we never discuss who the best publishers are or "hey, did you see the new release from Penquin?" We talk about authors and specific book titles.

Future... future.... future of agenting and publishing....!!

I've been thinking this for a while, especially since I'm heavily into SFF and publishers are recognized by at least the profilic readers in that genre. I think, though, that this is going to have to be something publishers learn the hard way, and hope the branding will go stronger as they begin to compete more with self-published authors. As more and more of them enter the mix, and assuming it takes a while for the public to become fully trusting of them, they'll start paying more attention to the publisher names as brands and seals of approval.

As I noted in my last blog post, most readers don't care if the book is published by a goat. No one buys "the next Random House". It's authors who are brands.
The Titanic is going down and those in steerage either already jumped off and gone indie or they're dead. First class can still eat caviar, but the ship is still sinking.

You're making a very important point here, Nathan. As much as we'd like the general public to be educated about the self-pub revolution, an awful lot of them aren't. People who get all their reading info from the NYT Book Review, for instance. And people who only buy a few books a year, and once bought a self-pubbed book from that woman at church and it was so awful, they had to sit in the back pew for a year to avoid her.

Also agree on the imprint thing. I recently brought up a book title at a party. "Was it self-published or did they have a real publisher" said Uninformed Person. "It was published by Grand Central," said I. "Not a real publisher like Random House or Little Brown?" said she. "I think Grand Central IS Little, Brown," said I. (Not even sure myself. Is Hachette owned by Little, Brown, or the other way around?)

Uninformed Person shook her head and snorted as if I was trying to pull something on her. Everybody laughed at me. And these are book people. This info isn't on the evening broadcast news, so many older people don't have a clue.

So thank you very much for this post!

Anne-

Yep - Grand Central and Little, Brown are imprints of Hachette.

I agree. Even though I'm somewhat interested in self-publishing I almost never buy self-published books. The fact that a book has been through the traditional process means a lot in terms of the quality, at least to me (and thousands of others).

That name recognition means an awful lot and translate to sales.

I think a lot of people are missing the point- it's not THAT the imprint or even the brand name of the publisher matter right NOW. It's that they COULD matter- these are brand names that we've created and let fall to the background. In the brick and mortar model, this was ok (someone made a very good point about this being because a physical store promotes a feeling of "vetting"). In a digital world, where everyone can just print whatever they want, really taking advantage of a brand and image is one way publishers can really make their mark on the digital front.

This is the first time I've seen a post on this and I agree wholeheartedly. Lots of my friends who don't write, have no idea of some of the imprints I mention. Many people don't unless they're a part of the publishing world in some way and most readers are not.

If a book is good and gets the right marketing, that can make all the difference though, regardless of the name on the spine.

Nevertheless, you've made some valid points. Excellent post and very well put.

Of course people care about authors over publishers, and nobody goes to Amazon and searches for books by Tor.

But they do search by genre, or follow Amazon's recommendations. And when they hit upon an author they've never heard of, the publisher is one of many factors that can go into their decision.

I'd agree that, at the moment, who published a book is a small factor--maybe the smallest. But why should it be that way?

Opinions aside, publishers go through a lot of trouble to choose quality books. If they marketed that fact, and changed the imprint names nobody knows to include the Big 6 name (like Nathan suggested in an earlier comment), it would go a long way towards not just increasing sales, but increasing the cachet that publishers provide.

Imagine a world with TV ads for Random House, where bookstores set up a display just for Tor books, where publishers' cachet was so strong they could sell books directly from their websites (and people would actually go there to look for them!).

It sounds almost ridiculous, but I don't see why it couldn't happen. What's the point of having a business name if nobody knows it?

Well, I look for certain publishers when I buy. I know Piatkus is going to put out something I'll enjoy, because I've liked pretty much everything they've done so far... and I'll try a new book based on the strength of their brand. (Edgy, hot, a little dark...)

I buy Orbit for Sci-fi and Fantasy and I know what I'm getting... (a little more bloodthirstiness than say, HC).

I could name a few others, but you get the gist.

I realise a lot of you are arguing that no one has bought using publisher style as a guide previously, and in your experience that may be true. I personally do, and I know others who do, so it can't be that uncommon.

Regardless, the point that Nathan makes so well is that going forward, in a market under deluge, people ARE going to start looking more towards publishers for the best work available. And Nathan's point is a smart one... publishers should be building an identifiable brand for purchasers.

(And by the way, as writers, it pays to be aware of an imprint or publishers style. When you get to the talking through submission stage with your agent, it pays to be aware of the market.)

Well, I look for certain publishers when I buy. I know Piatkus is going to put out something I'll enjoy, because I've liked pretty much everything they've done so far... and I'll try a new book based on the strength of their brand. (Edgy, hot, a little dark...)

I buy Orbit for Sci-fi and Fantasy and I know what I'm getting... (a little more bloodthirstiness than say, HC).

I could name a few others, but you get the gist.

I realise a lot of you are arguing that no one has bought using publisher style as a guide previously, and in your experience that may be true. I personally do, and I know others who do, so it can't be that uncommon.

Regardless, the point that Nathan makes so well is that going forward, in a market under deluge, people ARE going to start looking more towards publishers for the best work available. And Nathan's point is a smart one... publishers should be building an identifiable brand for purchasers.

(And by the way, as writers, it pays to be aware of an imprint or publishers style. When you get to the talking through submission stage with your agent, it pays to be aware of the market.)

A lot of the imprints are left over from large publishers buying small ones. The offices and staff are long gone, and only the imprint remains.

Look at british comics in the 70's and 80's - the arrival of cheap home computers destroyed the market, and mergers were taking place every month. A larger comic would add 'and [insert smaller name]' to their masthead for about 12 months, and after that it would quietly vanish.

If the title of the imprint is all you have left after you've bought out a competitor, you can bet publishers are going to use it as long as possible.

@Mira - I think you're spot on. There's something disturbingly class-based when it comes to the idea of building cachet by publishing imprint.

To put it bluntly, the beauty of the book comes down to the writing and the editing. These two are in themselves an inexact science; marketing, cover design, style etc are just as inexact in targeting reader markets, if not more so.

To imply that, somehow, quality can be perpetually guaranteed by a singular publishing house for any particular genre of books they represent, thereby lending cachet to the books they put out, significantly downplays I think the often experimental nature of writing/storytelling (and editing to a lesser extent), not to mention the changing tastes of readers, and deifies the nature of the publishing house as something beyond a business selling/distributing books for profit.

How to associate quality only with particular 'brands' of publishing houses when those same companies are essentially people who are unable in themselves to predict what readers want to read or what readers consider 'quality' with any accuracy anyway?

If there really is a need for cachet as a filter system, better to outsource cover design and marketing while having 'editing houses' specifically imbued with their own cachet. Knowing the pesonal editing style applied to a book would be more telling of the book's quality than knowing who marketed it, who did the cover design, who distributed it and so on (ie, the 'whole package' the trad publishers are assumed to be).

The only integral service publishers provided to writers (apart from distribution) has always been editing. Distribution is now becoming democratised.
I'm beginning to think more editors need to form companies of their own to build the quality of (and profits associated with) editing. There is a goldmine of quality-centred commercial enterprise waiting to erupt for editors. More so than writers or publishing houses, I sometimes think. I know that if I were a reader looking for quality goods, I'd probably pay more attention to 'editing' brands than 'publishing' brands, if that makes any sense...

p.s. btw, I'm one of those readers who actually pays some attention to imprints/publishing houses ie I can pretty much identify who's publishing what. ultimately, that doesn't make me buy the book. Ie, I don't have a favourite imprint after all these yrs lol or even a favourite publishing house. I have favourite authors. And, yes, a favourite editor or two:)

p.s.s. and the basic reason I pay attention to those imprints/publishing houses in the first place is cause I happen to be enmeshed in this industry. Not because I've found them to be a guarantee of quality/style. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Okay, shutting up now:)

Very interesting post!

While I agree with you that many imprints are rather obscure (just look at the spine of the books on your bookshelf -- even those by famous authors have imprints that make me go "Who?"), and that it might detract from the 'prestige', if you will, of being published with a major publisher. However, I think this is more of a problem in the world of online book purchases, as most people I know probably won't be looking at the publisher's name when shopping in a book store. If it made it onto the shelves, it must have passed some sort of quality control, and it must have been published by some pretty big-name publisher.

Provocative post, and I think Nathan's not far off the mark ... in some cases. When I read a lot of scifi, I did notice when a book was published by Tor and when it wasn't. I pay attention if a book of poetry is published by Norton or Greywolf Press. But for most of my general fiction reading today, I pay attention to the author and the plot, not the imprint. And that's after spending a year thinking about publishing and paying attention to everything about the physical book.

That said, publishing and imprints mean a lot in academia. You cannot get tenure in the humanities unless your book is published by a major university press or by a reputable mainstream press such as Norton.

Historically, certain presses have held a certain reputation, good or bad. Minerva Press was known in Britain for publishing cheap gothic novels. But who published Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, arguably the most influential novel of the later 18th century? Samuel Richardson, at his own press. Ultimately, for readers of fiction, it's the book (and author's reputation) that matters, not the publisher's logo on the title page.

Isabella - thanks, but I think we may be saying slightly different things.

Just to clarify - my view - I don't think cachet in and of itself is a class concept, it's more of an image thing which works to market products in a capitalist economy.

I'm saying that publishings' current cachet is based on a "cultural gatekeepers" image, something targeted more toward the upper classes.

They are trying to change that to a "quality gatekeepers" image, but they will need to reach the lower classes to pull that off.

They would need to either do a huge marketing blitz or actually deliver a higher quality product. Since they can't reall control the latter, since the author is the one who decides whether they even approach traditional publishers or go the self-publishing route, they really should go with a marketing blitz. Or do something to entice authors.

I'm not all that hopeful they will do either, based on what seems to be an entrenched inertia, but they might surprise us! Maybe if we tweak their noses enough on posts like these, they'll pay attention!

mira-

I think cachet may be the wrong word because I agree that implies a certain upper-crustiness, but it's not what I mean. It's not about class. Harlequin does not market itself to "upper classes," but it has what I'm calling cachet because it's known for a particular type of book that its authors do very well.

What I mean by cachet is really about trust - you're placing your faith in the publisher (or bookstore or library or restaurant or clothing store) that you're going to get a certain type of product and a certain level of quality. The more consumers trust a brand the more "cachet" (or whatever) the brand has.

I used to think that writers were the heros of the publishing world. Now, I've put away childish toys and see that it's the brand, whether that be publisher, imprint, or author. (Patterson is a franchise, btw.) I don't like that.

I adore the freedom and low cost that's come to self-publishing and have been open-minded esp in romance genre to self-pubbed writers via Kindle. But lately, I've started to weigh in for publishers. Self-pubbed stuff can be SOOOO bad. It's not a given, but a pro editor / agent will weed out the dogs, not to mention zillions of typos and grammatical errors.

Nathan -

I could be wrong, but I think we're using the word in the same way.

I guess what I'm saying is publishing has earned that 'trust' with the upper classes, because publishers do market, in a subtle way, to those classes (trade magazines, prestigious book reviews, etc.) They have not marketed themselves (in any way that I'm aware of) to the middle or lower classes, so those classes don't have brand consciousness or trust with publishers unless they are industy insiders, read niche genres and develop loyalty to a label, or are simply individuals who care about publishers.

This started because I was speculating on why people on this thread have differening opinions about whether the publisher matters. :)

mira-

Still disagree somewhat. What about mass market paperbacks in supermarkets, Harlequin romances, etc.? Not every book is marketed as literary - they're not making TV commercials for Jonathan Franzen, they're making commercials for James Patterson.

I hate time zones. I like to read the week in books before I leave work, because sometimes I'll forget to read it at home, and then I don't see it until Monday.

Nathan, sorry for the delay in my response - my work computer kept crashing at your site, but it's better now.

You raise some really good points! Harlequin is a definite exception, and it helps that they print their names right on the front: "Harlequin Presents"

And James Patterson is a good example of what publishing might do more of, only they could add their name:

James Patterson's Publisher Presents:
James Patterson

That would help increase their visibility.

I also want to quickly add that my discussion about class wasn't really meant to be hyper judgemental, but more explanatory about why publishers may be more visible to some than to others. It was also speculative, and I could be wrong!

I was just having this exact same discussion with my husband, and then I saw your post! He didn't know who TOR books was, even though their little logo is on half of his paperbacks.

I agree with what you're saying, Nathan. In fact, the only thing that keeps me from buying a self-published book is that it can't show that it has been vetted, edited, and proven by slapping the name of a publisher on it.

There is nothing more annoying than purchasing a book and realizing it is poorly written, or worse, poorly edited. The major publishers let us consumers know what has been identified as quality.

Krista, when I tell people I've written novels, they do sometimes ask who published me. I tell them I'm self-published. Then I mention how many I sold in the last year.

That gives me instant credibility, I find :o)

This is a great post, and a great discussion.

I absolutely agree that publishers need to leverage their imprint "brands" and ditch the ones they can't logically promote. I think there's a ton of opportunity for publishers, authors and readers if this is done intelligently.

Imprints and publishers do mean things to booksellers, for example. I experienced this first hand last year when I did my mini-author tour.

Publishers can and should use the advantages that they have and develop coherent brand identities for their imprints, and ditch the ones that don't work.

I think the point is less whether the publisher matters NOW and more that it COULD matter. I don’t think NB is suggesting that people walk into a bookstore thinking “I want a book from Random House” and go looking for only that. But that going forward in a market where anyone can produce content, what publishers will have to offer some assurance of consumer is quality control. It would be, as someone pointed out earlier, the same kind of assurance you would get from a book being in a bookstore- someone read this and thought “People will like it”. Not a guarantee that everyone or even you will like it, but enough that it’s worth testing out. I think it’s a valid point that a recognizable brand name will be crucial to publishers as we move forward.

I think, however, that imprints still have the capacity to be relevant as their own brand/identities. Reading tastes are SO specific and targeted, especially within genre fiction, that imprints (at least some of them) within houses could benefit from being more recognizable.

Nathan,

The title, the cover, and the summary on the back will cause the reader to open the book and read a page of two no matter the imprint.

Imprints are important for niches, much less so for best sellers and the like.

I read mostly SF, and have individual preferences. When I go looking for a book (unspecified, just something to read) I will look first at those with the Baen imprint, because their selection process yields the "flavor" of SF I prefer. If I don't find anything that looks good based on cover, blurb, and the like, the next choice is Tor.

A good presentation will override that, so I'm not wedded to either publisher; I'm playing percentages. When I was traveling a lot, and buying lots of books to while away the hours in motel rooms, it saved time in the selection process. This is what "brand" is all about.

For big sellers and supermarket books, imprint is practically meaningless. That doesn't mean it couldn't be, but at the present state of marketing in the publishing business it is.

Regards,
Ric

The imprint doesn't tell me much when I browse for books to add to my Kindle. Amazon gives the consumer more value-added in the sample and "also boughts" when it comes to making book selections.

Imprint alone can't tell me what type of reader is buying the book ("also boughts") or whether I'll enjoy the writing style (the Amazon sample feature), or whether the book is selling briskly (Amazon ranking).

I agree with Anna Murray: The imprint doesn't tell me much when I browse for books to add to my Kindle. Amazon gives the consumer more value-added in the sample and "also boughts" when it comes to making book selections.

You said that the name of a big publisher "theoretically" carries cachet with readers. Theoretically is correct. Once a reader knows how to search for great fantastic self-published books, the cachet of a big name publisher completely disappears. Recently, I've found more typos in books published by big name publishers than in the self-published books I've purchased, so the big publishers have lost their edge in regard to editing for me, especially since they usually price their eBooks at many times the price of self-published books. Big name publishers are also much less likely to publish edgy books; so many of them end up having cookie-cutter plots, which I find disappointing. I always search an imprint, by the way, so I find it easy to figure out who's the main publisher. That said, I still buy great books by the big name publishers, but it has nothing to do with cachet. I buy many more self-published and indie-published books than books coming out of the big publishing houses these days.

I plead guilty to the above. If I'm standing at the bookstore with two volumes and I know nothing about the authors, the publishing house can make a difference to me.

Nathan,

This is a good point you make but I have a feeling that as we get more into the digital revolution of the book world and publishers start dropping like flies, this name recognition is going to matter less and less.

Any chance you'll share the query for the book that didn't sell? :)

Even if not, do you think there is anything to be learned there, or do you think the query had nothing to do with the result? This one is so good, and knowing something about how you write and your experience, I just have to believe that the adult novel query was pretty fricking good, too.

hey nathan....thanks for this post, and all the posts this week. super informative, as usual. great stuff.

question: are you nervous? how do you feel? will you be watching how much your book sells once it launches? how many books would you like to sell? just curious how you're feeling and what your expectations sa the big day looms....

livia-

I knew pretty much what was going to be in the agreement because I was familiar with Penguin's boilerplate, so there weren't any dealbreakers for me.

anon-

Thanks for your confidence! I won't be sharing that query because I have a thing about sharing projects before they're fully baked. That novel was based on an ambitious idea but I wasn't skilled enough to pull it off.

Mark-

No, not nervous! Sort of dazed, busy and excited. I have been strenuously avoiding expectations of any kind. I'll be keeping tabs on things but I'm not living and dying by how it does. Just having it out there is reward enough.

Hey I've got a question:

How do you track sales, anyway? Do publishers provide numbers? How often?

I have a published play, and I get a statement every six months. That's the only way I know how it's doing.

domino-

Publishers will sometimes provide sales numbers, but for the most part you know official sales from royalty statements. Nowadays though Amazon offers Bookscan numbers through Author Central, which doesn't rack all sales but gives a partial snapshot.

You might have time to be a self-published author, just not a good one, or likely a very successful one. (Well, you might do better than most. This blog gives you a lot of name recognition.)

But I can understand your reasoning, as many of your reasons are mine as well (and, I suspect, this hold true for many of your other readers).

Has your book sold in any other countries? That alone would seem a good reason to have an agent handle your career.

kristin-

It has! It should be published in Spain in the fall.

JACOB WONDERBAR AND THE INTERSTELLAR TIME WARP? Good, but JACOB WONDERBAR AND THE INTERSTELLAR TIME WARP AND THE VACATIONING ALIENS FROM ANOTHER PLANET WITH ADDED SPACE MONKEYS would be better. If the cover is big enough.

Publishers eating books!? Rice paper perhaps? Yet another argument against e-books. Just try eating a Kindle.

I'm not so sure about publisher recognition. Some readers may think your books are published by a Batman villain.

Anyone who's figured out who Gordon is can have more fun guessing what Mira's first question was.

Seriously, Nathan, many thanks for this excellent series of posts.

Your reasons are all great for why to go with traditional publishing. I also have a full time job and blog. Like you, I wouldn't have the time to market and design a self published book.

Just got my copy of your book in the mail. Can't wait to start it as soon as I finish what I'm reading.

Nathan, you cite have a professional editor as a reason to traditionally publish ... and you seem to imply that self-published authors can't have that. Well, they sure can ... from the ranks of many fine editors who have been laid off from publishing houses in recent years precisely because many choose not to pay for top-tier editing any longer. I have many friends who have hooked up with Big Six refugees for developmental and copy editing, for very reasonable prices, and get quality work that's every bit the equal of what you say you're getting. Not all the best editors work for publishing houses.

Yes to every single one of these, plus the insight and wisdom of the art dept., publicity, and all those behind-the-scenes people I know nothing about.

I can't imagine doing this alone. My work would be ridiculous without the prodding and encouragement of my editor. And then getting the story out into the world without backing? No thanks.

What backing? Two weeks of co-op placement (maybe) before your book is remaindered and pulped? Before the book is closed on you and your sales potential ... and thus your future in traditional publishing?

Really, all we're talking about is a difference in how professionals are paid. In self-publishing, authors hire out all these services themselves. In traditional publishing, the publisher arranges for these services ... and then recoups the cost, plus the cost of your advance, before the earn-out threshold is reached and any royalties paid.

It really all boils down to paying now ... or paying later.

I respect your reasons for going with traditional publishing and maybe in the world of children's books it is best. But I'm hearing a lot about how publishers are leary of taking a chance on a 1st time author. I know the process can take an awfully long time as well. An advance for a newbie is very small, too. I have the free time to devote to self publishing and would like to see my book in print within a year of beginning to write it. You're right about the fact that it may be a toss-up as to which route will yield the most income. Good luck with your new book and hope sales are high!

Self-publishing needs to be a collaborative process too, Nathan. The sad part is, it's up the author to decide that...often to their detriment. Most Indie authors don't know what they don't know, including the business they are really in: which is to connect their books to readers, not just to write and publish books.

More on this in my blogpost: http://www.bookdoula.biz/hobble-ins-welcome-write-to-relate

Not until recently did I even consider self-publishing. I used to work in publishing, so I'm partial to the traditional route.

That said, as someone who likes the whole process of book-making, I'm so tempted to try self-publishing, especially now with all the new and exciting 'toys.'

I'm torn, though. It would be so great to have the pub dream in my head fulfilled...

Thanks Nathan for blogging about your experiences. Sharing your excitement is inspiring!

I'm with you!!

Another point to consider is that writing is a solitary endeavor. Yes, you have your crit buddies, possibly a writers group to hang with, but a traditional publisher comes with a team of pros who are all there to support you and cheer you on.

I was published by a small press years ago and I now have the best agent in the world (yes, I'm biased) who got me an awesome 2-book deal with a very big publisher. My agent works with my editor who works with me, and there's a marketing department, and an assistant, and it's like a big family. They give me those "atta girls" and rain praise on me and encourage me to keep up the good work. If I self-published, I wouldn't have that unless I hired people to do it. I don't have that kind of time or money. And Nathan is right about the advance. It's money in the bank.

The traditional publishing world is a whole different ball game. There's stress and deadlines, sure, but you're not alone. You're part of a team and it's awesome. I didn't have an "in" with anyone in the industry, I was just a hardworking writer writing the best book I could and taking my rejection lumps along the way. It all paid off and it's awesome! I wouldn't want it any other way.

I'd like to give a shout-out to my traditional publisher, Soho. They are a large indie with an extensive backlist and a 25 year history. They've done an awesome job supporting my book(s), which goes way beyond "two weeks co-op, then pulp." I do think they handle things somewhat differently than a lot of Big Six imprints -- they publish fewer titles and support each one, which seems to be a somewhat rare, but very sensible business philosophy. They really get what their market is and how to promote within it.

Didn't you choose a traditional publisher because you could? Let's face it -- most of us would accept an offer from Penguin if we got one!

Nathan, Amen.

But could you have self-published? As a lit agent, you had to go the traditional route, no? Not sure you had a choice.

You had me at Penguin, and I pretty much stopped reading at "third."
Kinda of no brainer here. How much further up the book publishing ladder could you hope to go? It takes most writers years to get that, or only on the heels or reprint of some previous break away success. What if none of the big 6 were interested? what if your offers were only coming from small presses, mid sized independent publishers, with small budgets and no advances? Retorical now, I know. But would you have chosen one or not published at all?
"Why I chose Penguin?" -doesn't sound like much of a choice to me lol.

These are my thoughts exactly. When the time comes for me to query my ms and quite possibly the years slip by it really is some of these key elements that will keep me hanging on to traditional publishing.

Plus, I have an e-reader and still prefer a tried and true crispy paged book over it any day.

Someone here got their copy of your book in the mail today? Where's mine? I pre-ordered months ago! Anyway, the reasons you listed here are exactly why I want to go the traditional publishing route...with an agent of course. :)

The great thing is there are choices today that weren't available even a year ago. I decided to epublish my MG on my own and am loving the process. But you're right...it's not for everyone. You really have to have a DIY attitude and spirit.

For those of you who think indie authors don't have what it takes to make it traditionally, I encourage you to buy an indie book in your genre...a good number are available for $.99 on Smashwords. There's some quality work out there by indie authors who have decided to go it alone for a variety of reasons. These authors usually explain their decision on their blogs, much like Nathan has explained his reasoning here.

Nathan, I'm looking forward to reading your book!

Hey, congratulations on your third book! That's wonderful news.

I am just way too tired to navigate such a controversial topic. All I know are three things, in order of importance:

a. Congratulations on your third book deal! That's wonderful. :)

b. I really like this week and this opportunity to learn more about you. It's interesting and lovely to hear about what goes into your thinking and choices.

c. There are many factors that go into choices, and what may be right for one writer, a worthwhile trade-off, may not be right for someone else, and that's okay.

d. I really don't like math. I think if you multiple 25 by 15 percent, that makes 3.75, which means you get 21.25 percent of every e-book?

e. I still wish that when I bought your book, you got 100% of the profit.

One more week! I can't wait!!! I don't care how much is going on for me, classes and work can wait, I'll have a book to read.

mira-

Say an e-book is $10. In the agency model, the publisher gets 70%, so $7.00. The author gets 25% of that gross, or $1.75 (17.5%). Agent gets 15% of that, ($0.26), so the author ends up with about $1.50, or 15%.

Nathan,

Lol, I still got it wrong.

Thank you. I appreciate your patience with my math disability. That's nice of you. So basically the author gets 15% of the e-book.

got it. :)

This is all really helpful. Thank you!

I plan to pursue traditional publication mostly because I believe that if I can't find an agent and a publisher, I'm probably not good enough to be published at all.

Don't get me wrong. There are a number of exceptional self-published titles out there. But the number of good ones is a tiny percentage.

If no one wants to publish my book, I'd rather just take the hint and find something else to do with my time.

Penguin. Cool! Congrats!
I remember Puffin books, too, from when I was a kid.

Congratulations, Nathan, on the upcoming publication of your first book and for signing contracts for two more books in the series! That’s fantastic!

I think it’s wonderful when writers get published by traditional publishers. I also think it’s wonderful that there are so many alternative ways to get published today, and that opportunities arise in every type of publishing. This week, my indie publisher announced in a press release that the Executive Producer of THE LORD OF THE RINGS movies will be selecting books from among our publications for possible movie and TV show contracts, including possible shows on the SyFy channel. The Executive Producer has formed his own company to produce movies, through which traditionally-published Judy Blume currently has a movie based on one of her novels in production, scheduled for release later this year. Who knows where all this will lead, but it’s a wonderful time to be a writer. :)

Do you think the rise in popularity of self-publishing has altered the odds of getting an agent? I mean, I wonder if agents are being queried less than say 10 years ago...

Congratulations on the third title!

Though I'm not quite to the point where I need to worry about how to get my book published yet (still plowing through those revisions!) I had gone back and forth on the idea of if I wanted to do traditional or self-publishing.

I'm a bit of a control freak so the idea that I could design everything myself sounded tempting, but I'm starting to lean more towards letting professionals handle things. After all, that's why they're the professionals, and like you mentioned in your post, with the crazy schedule of my day job, I don't know where I'd find the time and energy to devote to designing every aspect about a book. Getting the words inside as close to perfect as possible is challenging enough!

About your point on time. J.A. Konrath, Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, and Barry Eisler, all multipublished traditional authors who have gone to self publishing, have said that self publishing actually takes less of a writer's time than traditional publishing. It's counterintuitive and I don't quite understand it -- I think it has to do with all the back and forth and the general inefficiencies introduced when adding more people to the book production and marketing process, but enough people are saying so that it's worth investigating.

I decided to seek a publisher after 10 years of (very part-time) work on a regional nonfiction book; was advised by a NYC agent to find a regional publisher. Got a nibble, but they pay 4% royalties. So if my book retails for $25 (about right for a coffee-table book with lots of text and pix), I get a dollar. Wow. I wanted a publisher because I've done two self-published books and know the costs, in time and money, and the risk, and I'd appreciate the team effort--but 4%???? Back to Plan A. Self publish. Question: Can diacritical marks and picture books work on eReaders?

Given what Victoria Mixon wrote recently about who actually owns the big houses, the publisher you went with is the only one of them I'd want to put something out there with my name on it...so that pretty much means if I'm ever going to be published it's going to likely be me doing it! Even if I did manage to attract an agent I doubt they'd take kindly to my saying "But only if Penguin wants it!"

Thanks for this series of posts- and congratulations on the third Wonderbar installment!

~bru

I think it is most generous of you to devote your time helping people with writing problems and showing them that self-publishing is not the last resort.

Thomas.

I have been sending, for the past year, all my sci-fi fantasy books to Baen e-book publishing. The response time is 12-18 months. My editing was not as polished as it is now and I wonder what their reaction will be. Should I ask them to delete my recent admissions and send them anew? Which means waiting another 18 months for a response.

Fascinating article, Nathan. Thank you for a well-balanced approach!

My take - I think there is a great deal of uncertainty about the future. For one thing, there is the question about whether Amazon, et al, will continue to allow authors to set their own prices. That may change. I hope it doesn't, but it may.

If things continue the way they are, I think your second option - tier pricing - will occur. People will pay more for an author they want to read - the value goes up if the desirabilty of the product goes up. If J.K. Rowling wrote another book, I'd take out a second job to pay for it.

There are two points in your argument that I want to discuss further. The first is the idea that the demand for books is finite. Although that's undoubtedly true, it's also true that books are disposable items. Once someone reads one book, they are ready for the next. Also, the ease of access afforded by e-readers allows books to be instantly attainable. This is a very different world than before, where books were hard to get and the demand for books may be much greater than people imagine.

The second point is this persistent myth that a 99 cent price point will sell books.

Sorry, but people will not spend money for something they don't want. They won't even take something for free if they don't want it.

For example, if you go out to the parking lot and pick up a stick that is covered in mud, I'm not taking it, even if it's free.

99 cents may sell a few books, because some people are willing to pay 99 cents to see if the book is any good. But it's not going to sell alot of books. Just a few.

There is one thing, and one thing only that will sell oddles of books. People seem to think there is a short cut, but I'm sorry, there isn't. The only way to sell oodles of books is to write a book that oodles of people want to read.

And then they'll probably pay more than 99 cents for it.

I'm still not convinced the 2.99 / .99 "revolution" isn't history repeating itself.

The first step to monopoly is destroying a competitive market, and historically, the way that's been done is by undercutting prices to such an extent that no one can compete. (Railway and oil "barons" were made this way).

However, once the competition actually buckles, then the "cheap" price usually disappears because the last one standing is still going to be able to set their own price.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the price of an ebook would rise above .99, but there's no reason Amazon has to continue to pay out the same percentage in royalties they are at present.

The public - who couldn't care less, so long as they get what they want - would be relatively happy, but the writers are up the creek.

Great discussion, and I'll add something I learned on my first day of class in Contracts in law school: a fair price is what a willing buyer will pay a willing seller. Simple as that. Regardless of the moral or philosophic or literary arguments, that will win the day.

You make great points at the end: free or .99 cents will be the proving ground, and then there will be much more leeway with price once an author is established. As a reader and an indie author, I have no problem with that. I love scouring for great new voices (and it takes me about a paragraph to figure out if the new voice is great) both in the bookstore and online, but I'm simply more willing to try a new author at.99 or 2.99 unless I think it is out of this world amazing. And as an indie author in an extremely difficult and competitive market (as always), I have confidence in my work, and want as many people as possible to find me. I don't like the .99 price point, but that is what the market dictates, then the other questions are a bit irrelevant. I think publishers, to survive, should think the same: if this ebook thing is happening (regardless of what anyone thinks about it), then they need to figure out how to stay relevant and profitable. Maybe charging 100 for the next book by the Rowling's and the Grisham's isn't a bad idea.

To the extent books become more like bananas - look the same, read the same - price can be a deciding factor. Do I want this 9.99 zombie apocalypse book or this .99 zombie apocalypse book?

But when the choice is this new 14.99 JK Rowling book or this new .99 LK Rigel book, until most people know who Rigel is, they're going to pick the Rowling.

My challenge isn't to find readers looking for a cheap read. My challenge is to get the attention of readers looking for a good read .

99 cents is a strategy. I use it, but it won't work long-term unless your book makes it into algorithm heaven or you have several books and the 99-center is an introduction to all the rest.

A note to Mira-- only self-published authors set their own prices for ebooks. For traditionally published books, the publisher sets it. I know authors who wish the publisher would make the ebook cheaper.

If you're not familiar with it Nathan, you might want to check out eReader IQ, a site that exists partly to allow readers to track Kindle books & find out when the price drops. I think ebook readers are definitely price-sensitive, but I think it's worth noting that bestsellers continue to be best sellers in ebook form, even when the price is $12.99 to $14.99. What has happened is that books that would not otherwise be best sellers get on the list by being priced at 99 cents. Probably they bump some higher priced books to get there, but they don't take over the list entirely. I consider it's too early to say the 99 cent phenomenon will have a profound impact; for one thing there are huge numbers of 99 cent books that go nowhere.

I have an e reader. I love it but find myself filling it with free or cheap books.
With a traditional book you can read it, pass it to friends, sell it at a used book store, sell it at a garage sale, or donate it.
With an ebook the reader can't do all these things.
I think publishers need to do more with price discovery. If people are flocking to 99 cent ebooks it is because paying more for an ebook than a traditional book doesn't make sense to the consumer.

I agree with JL Bryan. This is a good deal like shopping for anything else. If you aren't sure about the quality of a product, you tend to buy the cheaper version -- to see if you like it. If you want quality, you buy a more trusted brand name, which will be more expensive. This is not to say, of course, that you may not be pleasantly surprised with the quality of the inexpensive product. But a newbie cannot sell as much for as high a price as an established brand, whether that is clothing, electronics, or a book.
My guess is that Amanda Hocking's book prices will go way up soon. And that's okay. She started small with the unknowns, and now she's off to the big time.
Hmmm.... maybe I'd better go try one of her books, eh?

Oh, and I'd most certainly pay $100 for Rowling' next book. Anytime.

To me this post reads as a list of well thought out reasons that $.99 e-books may not be good for writers in the long run (because it'll become increasingly hard for most writers to get paid a worthwhile amount), and then a supposition that maybe some magical market force which hasn't yet made itself felt yet will rescue some big-name authors from the wreckage.

Yikes.

Honestly, just because a book is 99 cents does not make me more interested in buying it. I still read samples. I enjoyed Amanda's opening pages of the trylle trilogy which is why I purchased the first book. I would've paid more.

2 things:

1) @erin said "sorting, critiquing and reviewing that goes on with traditional publishing, the quality of the literature will decline"

The "sorting, critiquing and reviewing" that traditional publishers do does not guarantee "quality" literature, what it guarantees is marketable literature. Publishers don't care if it's good, only that it sells. It's also a mistake to assume that the same (or higher) level of sorting, critiquing and reviewing isn't going on amongst the self-published. I guarantee that just as you will find self published books of a "lower quality" than many traditionally published books, you will also find "higher quality" self published books than many traditionally published books.

2) If everybody is clamoring for cheap and free books to read how did libraries ever fall out of favor? Isn't the "Netflix" model just a library card?

@ Michael C

Her books can't go up in price if she wants to continue to make the royalty amount she's currently pulling in. (This is for the self-pubbed ebooks, not her upcoming commercial book)

The reason self-pubs have chosen the amounts they did isn't arbitrary.

Amazon set their royalty percentages with one ceiling at $.99 and another at $2.99. There's no incentive to raise, which is why I believe this is more manipulation on Amazon's part than progression of the market from buyers.

I've been lamenting this point for a while now, this dollar book phenom. Time will tell of course how it plays out, but the driving down of ebook prices, while good for readers, I think will end up hurting writers in the long run. If the name authors prices get down low enough, 99 cents will not longer feel like such the bargain, and the desire to risk on an unknown will go down. Name author you like for 2.99 or unknown for .99? As the difference goes away, so does the incentive.

Regardless, I still believe, and likely always will, that books are worth more than a buck. I honestly don't care about the economics in this case. It's just pig-headedness perhaps, but stories deserve a spot somewhere above the mass-produced junk from the local dollar store.

Josin - I agree with you about Amazon. Right now, they are definitely courting the author, which is a very good thing because it is changing the culture. But, whether that will change once the competition thins is a very good question.

On the other hand, if that happens, authors may feel more empowered at that point and may form collectives to strengthen their position. Or start handing out books on their website, and refuse to go through Amazon, etc.

Should be interesting to watch.

Carmen - good points.

Very interesting conversation. But I'm wondering: are people buying the .99 cent books because it's something they want to read, or because they're only .99 cents? As with Groupon, I signed up for it at first, but then realized none of the discounts were for services I wanted, so I didn't use any of them - kind of like grocery store coupons, why would I want to save $1 on Twinkies if I don't eat Twinkies?

I think some consumers jump on something because they think it's a deal, it's what's in front of them, so they grab it without even considering if it's something they WANT. Kind of like walking down the strip in Vegas and you grab the flyer the guys are shoving in your face, just because they're there... but do you really want what they are offering? I'm sure some do, but I have no need for HOT YOUNG GIRLS DIRECT TO MY ROOM NOW!!! I just wanna go see Carrot Top.

And... am I the only one out there who still hasn't gotten into ebooks?

I do so much reading on the computer that when I want to read a book I, well, want to read a BOOK.

I tend to agree with you, Nathan. As a self-published author, it irks me that I have to price at 99 cents, even for a short, to compete. For guys like Konrath, it's a way to turn up the profit spicket for the short term. If readers get use to paying 99 cents for novels, I think it will be more difficult to go back up to $2.99 or, heaven forbid, $3.99. or $4.99. Personally, I don't think $5 is too much to ask if you've produced a welld-one novel-length story. Arghhhh!

I like your idea of applying price discovery to the e-publishing industry.

I wrote my own rant a few weeks ago ("99-Cent Train Wreck" at http://wp.me/p1qrBV-2c), but I was thinking of commoditization as a downward pricing trend only. It didn't occur to me that it also implies pricing can increase based on demand. I guess I've been too accustomed to the retail model.

Thanks for an interesting new perspective.

Thought-provoking post.

I have experimented with price points at $2.99, $1.99 and $0.99 and my experience is that there is a degree of price elasticity of demand (e.g., lower price = greater quantity).

I have to agree with JL Bryan's comment that there is a market for everything and all price points. In the world of self-publishing, the author decides how to brand him or herself and the pricing strategy that is appropriate for his or her works.

As an unknown author, my most pressing marketing concern is market penetration - getting my ebook onto as many ereaders as possible. The hope is that I can build a fan base that will be willing to pay more for future works. I've experimented with the $0.99 price point and it has worked. I moved my price up for April and have noticed a decline in sales.

Will I move my price back down to $0.99? I'll wait for April's full month results and then make a decision. One thing is for certain, I will never give away my work.

Other, more well known authors, may be able to charge a higher price, because their fan base is willing to pay more for a known experience. So, no need for Rowling to drop down to $0.99.

Here are some counter intuitive aspects:

- Ebook readership is still in its infancy. The vast majority of readers are still using "old" pbooks. As Kindle and other ereading devices increase their market penetration, then so will the number of readers and the amount of readership attention.

- The net impact of communications technology (Internet and cable TV) has been increased specialization. Which means there is now more choices than ever before and readers buying ebooks are far more likely today to discover authors that they like and are willing to support. Ebooks give more authors more opportunities to create a loyal fan base, which in turn gives more readers the ability to find more of what they like to read.

- Will Entrekin made a good post when he disputed the notion of constrained resources, that there is no depletion of readership attention. He is right, people's appetites for a good read are unlimited and they might be willing to ply through the first five chapters of 10 $0.99 ebooks just to find the next big thing.

In the self-published world, ebook pricing is under the control of the author, who can set price strategy to achieve his/her personal goals.

In the next several years, the number of ebook readers will dramatically increase. That means more bananas to pick for everyone. Also, since the technology provides for an improved ability to reach out to or create a market niche, there should be more room for mangoes, apples and kiwis, too!

The price of a book should be whatever the market will bear. If you won't pay $10 for a book then the market won't bear that price. Regardless of price discovery. The abstinence of purchasing a book has been going on for years. That's why students don't buy books that are required until they know they need them and they usually buy them when they need them and return them before they can't get full price for them anymore. Or they buy them used off of Amazon, even 2nd or 3rd editions instead of 5th editions.

For an unknown author such as myself, the odds are the same, getting an agent and a publisher, as making it through indie pub. The difference is, I don't have to depend on an agent and publisher and the readers, just the readers and myself. I am the master of my own destiny. Plus, the appeal for me is to get some money flowing now instead of holding my breath for something that may or may not happen.

Honesty, with the time and effort I put into writing my books, I wouldn't just give it away for free. I might do the first hundred copies and then sell for a minimum of 99cents and probably wouldn't even do that. I'd start at $2.99 and go from there.

Our community is a wonderful one and we could get at least our followers to read our works for free. We all help each other get the word out on new releases all the time. It's a start for a good readership.

Unfortunately, the creative process is left out of this equation. Will we demand that writers become more and more "efficient" in the way they write (or perhaps more accurately in this scenario, "produce") books? We've lost any sense of putting a value on the writer's time, thought, and courage in writing a novel that is worth reading. Books are not bananas- writers are not trees sprouting fruit.

Here's the thing - while *I* am willing to pay a lot for my books because I love books and I love books by certain authors, most readers probably aren't as passionate about it as I am.

Also, while I'd willingly (and HAPPILY) turn over $50 for Scott Westerfeld's next book Goliath in hardback, I am a lot less enthusiastic about authors I've never heard of or books I've never heard of.

So here's a totally hypothetical idea I just thought of - there's this plugin/widget on many blogs called Linkwithin. at the end of a post it shows 3 or 4 posts that are related somehow. I wouldn't be opposed to having something like that embedded at the end of my e-Books that said, "you liked this paranormal YA about zombies, here are 3 other paranormal YA about zombies" either from the same publisher or others. And maybe if you buy from that related books spot you get a discounted e-book price.

I would like to see more of to see more of the process working to promote books but also cater to the needs of the readers. I'd like to see best sellers do more for the little known debuts. And while I don't think we should be selling at basement prices so that no one makes money, I think it is fair to rethink the pricing of e-books because it is pretty clear that most people do not FEEL like the thing they are buying is worth the cost, even if behind the scenes it is. There has to be a middle ground.

Musicians are already experimenting with the price thing through Bandcamp and that kind of thing--look at what Amanda Palmer is doing, for example, or Radiohead's previous album, wherein they set a minimum amount for a download but the buyer can pay more if they think it's worth more and can afford it. Sort of a reverse kind of barter, really. Strangely, at least in some cases, it seems to work.

I don't really know what to say about all of this. The one thing that is sad to me is that if a book is really great, it's worth a lot more then $0.99 to me.

I wouldn't feel right paying less than say about $10.00 for some of my very favorite novels. Hell, I'd probably pay many times more what they ask for some of my favorites. They're worth it.

I hope the 99 cent thing will lose its appeal soon. Most authors do it to get on the lists, but as more authors do it, staying on the lists will become increasingly difficult, and making money that way will become almost impossible.

People are willing to pay for quality, but the problem is discerning quality from an unknown writer. Readers need new, more reliable ways of discovering writers--a new system of vetting that would eliminate the need for unsustainably cheap e-books.

Traditionally, even before e-books, the only people who ever made real money in publishing were the best selling authors. Most mid-list authors still had day jobs, either teaching or whatever they did to survive.

I also think there's a huge trend happening right now. Most of these so-called authors will publish an e-book, decide it's not really for them, and more on. And we won't really know who is going to survive until the dust finally settles and people move on to the next new trend.

I wish there was a way to tweak the way readers buy e-books.
I'm one of the old guys, but I remember the days when I would go into a bookstore to find my newest friend. (Still do. The proverbial old dog and new tricks thingie.)

Did I look at the cover? Sure, but it wasn't the driving force behind my decision to buy. And it CERTAINLY wasn't the price listed on the back. What made me carry a book to the counter? I read the first page, or maybe even several pages.

I know, I know. The "sample" thing. I do it all the time, even with the freebies and cheapies.

But here's a thought. (My own little tea party) Let's abolish price listings on books, and abolish the "buy" button until after a browser has gone through the first several pages. I think that would go a long way toward weeding out the haves from the have-nots. Maybe even curb this downward spiral in pricing.
Because if the writing isn't there, I walk.

Hey, I can dream, can't I?

By the way, I don't know if I'd pay $100 for Harry Potter, but I would for The Lord of the Rings, especially for one of those leather bound editions with all three volumes.

I can't say this worries me too much. Everyone said the same thing about iPhone apps, but I think they are turning around. At first people expected them to be free or no more than $1, now we're seeing more apps at $5 to $10. All it took was a few quality apps at a higher price to make the consumer think "oh, some of these pricier games are wroth it."

I think we'll see the same thing in the ebook world, especially with self-published books. There's going to be a race to the bottom, but it won't stay there.

As far as debut authors go, I think they would do themselves a favor by setting a minimum price of $1.99. It's all about creating a value anchor. It reminds me of the story of the woman that tried to give away a mattress on Craigslist. She kept the posting up for weeks and no one bit. Her husband took the posting down and put a new one up--"Gently used Queen Mattress $130." It sold that same day. No one wants a free mattress, that implies that it's all gross and old. But $130 seems like a fair price. It implies that the mattress is used, but still high quality. I think authors should use the same tactics. Give away short stories, podcasts, and blog posts, but charge--even if it's just $2--for your books. It implies that they are worth charging for. Of course the trick is to make it so.

It's the publishers who have created this situation, not the independent authors, by the unfair "deal" that they offer their authors for ebooks. Yes, 10% of retail price to authors is fine for print books (not great for authors, but understandable given the real costs of printing, warehousing, distribution).

But offering 25% to authors for ebooks, when publishers have none of those real costs, and claiming this is the industry "standard" is unfair, and it is also what is driving the high ebook prices.

For a $9.99 ebook released through a publisher, the author will earn somewhere around $1.50 to $2.

For a $1.99 independent ebook, the author will earn $1.40 - but will probably sell a heck of a lot more copies at that price. (Yes yes, in both cases the marketing needs to be done properly - but publishers are not actually doing much about that for most of their authors these days).

A large part of the cost of "real" books is due to their physical presence: printing, shipping from printer, warehousing, shipping to sellers, sellers' retail space/warehouses (plus the mark-up that each of these players must add in order to be profitable). Ebooks have none of that. Pricing them at $9.99 is an artificially high price, set by publishers who are desperately trying to set a new industry standard that will rake them some big profits.

Yes, at $0.99 it will be hard for anyone to make a living from ebooks (although it does open the market to shorter works - long stories or essays, novellas). But ebooks priced at $1.99 and $2.99 really opens the door for us, for authors, to actually make a living from what we do.

There is limited readership attention span for books. Given that I can now purchase e-books for the same price at which I purchase used or dollar store books, these e-books are now not only competing with each other and with best-sellers but with, frankly, every book that’s ever been widely distributed. Or even narrowly distributed. They’re competing, pricewise and cachet-wise, with any of this fungible commodity I can find on the market.

When I peruse the shelves at the thrift store, I’m not concerned that a “new” author is, in fact, deceased now, or that his or her book was published thirty, forty, fifty years ago. Most of what I see on the thrift store shelves is new to me and carries with it not only the thrill of discovering a new author but also what previous readers have left in the book, from book marks to margin notes to the fact that long ago they took the trouble to get a signed copy of a book from an author and then, later, gave the book away.

The tragedy of the commons is actually a non-tragedy. Elinor Ostrom won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics for showing that commonly owned resources are often very well managed by the local communities that depend on them.

Plus, books aren't exactly a finite resource. The market for books is definitely finite but the creation of books isn't tied to any constrained resource. If anything it's actually the opposite. The act of writing is so pleasurable in itself that the thought of being a successful author is very attractive. So much of your blog is dedicated to trying to prove the opposite :-).

These days it's almost impossible to charge differing prices in the consumer market for the exact same product. Amazon knows all about my past purchases and probably has enough information to be able to charge me more for some stuff than it charges to other people but imagine the bad press it would get if it did that (economists always seem to ignore human psychology for some reason). Even if Amazon could get away with charging me more you'd instantly see companies spring up to take advantage of that price inefficiency by acting as a middleman between people who can buy something cheap and people who actually want that product.

Well, as a writer I don't want to sell my books for free, and as a reader I don't want to pay $100 for a book.

Perhaps I'm simply feeling nostalgic for something that hasn't even passed yet...

"For a $1.99 independent ebook, the author will earn $1.40 - but will probably sell a heck of a lot more copies at that price."

On Amazon, this author would get 70 cents. And just because they're cheap, doesn't mean they'll sell a hell of a lot more copies. There are plenty of .99 books earning about a hundred bucks a year.

Economics is concerned with money and making more of it. Efficiency and economics are based in business principles, and businesses very seldom will cut their own profits to benefit society as a whole, or in part. Individuals are a different matter.

Most people don't care about what resources are available, and aren't interested in sharing those if they can acquire more for themselves.

There are exceptions, but isn't that what the current state of publishing is pushing us to do? That's the message I see in publishers who are changing their tune when they see that perhaps that debut author who self-pubbed isn't as bad as previously thought. (i.e., her writing record doesn't matter). It's what sells and how many that matter in most business transactions. So like the truckers who priced themselves out of making a living, the writers and authors are losing sight of what's important.

All writers should be able to expect recompense for what they do. 'Gettin' while the gettin's good' is a common philosophy today and is considered by many to be a justifiable endeavor.

We must always remember what is lost in the cause for efficiency -- generally it's the personal aspect, or the quality. Marketing drives efficiency (more product sold equals more revenue).

In most instances where efficiency is introduced into the equation, jobs and functions are lost for the sake of unit price. Loss leaders (free or 99 cent books) are a hook. We as debut authors, are the fish that could get eaten. More culling of the herd of writers that exist today?

Meanwhile back at my study . . . I keep on writing. Never say die is my creed.

The music industry is doing it.
And, there are artists who want to sell their songs for $0.99 but, the Apples of the world won't let them go for a lower rate.

Kid Rock is one of those outspoken, give the masses what they want, and give it to them at a lower cost, and add on a few more songs for free.

Cheers!

You get an 'A' on your analysis...you missed the A+ by missing out on the 'price elasticity of demand'. I quote (Wikipedia):
"Price elasticity of demand...is a measure used in economics to show the responsiveness, or elasticity, of the quantity demanded of a good or service to a change in its price.

In general, the demand for a good is said to be...relatively inelastic when changes in price have a relatively small effect on the quantity of the good demanded."

Simply put, the price elasticity of demand for form-based 'excellence' (in this particular example, an 'excellent' book) is relatively inelastic: To wit: People will (and always have) demanded excellence at a reasonable price for a great many reasons (reasons that are generally outside the simplicity of this post).

But that's the answer to your question: "Are we headed to free for e-book prices...?" (No).

s

Self-published e-books are attracting readers who used to troll used bookstores and remainder sales. They may be biting into mass market genre sales a little bit, but readers who buy hardcover fiction seem to be sticking with those sorts of books even when they adopt e-readers. Despite the inefficiencies of commercial publishing, it is still the only way to reach 80% of the audience. And the rock bottom pricing only entices a small and, frankly, undesirable segment of the readership pie.

Precisely because reader attention is a scarce commodity, quality content can command a price premium. Authors who can distinguish themselves on quality don't have to race to the bottom on price. This is the reason most people who can publish commercially will continue to do so.

Not sure if I'm understanding all of this but I think it'll weed itself out like anything else. These well known writers dipping their toe into self publishing are charging less because they're nervous, maybe. and freebies pull people in. Once the authors see what they can get they'll charge that. Supply and demand I suppose. Rowling might even give her book away at some point beause she doesn't need the money, and she's knows the real money is in merchendising (for her) anyway.
Self published, unknown guys like myself, charge little for the ebook to build a readership, I hope that people will still want a print copy, screenwriters will still want to adapt, producers will still want...well, ya get the idea.
It is a little scary to think of it terms of de-valueing the work (thats the real tragedy.) But on the other hand, I think its a trend right now, these 99 centers. I think the cream will rise as it always does, price will find it's sweet spot based on readership.
Marketing company's really need to be paying better attention to whats going on here. They're still thinking inside the box along with pricing and traditional publishing. Amazon and google are already looking in the right direction with that too. So I think there needs to be some Independent media company's poking their heads in here soon and re-thinking what they do and how they do it.
There's alot going on, and a lot coming up in self publishing and no one seems to have a handle on it; a view of the full, big picture, cept maybe Amazon, and I know there are still a lot of amazon haters out there, but there pretty good at raising monkeys and growing banana trees, and there getting better and better at selling them too.

Maybe it's because of all the talk recently about the roles of agents and editors in the future and how they will serve as gatekeepers, but when I was browsing through new books for my Kindle last night, I found myself really distrusting the very cheap e-books unless I recognized the author's name already. I feared I would be purchasing low-quality work; the stigma against self-publishing was at work. I still don't want to pay $15 for an e-book, but I didn't find myself too tempted to get a lot of cheap ones instead, even as impulse buys.

Also, you're right. People only have so much time to read, so even if all e-books were that cheap, people probably wouldn't buy that much more since it would still take a lot of time to read them.

You sure are smart, Nathan. Being a long time blog read, I already knew that but damn...

This is a really interesting observation and I think, ties publishing more definitely, to the game theory of economics as well as the tragedy of commons. Nice.

Dan, are you calling used book buyers undesirable? I thought we were just savvy shoppers. Why pay $35 for Rowling when it will be $4 at the thrift store if I wait a month. It would take six months for me to get a turn to read a library copy.

This is a market iTunes has successfully tapped. Why comb through piles of used CDs at the thrift store when I can download that song I've been looking for at $1. The CDs pile up higher than records now at my local thrift and the artists gets part of my dollar. Why would I sift through piles of disorganized books if I can find the one I'm looking for cheaply and quickly online? And the writer would get part of my buck and the 20 other people's bucks who would have bought that book used over its lifetime. I wouldn't have to buy furniture to store my library or put them away when they pile up in the kids room. When I couldn't find the physical copy of the book I wanted to read to my daughters class I downloaded a free copy, but would have willingly paid another dollar to not have to search the stacks. That's where the volume of sales will come from.

I think that debut writers and those looking for a temporary boost in sales will place their books at 99 cents.

But, there are a lot of people who are paying $2.99 and $3.99 without batting an eye for indie authors who have at least one other book out there. Their sales are not hurting. Dropping the price per book reduces the percentage they get, which in turn mean they'll have to sell roughly six times the number of books to make up for a single $2.99 sale.

The big publishers will always get $9.99 or more for their big name authors whom they've marketed well. And people will buy the 99 cent and the $1.99-$3.99 indie authors books, too. Like you said though - they'll choose what they want to read and how many books they are willing to buy. Price, to a certain point, won't deter reader from buying from an author they like - indie or traditional.

Great post, Nathan!

In my opinion, we are going to reach a happy medium. Prices will lower to more affordable prices. Beginning writers may need to be "discovered" by readers before they can charge for their work. Once they build a following they will be able to increase those prices to a certain point. I personally welcome this system even though I am currently unpublished. Musicians have to play their music to an audience for free, build a following, and then they are able to sell music/get picked up by a producer. Why should it be any different for writers? At the end of the day this will benefit the publishing houses and writers. Publishing houses will have lower marketing expenses and the writers they pick up will be better able to market themselves. It will be more of a partnership, the publishing house taking over the part of the business that writers don't want to have to handle (editing, printing, etc.) Also, how much nicer (if we get there) to have publishers going after writers who are building large followings instead of the other way around...Dare I say, publishers might query writers? :o One can dream :)

Awesome post :)

This is fascinating to me. I have recently been toying with a service that I'd like to charge $110. for, an hour, but that I'd be willing to take (rather than lose) a client for as low as $30.

Sort of like Priceline.com only different.

I don't want to lose any prospective client. But I want them to value and afford my service. And, politically, it feels like, too often, needed services/products are only accessible to the richer amongst us, when the less financially secure may need (and benefit society from having access to) our product/service even more.
i.e., not everything is a luxury item nor should it be.

A friend of mine has been working with "pay what you think it's worth and what you can afford" for some time now. And, myself, once, in a rough patch, someone gave me their service for 10% of its typical value. I voluntarily upped that amount over time as I got back on my feet to what I was comfortable paying: 40% (over which I wouldn't be able to afford it).

There's always a balance between the two: that's marketing.
The low cost introduction of E-Books was a necessary step in helping the technology grow, think napster. In time, the industry will adjust to the market and steadily step up pricing to sustainable levels. The consumer will either pay more, for a perceived improvement in quality and or service, or the industry will adapt to meet the consumers expectations. Either way, cheap E-Books will probably still be available, somewhere, somehow.

All of this discussion of ebooks has been madly interesting.
First, while I adore J.K. Rowling, I would try to borrow the book before paying 100.00 (I would content myself with a re-read of her others while I waited.
As to the 99 cent.... Well...Pen and Ink is following The Wooden Men.
http://thepenandinkblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/pen-and-ink-blog-travels-amazon.html
The results aren't in one this one.

One thing this price point argument fails to take into the consideration is not the willingness of the customer to pay, but the ability to pay. Economics don’t take place in a vacuum. You have to look at the bigger picture, which is that over the past ten years, the median household income has fallen to below $50,000 while inflation continues to soar. This means that Americans have less discretionary income to spend on books, CDs and other types of entertainment. For example, now with the cost of gas going up, I’m seeing a lot of people on my social networking site wondering how they’re going to get to work and feed their families. These are people who read copiously. If the price of fuel, food and goods continues to soar, I can see 99-cent eBooks becoming even more popular. So publishers can artificially inflate eBook prices so that the most Americans cannot buy them; or they can look at what book prices were ten years ago and lower the price to reflect what people actually have in their wallets.

I will say that when I see a book that's $0.99, I'm actually more suspicious about it. I ask myself why the author thinks their novel-length work is worth so little.

Oddly, I become more picky if the price point is so low.

I think Amanda Hocking is an excellent example of price discovery and why there's no real reason to worry about everyone pricing their books at 99 cents. She prices the first books in her trilogies at 99 cents, hooks you, and prices the additional books in the trilogy at $2.99. Very smart, very profitable. I think it's an excellent model to follow.

Authors aren't stupid. JK Rowling and Stephen King will never price their books at 99 cents. They don't have to. The 99 cent price point will always be the bastion of new authors hoping to be discovered.

"Let's say that everyone sold their books at $0.99. Stephenie Meyer, J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, J.A. Konrath, Amanda Hocking... everyone.

What would that publishing world look like?"

Nathan, checkout the Kindle UK charts.

Kindle UK has just been flooded with cheap backlist books by established writers with history, followers and celebrity.

The "indies" have been decimated overnight!

Only one indie book, ours - Sugar & Spice, Saffina Desforges - is still in the top five (by the time you read this that may have changed), and that only thanks to our having got to such a strong position (20,000 a month) when the going was good.

We are still, just, the number one thriller on Kindle UK, but that seems to be a because no big name thrillers have been dropped in price.

One of our closest indie rivals dropped from the top ten to the top forty in a matter of hours as the cheap "names" swamped us.

It's a bloodbath.

I don't buy $0.99 books. I also don't buy ebooks that cost more than the associated hardcover.

You're right about the economics, but there's a third solution that has worked reasonably well for both up-and-comers as well as established artists in the music industry: Pay what you will. Those who are broke or don't want to pay will pay next to nothing. Others with more disposable income or who place higher value on an item will pay more, and sometimes more than retail would have been.

What's broken (and probably has been for some time) is putting a retail pricing scheme on what is, ostensibly, art. The agency model breaks it even further, because when retailers aren't free to alter pricing to meet demand, sales are lost, either by people losing interest or piracy. I can say that's happened at least once to me, with Anna & the French Kiss. I don't want a dead tree version, and it's insulting to have to pay more for the convenience of an ebook.

As price pressure continues, I wonder if we will see a situation where books go to Free, but are Ad supported. Authors become like TV channels, and the more eyeballs you can deliver, the better and more high paying adds in your book.

After these messages.....we'll be right back.

"The 99 cent price point will always be the bastion of new authors hoping to be discovered." Why because we've had it for like a whole year, two years? It's clear that no one (other than John Locke) can make a living selling 99 cent books. Unless you live in an igloo.

If the point is develop a loyal fan base, and you're finding that fan base in the 99 cent bargain bin, you might also find they they aren't willing to follow you to $2.99 or $3.99.

The majority of Americans read 1-3 books a year. Let's say 3 books at trade paperback prices, around $15. That's $45 or so dollars a year.

Most people would be fine with that, give or take 10 bucks. Then there are the avid readers, but maybe they only read 12 to 20 books a year. They're still happy to pay anywhere from $7.99-$15 for the most part. Then you have the super readers. These people read at least a book a week. That's 52 or more a year.

The $0.99 and $2.99 books are designed not for the average or even the above-average consumer of books, but for the super-consumer.

I seem to recall the arguement against Ben Franklin and his idea for free public libraries as potentially dooming the publishing industry. Of course that didn't happen and perhaps we have the same thing here. Self-publishing ebooks is still experimental; we have yet to see the long term effects. Had public libraries wrecked publishers then the libraries would also have gone away. Then the publishers would have returned and no experiment like that would have been tried again. History is replete with civilizations that have decimated their resources and disappeared or moved on. But humanity as a whole survived. The same thing here?

"Are we headed to free for e-book prices or will we find a way to charge as much as people are willing to pay?"

I think people will always be willing to pay at least some amount for something like an e-book since there will always be demand for them.

Do any of the posters think that writers were decently paid prior to the ebook phenomenon? By how much have publishers advances changed in the last twenty-five years? the last fifty? Isn't it the publisher's ox that's being gored, not the writer's?

If authors tell people a book is worth 99 cents, then it's worth exactly 99 cents. Most of the top ten kindle books are over 7 bucks. Most of the top kindle 100 books are over 7 bucks. Self-pubbed authors use that to bolster the claim that people are only willing to pay .99-$2.99. However, since 98 percent have only tried that price-point and no other, it's a rather specious argument. Correlation does not equal causation.

There are some "indie" authors selling over $4 and doing quite well. Why? Because their audience is willing to pay that. If a literary fiction writer prices his new work at 99 cents, it's almost impossible for him to achieve the same level of sales as a thriller or paranormal writer at the same price-point. If you're going to sell 3200 copies no matter what, you might as well sell them at $4.95 and not $0.99.

'Human progress is a steady march towards greater efficiency.' Clearly, you are not acquainted with Irish bureaucracy.

Will Entrekin has a point about the $5 sweet spot, i. e. the price of a mass market paperback less the printing and binding and handling costs. But it is harder to find an e-book equivalent to the hardcover and trade paperback windowing system.

C. L. Phillips, Merry Old England's version of the tragedy of the commons was exaggerated by big landowners in support of the notorious 18th Century Enclosure Acts, which allowed them to basically steal common lands with the support of the state.

I second Mira and Josin re Amazon. Self-proclaimed 'independent' authors are a damn sight more dependent on Amazon than many of them care to admit.

And Mira's collective idea is interesting. As a matter of interest, I own a share of a commonage adjoining my farm in Ireland. I am what's called a tenant-in-common, and can graze the land (well my livestock could, I hate the taste of grass...) as can the other tenants-in-common, but not the general public. An ancient form of collective, in fact.

Anyway, I have now finalized my publishing game plan. I'm going for the 99 cent e-book approach, BUT I'm going to turn it around. I'm going to PAY the reader 99 cents! If 99 cents can't compete with free, how can free compete with getting 99 cents along with the e-book? I'll be the biggest bestseller of all time!

Oh, wait...

Sorry I'm so late to the table, but I do want to chime in. This eBook movement is, in my opinion, going to change the way our children read for the better.
I was one of those kids in school that played football and wrestled, but was really a closet geek. I would read every Fantasy book that came out from JRR Tolkien to Robert Jordan. But, the one thing I remember is that the cost limited my ability to get more books.

The library in town was slow to fill the shelves with new books and when you are reading a series, you have to read the next one.
My point is, if I could have shown my father that the books I was reading only cost .99 to $3.00 a piece instead of $8 or more, he would have been more open to me getting new books.

It isn't going to be a tragedy, I think it will make the millennium literature accessible in a way that it has never been before.

Whether it is advertising in the books or some other scheme that hasn't been thought up, publishers will find a way to get a cut.

Great post Nathan, especially being one of those unknown authors trying to make their s-pub mark on the world. It is going to work out, I have faith.

Why wouldn't we see prices decrease and settle in at the $0.99 - $2.99 level? There's going to be a lot more ebooks uploaded for sale in the next couple of years, and the current ones won't go away. Publishers will get up backlist, authors will get up backlist of books with reverted rights, people with a novel in a trunk will dust it off, and everyone will put their books up for sale.

What happens when there are five million ebook titles for sale instead of the 800,000 or so that Amazon has now? Prices will be driven down.

Great post!

"At the end of the day, there are only so many people in the world who read books and only so much time in the day they spend reading them and so much money they're willing to spend for them. People do buy a few more books than they end up reading, but not that many more."

This is EXACTLY what I said in response to an earlier post by you on the advent of e-books when I first started following your blog a year and a half or so ago.

I think we're heading for a saturation point in e-books, and I think that when that happens, people will start to look at price as a mark of quality in books. This could be one way to explore with "price discovery".

I think a book is a form of entertainment like iPhone apps, mp3s, and the rest of digital medium. The best stuff will rise to the top. But if I have to choose between paying for angry birds or downloading a book, the book had better be at a comparable price.

Right now, traditional publishers just don't get it. And agents are about to feel a lot of pain as their industry shrinks.

Great article, Nathan. Several excellent comments so far, too; but, what no one has mentioned (or maybe I missed it) are the ebook samples. Both Amazon and Smashwords require their authors to allow for sampling. Smashwords gives the writer a choice as to how much of the book can be sampled...up to 40%, I think. Just like browsing in a bookstore.

I randomly bought ten .99 ebooks, after sampling. The samples were okay to really good. I didn't finish a single one. They went south really quickly. Probably not a good survey sample with the huge numbers of .99 books out there, but it was enough for me.

I recently published my first ebook and set the price at $2.99. I think the quality and storyline warrants that price, even for a "newbie" author. I'm hanging on to the hope that slow sales (after only about four weeks in) are due to less than adequate marketing and not the price. I might go down to .99 but I'll never give the book away.

As an avid reader, I'll pay big for my favorite authors; but, not for an unknown. Still, if the price is .99, and the author is unknown to me - I'll skip it...

Time is another factor. Most people, I think, simply don't have the time to browse all the .99 ebooks, looking for that one pearl. I start my search at the 2.99 level in a particular genre, then I look at the cover. If the cover is alluring, I'll give it a closer look. If the synopsis and reviews are good, I'll sample; and then, maybe, I'll buy the book.

Great article Nathan. Thanks for this. There is a lot to think about when pricing our books. One thing, I think people forget, is whether or not you're building an audience with these low prices or with places like Groupon.

Are people going to come back to you as the author or are all those sales simply because people will buy anything for $.99? I represent Bob Phibbs who has a lot of opinions on things like Groupon for that very reason.

http://www.retaildoc.com/blog/groupon-worst-marketing-business/

I haven't read all the comments, so if someone else already brought this up, I apologize.

You're mis-using the Tragedy of the Commons. The tragedy refers to the destruction of resources which have no owner, and that everyone can access freely. An example would be over-fishing that completely depopulates the fishery. If no one owns the resource, no one has incentive to maintain it. So everyone just takes from it until it's gone, unles they are restricted in how much they are allowed to use. At least that's the theory.

Elinor Ostrom, 2009 nobelaureate in economics, demonstrated in her reseach that the Tragedy of the Commons often won't happen, because people will set up their own rules of how to collectively manage the common resource, without requiring draconian controls.

Regardless, this concept cannot apply to literature, for a couple of reasons. First, intellectual property has a clear owner, who manages it and sells it or not, and who can have his/her rights enforced by law. Two, even if literature was available free to all, the act of everyone consuming that literature would not damage it. What, everyone reads Tolstoy, and suddenly Tolstoy's writing begins to disappear? That's not how it works.

I get what you're trying to say here, and for what it's worth I disagree heartily with those who say that ebooks should be $.99, or even free. But you're confusing your terminology.

Interesting and somewhat daunting post. I don't have anything novel to add to the conversation but I just found my way to you and your blog (and I'm already a fan) and so wanted to say hi.

Layton nailed it IMHO:

"I'll add something I learned on my first day of class in Contracts in law school: a fair price is what a willing buyer will pay a willing seller. Simple as that. Regardless of the moral or philosophic or literary arguments, that will win the day."

$100 for JK Rowling is perhaps a bit extreme, but I just shelled out $36 to have the collected works of Wolfgang Borchert shipped from Amazon.de. Given the lack of availability elsewhere (and that for some reason Amazon.de refuses to ship me used books) I judged that to be a fair price, especially with the euro-dollars exchange rate factored in.

I also pay to subscribe to The Financial Times, because I perceive value there that I don't in other news outlets.

So Nathan, based on personal experience I would say you are right on about price discovery.

I think people will gladly pay more than $0.99 for books, even e-books, provided there is a perception that value is being added beyond what they would obtain for the base rate.

Maybe it's because you love X Author and he/she refuses to "give" their content away (what I would call The FT Model), etc.

I think sometimes the media industry gets caught up in price and overhead numbers, and overlooks the fact that this perception of value is really the lynch-pin for its ability to generate revenue at the end of the day.

It's why piracy is such a problem for the film and music industries: piracy distorts the price discovery process.

But even still, the long-term solution for those industries is to enhance the value they add to the "products" they produce, in these cases the theater and concert-going experiences are probably ideal.

And you can take this right across the board to "content farms" such as Demand Media.

Great post, Nathan, but I don't think this is tragedy of the commons. I think this is supply and demand laws making their way.

Supply is going up extremely fast (authors die - their books don't, new authors show up, there is pressure to put out more books quicker, it is easier to get published).

Demand isn't catching up (readers die, argueably less readers overall in the digital age).

Spammers and scammers are filling up virtual shelves with trash.

E-books circumvent usual barriers to publishing, creating even more supply.

Money-wise, I think the situation's even worse than Nathan's post makes it seem.

Nevertheless, I think authors who want to write, will continue to write. And e-books don't need to be the author's only income. Cory Doctorow's books can be found free online, and he claims they help sell more physical books.

We'll find a common ground before we hit rock bottom. Not many writers want to see all the hard work they (and others, such as editors, artists, etc.) put into a book they probably view as their child going away for free. No profit, even after all that? There'd even be a substantial risk of loss. The public might like that, but the writers sure wouldn't.

If the book is good enough that it becomes an instant phenomenon in the vein of Harry Potter or Twilight or [insert literary phenomenon here], then perhaps giving away the first book would be worth it in the long run. But it'd take a very clever mathematician to calculate luck into the equation. If there is no benefit, why try and market it at all? We'd just keep the stories in our heads to tell our grandchildren rather than selling them, and the world would see a drastic decrease in publicly marketed writers.

Books would still be written, but they would be privately owned rather than stocked in the local bookstore. It'd be a step backward, and that's the last thing publishers and writers looking to make a profit want to see.

Again, the number of writers might stay the same. We write because we love to write; we aren't just in it for the money (I hope). But we wouldn't bother marketing it if it would be seen as worthless. A lot more books would be left to gather dust in the drawers, until a friend or family member asks to read it. And maybe that will be how word of the next hot project gets around in the future. I guess all we can do is wait and see, our fingers crossed as we hope for the best.

Great post.I hadn't thought about the commons and 99 cent sales. I'd like to see a debate between you and Joe Konrath. on this one.

The only problem I have with most anti-99-cent arguments is that they often fail to take into account the principles of revenue management. A product is worth whatever people are willing to pay for it at a given time. If no one is buying it, it doesn't matter whether you personally value your book at 99 cents or $99, because in fact it is worth nothing. If you price at 99 cents and your book starts flying off the virtual shelf, then experiment with increased pricing until you find the breaking point as dictated by the buyers.

The demise of ebook pricing will not be determined by the pricing techniques of ebooks by thousands of unknown authors.

BTW, despite all this talk of 99 cents, e-book prices are going up, not down. The best-selling e-books often cost more than a trade paperback, not to mind a mass market paperback.

I read a lot of books.

Ebooks, print books, library books, borrowed books. My decision to buy an ebook over a print book is set by the price.

If I can buy an ebook for half the price of a print book, I prefer to read it that way. But often the price is the same (a buck less) for the ebook or the print book. Which stinks. If I spend fifteen bucks on a book, I want to be able to loan it out (not all ebooks are lendable).

It seems like there's a lot of cheap and free ebooks out there...I've read quite a few of them. I still want to read the *good* books that I want to read. I hope publishers can figure out a pricing system that is fair. I don't mind paying for books. But an ebook should be less than a print book.

I spend way more money on books than I ever have because of my kindle. Ebooks aren't going away, and I think publishers and authors need to figure out how to make money with this medium -- without price gouging or giving books away free.

And please let us not forget those that are unable to purchase nice shiny new objects so that they can purchase words to go in 'em. Our libraries are still the point of entry into the world of books for them. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

I think the problem here is that if someone is giving away their book for free, being a new author or self-published, they will force others to meet the price demands in order to sell their books. Raising the price of your next book in the series would screw yourself, because the next up and coming author would have a book out that they are giving away. The same person who did not want to pay for your first book, would probably rather get another free book than pay for your second.

This method does not work for the betterment of all in the long run. Much of what is wrong with the world today is the fact that too many of us only seek what 'we' need, as opposed to looking at how our actions effect others. Personally, I don't care for ebooks, and have yet to buy one. But I can see how charging so little could effect others.

I do wonder though, is this so different from companies that sell used books? Once the book is sold, the origonal author doesn't get royalties if the book is resold by a used book store. So what is the answer? This is a tough discussion, and I don't think there are any clear answers. All I am sure of is we need to think of others, not just our own needs.

I'd like to point out that Amazon will also get 5% for dealing with all the payments. When figuring out where to set your goal, you have to tally all your expenses and then add 10% (divide by 0.9). It's the safest way to make sure you don't forget something.

Otherwise - it really helps to have an established following, but really, Kickstarter is great because word of mouth often can do the job for you. It's an amazing tool!

Wow, Nathan. Thank you so much for asking Mur to share her story. I had no idea there were places like this. Wow.

Mur, your story is inspiring. Thank you for generously sharing this information with us! This is very exciting and impressive. And I love your line about the puppies. :)

Nathan, where is that paypal button??

Nathan, it's like you live inside my mind or something (I didn't mean that to come off as creepy as it sounds, btw).

Just yesterday I was thinking about kickstarter as a way to create an app out of a PB I've written. I decided a while back that the ms probably wasn't high concept enough to attract a traditional publishing deal. However, it has features that would (IMHO) potentially make a good iPhone/iPad app.

It is exciting to be a creative person in an age where there are so many options for your work to "live" and reach people. Thank you for stoking the fires with your thoughtful posts.

Great post Mur, and I loved the interview with Nathan over at I Should Be Writing. Cross-promotion for the win! Pay attention people ;)

Kickstarter looks like a great tool, but it seems like something where it definitely helps to already have a decent social media presence. So, for people wanting to know how/why to get on the social media bandwagon, consider:

Step 1: start writing
Step 2: get networking
Step 3: finish writing
Step 4: use your network to get your Kickstarter campaign going so you can publish your writing in a professional manner
(Hopefully followed by Step 5: Profit)

I'm curious as to whether revenue like this would be taxable? Or is it a bunch of individual small gifts? I count the (trivial) revenue I get from my web site's paypal donate button as income since I consider it part of my business, but I don't know if I really have to.

Fascinating! I had no idea stuff like this existed.

The internet never stops amazing me. You can really do anything.

I took a similar approach, though not with Kickstarter.

By offering pre-sales of my novels I was able to raise roughly $6000 for each book for the (offset) printing. It took a couple of months to raise the money for the first book, but only a week or two for the second.

It's a good feeling to know that when the semi-truck rolls up with a pallet-load of fresh new books that they are 100% paid for, and the 1000 or so that haven't sold yet are free and clear profit that you can put toward the rent and the next printing.

Kickstarter is brilliant - if you're in the US.

I unearthed it a few years back now and at the time the site said they were planning to go international. In fact, it was the exact same wording in the FAQ that is still there now.

I'm not holding my breath! ^_^

My good friend Polly Law published her book by raising Kickstarter funds. For those who love obscure words, "The Word Project" stars her bricolage illustrations:
http://buttonwoodart.com/WP/WPA.html

Wow. I'd never even considered the possibility of such a thing. Very cool.

It would never work for me, but that doesn't make it any less awesome.

Thank Mur, and Nathan!

Holy Helpful Hannahs, Bat-Mur!

Fantastic success story. Congratulations. Thanks for sharing your experience.

Nathan, great choice for a guest post!

Great story, Mur, and congrats on your momentum!
I love the idea of podcasting your stories, I'll have to check that out.
I'd never heard of Kickstarter. I have Google Affiliate and adsense and never made one penny from either, so I pulled the ads. My blog looks much better without them.
- Thanks for the info and good luck!
PS love the image of the guitar guy, Nathan! You always have a great image to illustrate your article.

I'm not singling out Mur Lafferty here. I'm speaking in general terms. Obviously Mur has a good reputation that people know and trust. But I would like to mention a few things about the general concept of kickstarter.

On all levels, it absolutely astounds me that people would take their hard earned money and give it away to help fund a project and a person they know virtually nothing about. It astounds me even more someone would have the nerve to ask for it.

I saw one "aspiring" singer/actor/wannabe-rich-and-famous type on facebook last year run a campaign with a goal of making 20k in order to make a CD. I followed it for weeks, watching in amazement as trusting people pledged so he could meet his goal. And he did meet the goal. But I haven't seen the CD yet and he's disappeared from facebook. I'm sure there will be ramifications. But I also think whoever donated money to him got just what they deserved and learned a good lesson.

I'd like to know whatever happened to get a job, work hard, and save your own money instead of asking for handouts. I think I'd rather scrub floors on my hands and knees than beg anyone in public for money. And I'd rather donate money to a worthy charity than hand it out to anyone hocking a book, a song, or an acting career.

Anon 8:47:

Artistic sponsorship is a time-honored tradition.

Very interesting stats! You still need some marketing skills, which Mur has indicated and assessment of your audience.

I can see the value of Kickstarter for a series of novellas, and I'm assuming this is YA material that Mur is writing just from a quick look at her site. YA is hot right now, and that doesn't hurt either.

Good luck to Mur who seems to be on her way in the self-pubbed world (and who knows after that?).

For me, I'll think about it. It's always good to know the options out there. It's like anything else, you have to make your own choices.

I'll keep the post for reference.

I've seen these kickstarter book projects, and I just have one question:

Why do you need $1600 for an ebook conversion? Isn't that done in about 5 minutes by a doc-to-epub utility program?

Seriously. I can see needing $500 for a copy editor, and maybe a couple hundred for cover art or technical help with formatting. But if you're paying some company $1600 just to convert file formats for you, you -- and your readers -- are being ripped off.

...except for the fact that for an unknown, fresh baby author it won't do a lick of good. No one wants to take a chance on someone they have never read or heard from before.

Which, of course, the reply to that would be 'that's why you need web presence'. But if you spend all your time attempting to build the web presence, trying to find people to buy into you before you write the book, how are you ever going to find the time to write the book in the first place, between working a full time job, taking care of a family, and trying to care for yourself?

In short, it's called impossibility, unless you are disabled\unemployed and have all the time in the world to write, are independantly wealthy, or have magic powers.

No, I'm not a cynic. I'm a realist.

Discovering Kickstarter was a fab way to start this day and I thank you for bringing Lafferty's story to your readers.

I would hope that you stress that this plan is not for beginners, the unpublished or those who self-published and have material languishing online.

This warning seems obvious to experienced insiders, but the desperately hopeful will see what they want to see and miss the catch that they must already have a large audience/following to make it work.

very cool. I just backed a kickstarter project for a favorite musician of mine. It seems like a handy website

@ Anon 8:47 - I agree with some of your points as well about how easily some people will donate their money to a personal cause. But, the Impressionists could have used something like this to help fund their art (before it was accepted as art).

I wouldn't donate to a stranger (via the web), but I would donate to an author friend. I did like the fact that Mur offered incentives.

There will always be con artists trying to rip off the unsuspecting. One must always have 'eyes wide open' in the web world.

I've never thought about self publishing before, but I am beginning to think about it. Pen and Ink will be self publishing a book very soon. We will keep readers informed of the progress

"Artistic sponsorship is a time-honored tradition."


Mary Higgins Clark was widowed young, had small kids, worked full time commuting from NJ to NY and wrote her novels between four and six every morning. It took time and hard work, not entitlement.

Good old fashioned hard work is also a time honored tradition :)

Anon 9:21:

Imagine what Mary Higgins Clark could have accomplished with sponsorship.

Sponsorship allows the artist to put their energy into creation rather than survival.

Congratulations Mur! And thanks for this super informative post Nathan! I believe Cheryl Klein used Kickstarter for her book "Second Sight" too. What a great new way to help readers feel totally involved with a project. I love the community-oriented nature of this.:)

I also love Kickstarter (and indiegogo and the others like it). I think there are a ton of ways to utilize the site, particularly if you think of it as a collaboration between you and your fans. There are lots of ways to offer value and gain value beyond a book or app (though those rock, too). I've just launched my own project designed to enable me to give away school visits for free (yet get paid!), for example. Building relationships via your presence is they key, I think.

I love this post, and had never heard of this service before. I have been self-publishing for about 15 years; and it hasn't always been easy.

You are welcome to share information on my blog, writeouswriter.blogspot.com

"Imagine what Mary Higgins Clark could have accomplished with sponsorship."

Interesting.

It seems to me that we're seeing the dawn of a golden age in self-publishing. It’s awesome that Mur was able to raise so much money through Kickstarter because it means that enough people believed in his self-published work to donate money to his next project. Exciting times! Congratulations, Mur!

This is a great post Nathan, special thanks to Mur for providing all the links :) And thanks to everyone else for the additional comments, this is the stuff that makes being an artist in these bright times exciting! We have the power people, grab it by the balls and run!
*Also I must point out that you are channelling my need for info and responding via this blog in a bizarre twilight zone kind of way. Or perhaps I spend too much time on your blog. Chicken or egg, which came first?

A band I'm friends with is almost done with a Kickstarter campaign to fund their new album, and reached their goal in three days. Pretty amazing site.

Like I said yesterday: We all have to make money to pay the bills. But, hey, that's what the day job is for!

Interesting. Thanks for the post.

I participated in funding a project for an artist I didn't even know existed until I saw a recommendation from a friend on Facebook. I loved the artist's work and decided I'd be happy to throw a few bucks his way. My "incentive" arrived in beautiful condition, and I'm very happy I helped this artist achieve his goal.

How did I decide? Definitely from the Youtube trailer. Kickstarter is correct in advising that this tool is essential. It sold me!

Best of luck Mur! I'm going to check out your project now! :)

Thanks Nathan for a great series!

Nathan, of all the blogs I read, yours is the most informative and helpful to writers. Please don't stop blogging!

It's easier to move an industry that relies on unskilled workers (textile manufacturing moved out of New York, then offshore without too much trouble) than it is to move skilled workers away en masse.

Also, commercial real estate in NY (+ tax incentives) isn't as pricy as you might think since 9/11. There are still many empty offices downtown, and that drives prices down.

That said, as the industry consolidates more and more, and the Big Six becomes the Big Two or the Big 0.67, it becomes easier for an industry to move out because there are fewer decision-makers.

So New York could lose the publishing industry when HarperCollinsHachetteMacMillianPenguin & Schuster gets a better offer somewhere else.

I think it's more basic than that.

1.) It's easy to stay. The wheels are already in motion. The resources are already there. I'm a person who's moved 10x in 10 years, it's always hard to get going in a new place.
2.) History runs deep.

That being said, they could do it. Life outside of New York isn't as soul sucking or artless as it's made out to be. The skilled employees would move with their job. Or other qualified people would step in.

Personally, a move shakes up the pot in a good way. A little more diversity. A little more growth. Neither of which would be bad for the publishing industry.

Thank you for this, Nathan. I've long wondered about this, though many of my publishing houses are scattered around the nation (Oregon, Michigan, Colorado). It's also important to note that folks can have really amazing power lunches in Manhattan! (Just not the same in Colorado Springs.)

Interesting post. I think you have some good points about drawing on talent, etc, but there is a lot of talent elsewhere and the truth is there are a lot of people who move to NYC because of publishing. People who might not have to move if publishing were spread throughout the country.

Another thought about this, is would we think more broadly, have different perspectives on our readership, were we spread throughout the country? Would it give us a marketing edge if we were less NYC centric?

I'm not sure if the cost savings is enough to leave, but I think that as time goes on we'll see more smaller presses in other parts of the country, like Sourcebooks for example, make bigger inroads and make NYC less important as a publishing town.


--jhf

You cite the availability of a highly educated workforce as a major reason to center in NYC. I'm wondering what the workforce there has over any other city.

There are an awful lot of English majors graduating every year that would like a publishing/editing position. Even in South Dakota.

I don't have any experience with this yet, and hate to sound negative. But are New York editors really that educated and talented compared to elsewhere?

New York is a mindset all its own. Good and bad, the mindset is one of megatropolis-itis. It's Gotham high brow, great for mass culture urbanism. The downside is a thought process that treats everywhere else like hinterlands subserviently serving the primate city. New York doesn't give two figs or know what it's like in Ruralania. Everywhere else is beneath New York in stature. As a consequence, what New York publishes doesn't fully serve the hinterlands, writers or readers.

Take off the blinders, get out and enjoy the countryside, New York. Discover rural arts and broaden horizons.

Jessica-

Definitely, and that's one reason I found it helpful as an agent to be outside of NYC. Having things concentrated in one place does have its disadvantages as well.

Others-

It's not snobbery that's keeping publishing in New York any more than it's snobbery keeping the computer industry in Silicon Valley. That's, historically, where it set up, that's where the concentration of skilled workers are. Yes, there are educated people elsewhere, but industries benefit from drawing upon a concentration of an industry in one place and the networking opportunities it affords. Please read the Richard Florida articles!

Given the rise of eBooks, publishing needs to be a low cost business. Being in New York does not make publishing a low cost business. If anything, being in NY raises the overhead for a business that already has slim margins.

With computers, cover art can be freelanced out and files can be sent in. Edits can also be done remotely. And book layout in InDesign can be done anywhere. These skills are not location specific or incredibly difficult to learn.

Book marketing barely exists now, and publishers would hire outside firms anyway.

So what else am I missing besides copyright stuff and book sales to distributors and chains?

Why do you need a highly educated work force for this business model? What is so challenging about it?

Nathan: what are these skills that can only be found in NY? I just don't get it.

Don't forget that these places can also draw talent to the pool. Just like publishers settling in one place they can draw talent to them. Writers can go to New York, like actors go to LA and computer programmers go to Silicon Valley. You can always be small in one market, but there is always a place called the Big-time.

I don't think it matters where a publisher is located. Signing on excellent authors and publishing great books - that's the deal. I believe publishers can find talent in every corner of the globe.

I think this sort of ignores one important point. The assumption seems to be that there needs to be a central office at all. I think we all know that people are working remotely more and more. (I type this from my couch between editing articles of my own.) In fact, it was always my experience with editors that when ever they wanted to get some real editing done...they worked from home where there aren't pointless meetings and a million phone calls. The question isn't really "Do publishers need NY offices?" but "Do they need an office, and if so, how big does it really need to be?"

There's also something to be said for hiring the best, and not just the closest person for the job...and the ability to pay "South Dakota" salaries instead of "NYC salaries."

anon-

The same could be said of the computer industry. Everyone could work remotely, particularly because everyone is already so Internet savvy. So why are so many companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley?

Because there's a benefit to face to face communication, networking, and talent (and experience) pools.

Having worked in NYC publishing for a couple of decades, I thrived in the density of talent with creative, intelligent people working very hard to produce the best possible work.

Now, living and working across the river, I can tell you it just ain't the same. I miss the stimulation of a bright, creative environment (but I don't miss the commute).

Well, isn't it obvious? New York is just cooler.

:)

@Nathan:

But I would argue that the computer industry has challenging problems that need the talent to be available locally in teams. So I get Silicon Valley.

But Hollywood has seen a shift to Canada, where most of our TV shows and some movies today are filmed to save money.

I don't think publishing has many new problems that need folks available in person on a day to day basis. Besides networking, what are the advantages for publishing to be in NY?

Nathan,
As a New Yorker myself, I for one hope New York remains the hub of publishing; both for my own writing interests and as a New York tax payer!

That said, I think the "overhead" of the publishing business will probably migrate out of NY as the publishing business continues to evolve and face pricing pressure. I'm talking about the "worker-bees" (i.e. administration, marketing, shipping, design, etc.) There is no reason to maintain this presence in a pricey market such as NY, and other emerging business hubs are offering favorable tax advantages to businesses to move work forces to their town (Cincinnati, and Minneapolis come to mind).

Nathan - you parallel this to the technology industry maintaining their presence in Silicon Valley. Interestingly enough, my day job is in tech so I know a lot about this. A lot of the Silicon Valley companies are maintaining their management presence in pricey CA, but moving their developers, QA people, support, etc. to cheaper areas. We all know about outsourcing to India, but I am seeing a move to Florida, Texas, and even Canada.

Publishers will always maintain some presence in NY. They can't afford not to. Their "worker-bees" may move elsewhere, but management will stay in NY.

anon-

Even if movies are filmed in Canada, the studios and agents are mostly in LA.

Publishing is a collaborative process--there are meetings to decide which books to acquire, how best to produce and market them, etc. etc., and this means lots and lots of meetings. Not to mention lunches with agents and editors from other houses and various other socializing, during which lots and lots and lots of information and ideas are exchanged.

And yeah, you can videoconference, but it's just not the same.

But really, all of this kind of strikes me as kind of missing the forest from the trees. The marginal cost of renting Manhattan office space vs. Illinois office space is what, a couple million dollars? Ten million dollars? For a company that measures its revenue in the billions and profit in the hundreds of millions that ten million dollars is a relative drop in the bucket.

I loved loved loved being in New York, but the oh-god-why-cost of living is wretched and I didn't even live there. I lived in Boston which is absolutely no better, and took a train to NY every weekend. The density of everything is incredibly stimulating and awesome, but financially it made no sense for little old me to move there, not when I could move home to Nebraska and pay a third of what I paid out East and do most of the same work from home.

I get that it is nice to be so close to each other and to talent - because let's face it, the city itself draws the talent - but when companies are struggling and people are struggling, maybe changing locales is something to think about. Moving out to cheaper real estate climate isn't necessarily a bad idea to consider. I don't run a billion dollar company though so who knows? Maybe it isn't such an expense in the big picture.

Still, I think it is interesting that one of the big problems the publishing industry seems to be facing is the fact they aren't adapting quickly to the technological changes being made around them by others. These days so much work doesn't even need to be made IN the workplace thanks to technology. Some things yes, and occassionally definitely, but I work in an office that functions quite well when people work from home.

As someone who works in regional planning and deals with this kind of stuff all the time, let me tell you it's not all about land values. There are many factors that go into whether (or NOT) you can attract a talent pool to a location, whether workers will be happy, whether they will *flee* because they can't handle the political/economic/religious/civic nature of the area. I'm sorry, but as cheap as (for instance) central California is, there is no way either the publishing industry or the computer industry could thrive here with the region's majority values (including rampant anti-intellectualism). That being said, I do think the publishing industry could make better use of information technology to spread out at least a little bit, if there was really a benefit to doing so. I doubt the real estate is as big an issue as employee salaries and benefits, and I'm not going to suggest slashing someone's pay so I can have a paperback a dollar cheaper. No, I think NY's future (if it has much of one) is going to have to be innovation and evolution rather than budget-balancing.

I think Nicholas Cage said it best in one of his movies. "If Rome was the center of civilization for the Roman Empire then New York City is the Rome for modern times." Or something like that.

Thank you for the history lesson, Nathan. I always wondered why NYC is the center. NYC always had a glamorous connection with publishing. In comic novels NYC and publishing is also appeared one way or another (i.e.: Daily Planet). NYC is not lost. The question is; do they want to save it or not. But I don't believe that a new symbol can replace NYC. That publisher is going to win who will stay behind in NYC after all the others left. That one will have the greatest prestige, a symbol, while the rest must rebuild everything from the beginning.

MaryZ
"I miss the stimulation of a bright, creative environment"
The usual quantity vs. quality problem. Unfortunately it's appearing in every industry.

yes, there's the critical mass theory / argument as for why the publishing industry is NYC centric. However, that attitude breeds a snobbery that insulates NY pubs from larger, national realities. Riding the subway, one might assume from the many people one sees reading that the publishing industry is fine (tons of people read on the train.) Although I doubt publishing execs take their cues from the No.6, I believe it relates to a snobbery - about the rest of the country - that works against a NY centric world view, specifically writers who, if they don't live there, are viewed as provincial. I've lived in NY, and not lived in NY, and have come to the conclusion that while it's exciting to live there, it's not particularly conducive to actual writing. The self-inflation New Yorkers seem to derive from weathering snow, and riding around in metal containers underground is funny if you think about it (esp. since they all look so serious doing it.)

Not living there affects one's career in the practical way you describe: during the course of the day, you're less likely (okay, unlikely) to run into a colleague. However, that lack of personal contact would seem to be contradicted by the oft played tune, "The internet's going to solve everything." Maybe the fact that there are advantages and disadvantages to living in an 19th century city are the same contradictions we're seeing played out in publishing ie., print vs. digital?

The tech industry, and Hollywood, are different animals that operate a bit differently. Still, what I'm suggesting is that at least one publisher get out ahead of the curve, and downsize its offices. Publishers already work with freelancers all over the country -- designers, proofreaders, etc. -- many of whom have left New York and the full-time publishing world. In fact, at some houses, I'd say those freelancers do the majority of the heavy lifting. Smaller, smarter offices and a digital workforce could really kick-start a much needed change in an industry struggling with profit margins.

I agree with the cluster theory. Even porn has its own little cluster thing going on in The Valley.

I think he simplest answer is that they're in New York because that's where they've always been. Why move? I mean, besides the obvious pool of talent, agents, editors, et al, the mechanics of the industry are located in and around the area.
I'm sure we'll start to see more imprints popping up in other areas, but if I'm a huge publishing house that's been in a specific area for years, and I'm experiencing relative success, why would I want to change that?

I don't think WHERE the publishing industry is will be as important in the digital age as its mindset. If they can't stop thinking in the old pre-digital ways, they're going to be in trouble wherever they're located, just like the big brick and mortar bookstores.
If moving would help them start thinking in newer ways, then it might be good for them, but there's no reason they can't do the same thing right where they are.

New York and other large cities seem to have a vibrancy that appeals to all - they have super jazz spots, fashion houses,and the big publishers.

There is also a certain business logic to consolidating to be near suppliers and associated industries, but writing talent isn't clustered in 3 or 4 cities.

It's not as important as it was -- with online access -- to live near the centre of the publishing world.

Elitism survives in daily life, simply because the elite like to be above the masses. Do NY publishers give preference to NY writers, considering the rest of us to be 'lesser than'?

I'd prefer to see publishing in a large city rather than a small town, based on attitudes that seem prevalent in small communities. I can't see that moving out of NY is going to change anything that much. Especially when no one is sure what is on the horizon.

Just let the authors/writers survive, that's what really counts.

It seems now that most people in publishing (lit agents,editors,etc)have a book in mind themselves that they want to get published.

Is that why agents, editors & writers are clustered in New York?

I see the validity of your arguments, Nathan, but there's another factor that I think should be considered: Being centered in New York, a unique and rarefied environment, can cause publishers to be out of touch with the majority of their potential readers scattered across the country. The ethos of Middle America, the South, the Northwest, or any other region you care to name is radically different from the ethos of New York.

Also, I contend that many writers only live in New York in order to be close to publishers. Chances are a lot of them would rather live somewhere else.

Personally, I wish the industry would move to the middle of the country somewhere. It's frustrating for writers on the West Coast to be so far from "where it's happening." Especially since, as writers, we don't have the budget for travel.

Nathan,
Great work, look forward to each post. I really think this day in age if you are putting out a great product people will find you. I come from the print side of things and worked with hundreds and hundreds of publishers big and small and we never thought one area of the country stood out...being big does not mean they were great to work with or knew what they were doing. That I can promise you. I think getting back to working directly with the author is the way things are going and you the author should have more and more say in each decision, if you're not...then you're losing opportunities. Keep up the great work.

Nathan Kuiper
Compass Book

I can see why clustering works really well for publishers.

But have you ever seen the movie Interstate 60? Remember the town of Morlaw?

Sometimes I wonder if clustering that much is healthy.

I am an editor who is located in Montreal, Canada, when most of mainstream publishing is located in Toronto, and some of the more renegade publishing is in British Columbia (out west). I can tell you from my experience that location has certainly affected how I feel about publishing. Montreal is in Quebec, which is primarily a French-language province, and I work at an English-language publisher. There is certainly a place for that in Quebec as well, but I don't know of any other publishing house that works in mainstream publishing in Montreal. As a result, I do often feel isolated and not steeped in publishing the way I would like to be (though at times I appreciate the break as well). But as an editor, I feel it's important to be in touch with a community -- editing is about collaboration and conversation -- in order to understand the shifts that are happening in form and market -- in order to better communicate them -- and I sometimes fear the lack of that (I compensate by reading wonderful blogs such as these!). It's easy to quantify financial benefits -- but there are some things, while not easily measurable, really determine not only our success but also our satisfaction with what we are doing.

I hink another reason, industry density works for publishing is that it's still very much a face-to-face industry.

Lots of business meetings over lunch, which could arguably be done by email. But that's just a characteristic of the industry. And as long as those lunches stay important, publishers, agents, authors and illustrators will have every reason to be in NYC or at least within striking distance.

Clustering happens with criminals too. Here's a link to a Wired mag article about how a small town in Romania became "Cybercrime Central"...
http://tinyurl.com/5wccy64

NOTE to those commenters referring to the movie industry filming a lot in Canada - it's mainly Vancouver.

We have an film industry in Vancouver that has proved very efficient and sometimes cheaper than producing in LA. There is also a large talent pool of actors & support industries to select from.

Recent productions (still filming) include the current sequel for Twilight. Tom Cruise and his wife shop and visit here while he's filming another Mission Impossible movie. They call Vancouver 'Hollywood North' for a reason.

So the film industry knows that expansion outside the 'centre' can be profitable. Some of their best directors are stepping outside the protective bubble of familiarity.

As an author, I love having a California agent. But there's nothing quite like having a NYC publisher, even as the empire is wobbling.

New authors must differentiate themselves as never before, these days. Landing a New York publisher isn't a bad way to do that.

And it's not easy getting past the old-school gatekeepers. After all that striving for all those years, I'd prefer not to receive editorial and publicity correspondence from Just Anywhere, USA.

Call it sentimental or elitist or delusional but, as with the mythic notion of Hollywood, I think it's great that authors still have a physical address for their dreams.

1) Not all tech industries are in Silicon Valley. And these days, the HQ may be in one locale but the majority of tech workers are either at low-cost hubs (Arkansas and Texas, and other places without a state income tax) in the States, offshore or they work from home.

2) Just because a company or industry has revenue in the billions doesn't mean it's profitable. You have to look at profit margins, which may be razor thin or even negative. In that case, cutting overhead costs by even a few million CAN make a huge difference to the bottom line. The Big 6 chose to cut a heck of a lot of talent instead of real estate a couple of years ago, opting for short-term gain over long-term value. That's because investors are interested in short-term profitability in a shaky economy, NOT in the overall health of a company or industry.

You only have to look at Michigan and its housing economy and unemployment stats to see what happens when an industry stays concentrated.

I think this underscores another important point: If the market's doing something, it's doing it for a reason. Believe it or not, most businesses tend to make rational decisions. (Otherwise, they wouldn't stay in business very long.) We don't have to complain about this; we just have to find our own place in the market, our own little niche.

Great post, Nathan. This is the sort of stuff that makes the economist in me smile:)

I think Windsor, Ontario, would be far superior. Just sayin'.

Good question...I've worked in publishing or printing in NYC for most of my career and sometimes I've wanted to relocate, but it's hard to figure out where to go. There are great publishing houses here and there outside NYC, but it would be risky to take a job at one of them--in case it didn't work out.

I disagree that NYC publishers are provincial and don't care about the hinterlands. My novel is set in NYC and that's not something that's very interesting to people in publishing--I think they'd much rather read about a place that seems exotic to them (a ranch in Montana? another country? etc etc)...

Publishing requires a whole lot of younger assistants who will work for very little money--and no, not all of them have trust funds. Perhaps it's easier to find this pool of well educated, liberal arts grads in and near NYC than in some other cities.

But I think it's mostly just due to tradition....

Tradition is a heavy weight. I think there will still be major publishers in New York for a long time to come. But times "are a changing..."
I just had a picture book accepted by Beach Lane Books. Beach Lane Books is Allyn Johnston's imprint at Simon and Schuster and it's located in La Jolla, CA Allyn is, for my money, the Steven Spielberg of editors. I think where she is located is unimportant.
I have three books published by Guardian Angel Publishing. GAP is located in St Louis Mo.
The WWW had made us all much more of a global community. We're all local now.

One thing that one might point out about the publishing talent is that it came to New York – it likely wasn’t born and raised there. ☺ I would argue that if someone in publishing doesn’t want to relocate to … oh, I dunno, Utah or Nevada or a less exciting area, he/she probably went into it for all the wrong reasons.

The manufacturing plants that moved to the South (nonunion states) had the right idea. I’ve noticed that most of my clients have small offices in big cities like NYC and LA but do the bulk of their business out of Texas or Washington State. Reason? Austin and Seattle are the two most educated cities in the U.S. One of two people has a four-year university degree, and Austin takes the lead in the highest population with masters degrees and PhDs. It would be easier to go where the biggest pools of talent exist.

All of these things are points to consider for the publishing industry, not only when considering its future but when looking at our shabby state of our country’s economics -- which is not going to change soon. It would very still be sad to see the industry leave New York. Will the industry make a smart business decision? I don’t know. I mean, I never thought I’d see the day where the music industry in L.A. would crumble, and yet it did. Had it already had a presence established anywhere else but one of the most cost-prohibitive cities in which to do business, it could have rallied.

Great review on this topic and you did it again.

It took a day to do? It's loaded with information.

Thanks for all you do Nathan Bransford.

Nathan, you write about the most interesting things! Albeit, controversial. And I have to admit, I was very judgemental about Publishing in New York, but you've changed my mind.

You're right. History, contact density, access to professional worker, it makes sense that publishers haven't moved.

I also just realized that after all those years of paying rent, not to mention billion dollar budgets, they probably own the buildings by now, anyway.

Besides, I really don't think that cost-cutting is the way for publishers to go right now anyway. They need to spend MORE money. They need to spend money on fostering author loyalty and strengthening their imprint. They also need to start thinking creatively. In the same way that we've been advising bookstores to diversify and think out of the box, I think publishers could benefit from doing the same thing.

I would like to see the major publishers spread throughout the country rather than all located in one city. I think their having a little more cultural/regional diversity would help them do a better job of selling books, collectively, to the entire nation.

Plus, I don't see publishing as a high-margin business. If it was high margin in the past, it won't be in the future. Low-margin businesses need to keep their overhead low.

re: talent, people go where the jobs are. I live in Seattle because a Seattle-area tech company offered me a job. Not all tech companies are located in Silicon Valley. Seattle is a major tech hub, as is Austin, TX. This is a good thing, if for no other reason than we wouldn't want our entire tech industry to be wiped out by an earthquake :)

Also, I'm told many publishing industry jobs don't pay very well. Doesn't that make the cost of living in New York a problem for some people?

My supervisor in grad school once said if you want to build a world-class research university, the one thing you must do is put everybody's offices in the same building.

Human beings spark ideas off one another and come up with better solutions than they could working alone.

This is why it's so important for writers to read widely--most of our work must be done alone, so reading is our way to spark ideas off one another.

It's important to note that most of these industries clustered in one location before the advent of electronic communication, which allows people on different continents to communicate almost instantaneously. The industry in New York probably has enough gravity to keep attracting people there, but it's not completely implausible that new companies could rise up elsewhere and help distribute the industry more geographically, especially given all the shake-ups lately.

Interesting points - I've never given a thought to why all the publishers are located in one place but it makes sense.

I love New York so much. If my husband would agree to it, I'd pay a ton of money to live in a closet-sized studio in East Village. I can see why publishers would want to stay put.

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This makes a lot of sense, but one reason publishers should consider migrating is that talent is also migrating. More and more urban intensification and reclaimed industrial space is happening in smaller, once-robust towns (such as my own, Winston-Salem, which is re-imagining itself a hub for the arts instead of the cradle of the tobacco industry).

Although saving on Manhattan rent may not ultimately be the difference between fiscal life and death, cost of living for employees is also startlingly lower outside major urban areas, most prominently in New York.

While I certainly don't want a trend of underpaying publishing employees, adjusting salaries commensurate with cost of living—when coupled with lower operating expenses—could certainly make a difference to a house's bottom line. And maybe plumbing other reservoirs of talent (particularly the kind of talent already focused on seeing new possibilities in established areas) might bring some fresh ideas to the industry.

A very interesting and thought provoking post.

I live in the NYC area; I work in Manhattan. In fact, I work across the street from Simon & Schuster and down the street from MacMillan.

But I have yet to see any great personal benefit to living and working in the heart of the U.S. publishing industry (other than my "day job," which is journalism).

I have friends who have published with online-based publishers. I do not believe, with today's technology, publishers need either to be based or even clustered around famed haunts for "doing lunch" in Manhattan. I could theoretically be published by Espasa in Madrid as easily--thanks to the internet--as by Scribner's in Manhattan, or Wylie & Sons in Cincinatti. Or by McSweeney's out your way.

Many of the "better" agents were based in Manhattan at one time, for the very reasons you mentioned. And, because of the sense that pressure makes diamonds and competition makes sharper talent, many writers still live and work here.

But they don't have to. They choose to. Just as many celebrities choose to buy Manhattan apartments and price out those trying to make a living in "the City," so, too, do many not.

I have one friend, a reasonably famous and successful writer, who still mostly lives in Wisconsin. One who lives in Oregon. One in Baltimore. One where he's always lived, in Whitmore Lake, Michigan.

And at least one (really several, because I lived there for years as well) in Texas.

And there's you, in sunny California (where "Redroom.com," a writer's online community, is based).

It always has amused me that Joseph Pulitzer was really mostly known for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, yet Columbia University, in NYC, is in charge of the Pulitzer Prizes.

And William Randolph Hearst is mostly known for San Simeon, out your way, than for the New York World (which no longer exists).

New York is reasonably unique as a melting pot of humanity, a particularly ambitious nd hardworking, creative and intelligent and, presumably largely well-educated sampling of humanity. It's true.

But locations attract people and industry, I think, more than the industries--in this day and age--necessarily attract people. That's exactly why, while New York still has Broadway, Los Angeles has Hollywood (even some television series', most notably All My Children, that were filmed in NY have moved to California).

So, real estate prices being what they are, I would not be at all surprised to find, say, a start-up upstart publishing house operated virtually out of someone's basement, garage or apartment, that one day will be the place people want to be associated with.

Publishing--I'm not, you'll note, talking literature here--is a business. A business based on economics. And if an "economy of scale" cannot be reached remaining in Manhattan, I expect it will move. Look at Amazon, for instance...or Google...you may not be. But they are.

Nathan @8:03 AM said:
"But really, all of this kind of strikes me as kind of missing the forest from the trees. The marginal cost of renting Manhattan office space vs. Illinois office space is what, a couple million dollars? Ten million dollars? For a company that measures its revenue in the billions and profit in the hundreds of millions that ten million dollars is a relative drop in the bucket."

Huzzah!! Oh my word, in so many discussions about the state of the economy that includes recommendations about how people need to cut back, it always seems to me that the forest is being completely ignored. It’s like saying, Well, we want the rich to remain unbelievably rich, so everyone else needs to cut back to help them out. I’m not against people being rich. But Bertelsmann AG owns Random House, and last year Bertelsmann AG INCREASED its sales to $21.7 BILLION. So, considering that they increased their sales to $21.7 billion...which, with all the digits looks like this: $21,700,000,000.00...it really doesn’t make sense to say that Bertelsmann AG should take away the New York office space of the people toiling away in publishing in order to save $1 million or even $10 million. Plus, when entire industries actually do leave a city, the city usually ends up decimated – not a great thing for the people living there.

Good post, good discussion!

I hear what some people are saying about high rent and low profit margins, but I agree that when you start talking in terms of billions, saving a few million (and it would just be a few, not even a few hundred) really isn't much. I mean, would you move across town just to save $5 a day on transit fare? Or on gas? It doesn't make sense.

Also: I know a writer who sent 300 queries before she got a yes. But once she had that one yes, she had a contact, who she remembered. And then she met that same contact at a meeting later, and at the meetings she met more contacts, whom she remembered, and from then on all her book deals were basically brokered face-to-face. She developed relationships with people in publishing by going to conferences and workshops and meetings for writers and she knows what people want and she gets a lot of work. You cannot underestimate the power of face-to-face networking.

So some folks are clamoring about how large the sales are for publishing companies. But these same publishing companies with huge sales are struggling to turn a profit. That's right, even with a billion dollars in sales, some of these companies still run red from time to time.

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/46591-scholastic-reports-higher-third-quarter-loss.html

And if you look at financial statements, the biggest expenses are usually salaries and facilities.

Because the major publishers are located in one of the most expensive to live in cities, then I'd also expect publishers to have high than average salaries, even though some of the staff can afford to work for free, and even though some of the staff will spend over an hour riding the train in from a cheaper, nearby city like NJ.

What this means is that these publishers have to charge more for eBooks like Nathan pointed out in an earlier blog post to make money.

Of course, these same publishers heavily depend on their authors. Check this out:

http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/financial-reporting/article/46428-profits-fall-at-hachette.html

The new publishers are located in every little hamlet. All it takes for an author to be successful is writing talent, a computer (with MS Word), and partnerships with a good editor and cover designer. Even critique groups can be found online.

Virtual partnering changes everything, and lowers overhead significantly. How can NY compete with the business that runs out of a garage in Nebraska?

Look at all the indies in the top 100 bestsellers on Kindle store. They have extremely low overhead and high profit margins. How does the NY high-buck lunch crowd compete with that?

They can't. Publishing will operate on a more distributed model. Some NY publishers will survive, but their business model will look very different from what it is today.

Anon @8:58 PM,

I’m not sure how you’re interpreting the financial figures in the articles you mentioned. Also, I’m not sure, but I don’t think that Scholastic’s one of the "Big Six" publishing houses. Here are the "Big Six" with information on the bigger corporations that own them: here.

The Publishers Weekly article said that profits fell from the previous year for the Hachette Book Group USA parent company Lagardere because the previous year they had "unprecedented sales" for the mega-best-seller Stephenie Meyer’s books. So, of course, sales later on wouldn’t be as high as during the unprecedented mega-best-selling period. Even then, their sales "dropped down" to 2.16 BILLION euros.

In regard to Scholastic, they still earned $1.37 BILLION revenue for a 9-month period, and expect to earn $1.9 BILLION revenue for the year: here.

Anon @8:58 PM,

I’m not sure how you’re interpreting the financial figures in the articles you mentioned. Also, I’m not sure, but I don’t think that Scholastic’s one of the “Big Six” publishing houses. Here are the “Big Six” with information on the bigger corporations that own them: here.

The Publishers Weekly article said that profits fell from the previous year for the Hachette Book Group USA parent company Lagardere because the previous year they had “unprecedented sales” for the mega-best-seller Stephenie Meyer’s books. So, of course, sales later on wouldn’t be as high as during the unprecedented mega-best-selling period. Even then, their sales “dropped down” to 2.16 billion euros.

In regard to Scholastic, they still earned $1.37 BILLION revenue for a 9-month period, and expect to earn $1.9 BILLION revenue for the year: here.

Great post, Nathan, as always! It seems to boil down to the advantages of face-to-face networking vs. networking on the Internet. A little like the digital vs. the paper book controversy.

Since this is a "globalizing" age, with more and more information flying in the ether, it is likely that there will be a "spreading out" effect. Some publishers will move out of NYC, or at least move out some of their operations (the "worker-bees" of administration etc. Others will stay for the benefit of "density", "stimulation" from face-to-face interaction.

Conclusion? NYC will always remain a major publishing center, but others will rise - indeed, they have already risen in California and elsewhere!

I've never really thought about this issue because to me all publishers being in New York just always seemed to make sense. As an Art History Major I always just think of great industries clustering together and thriving (Publishing in NYC, Films in Hollywood etc.) as functionning on the same sort of logic/system that made Florence the Cradle of the Renaissance. It's incredibly difficult to pinpoint how most of these things start and is usually a weird serendipidous mix of the money, the talent and the demand being in the same place at the same time (We are the Medicis, we have power and palaces and churches. We need Artists to Decorate them. You! Giotto, come work for us). But once it has started its so easy for these things to build up and maintain themselves (Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and other artists who were sometimes but not always Ninja Turtles). This is not to say the industry can't spread and prosper elsewhere (Titian in Venice...) and sure it doesn't last forever (Give it a few centuries and Paris became the capitol of the Art world and then...well New York), but while it does it's just...natural.

Staying in NYC seems the lazy way out. But I admit I'm biased. I'm a 52 year old woman who drove to Manhattan last April from rural far west Texas (from Alpine, next to Marfa) to be part of Seth Godin's 1st leadership session, "Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?" I am the mother of two, and my husband's business partner, so of course I'm a linchpin!! I felt like every cabbie I passed in NYC had the same idea "Let's scare the crap out of the little lady with the Texas tags!" It worked, too!

http://jdavisstudio.com/2011/03/seth-godin-poke-the-box-linchpin-and-hows-that-for-seo-seth/

Interesting post, Nathan, thank you, and I learned a lot from the various perspectives of the commenters. I do understand the theory of clustering (Banks all wind up on the same street and sometimes the same street corner of town, for example). However, the Internet has changed and will continue to change daily the way we work across the business spectrum, including where we live and work. The inability thus far of NYC publishing to recognize this and to react well to it in a real-time manner can be seen in every publisher's bottom line and every author's royalty statement. If they want to remain relevant in this world, they'd better hop to it, and that means re-examining some of their most cherished precepts. Like advances for Snooki, and Fifth Avenue rentals.

Publishers are mostly in New York because that's where they first set up shop. The first firms were little more than copyright pirates crouching on trade routes waiting for hijacked products to come in from "literary agents" operating abroad.

New York was the closest port of call from European locales and coasting packet ships and centrally situated for postal roads between New England and North Atlantic colonies.

The book presses of the time were mostly in Connecticut, one or two situated here and there elsewhere. Connecticut predominated in that noble pasttime until further mass production advances came to the industry early 20th century.

In order to protect the major capital investments involved, the industry as a whole lobbied for rigorous copyright enforcement. Copyright laws until that time were largely given lip service, including in the Constitution.

I talked to a publishing house editor who recently moved to the Midwest from New York. He said he flies to New York and has power lunches with agents just as often as he did when he was in New York ("When I lived in New York, I could go a year without seeing someone," he said.) So maybe that will be a trend - agencies and publishing houses stay in New York but agents and editors telecommute.

At one time, New York was the center of everything in America. It used to be the major cargo port-of-entry; now Los Angeles and Long Beach have that distinction. It used to be the center of the movie industry until the moviemakers discovered Los Angeles was cheaper, had better weather and was 3000 miles away from Thomas Edison's goons. It used to have a stranglehold on advertising, which has now freed itself from Madison Avenue. NYC was the first U.S. capitol after independence. It was the main destination for immigrants (now Los Angeles).

All this goes to show that New York has no permanent claim on the publishing industry or, for that matter, any other industry.

We've all seen billion-dollar companies cut back on trivial expenses to make their quarterly numbers look good. (I worked for one that stopped buying office supplies for a year.) NYC rents and salaries are hardly trivial expenses. And while major corporations don't seem to give a damn how much they pay their executives, they grind every dime possible out of their lower-level supervisors and workers, both in salaries and amenities.

In a way, I'm astonished the publishing industry didn't start migrating out of NYC as soon as it was devoured by huge multinationals; the largest companies seem to also be the biggest tightwads.

The high-tech industry is scattered all over the country -- Silicon Valley, yes, but also Seattle, Portland, Austin, Boston, San Diego, and Raleigh-Durham. Big Pharma is the same way. Seattle thought Boeing could never move, but it did and seems to be doing okay. As others have pointed out here, there are film professionals making good livings in Vancouver, Toronto, Dallas, and various other places without ever having to go to Hollywood.

As some other posters have suggested, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the vast majority of publishing-related workers hied out to the other 99% of the country (or outsourced to other English-speaking countries) while the executives keep their vestigial headquarters in NYC. It's happened with most other industries -- publishing ultimately can't be that different.

Big Publishing may eventually migrate out of NYC, but consider what changes would be necessary to make it happen quickly:

I. Convince your staff that they want to pack up and live somewhere else. (And let's assume the company is willing to pay for their relocation.)
a. How many of them have spouses/lifepartners who cannot so easily relocate? Odds are very good that the partner is the bigger breadwinner.
b. Or children in school? (If you're putting kids through college, the CUNY local-resident tuition can't be beat.)

II. So a nontrivial percentage of your staff do not want to relocate. Do you:
a. Hire a bunch of unknowns in the new location, who will have to be trained, or
b. Continue to work with your old staff via Skype and other internet options?

II.b. is not as easy as you might think. More issues get resolved in any large office--not just publishing--by someone riding an elevator to see a colleague face-to-face in their office.

III. Publishing-specific, there are some things you just can't do over the internet:
a. Route hard proofs quickly (essential for anything done in color, which would apply to any book that has a cover)
b. Get a quick second or third opinion from colleagues
c. Process a whole lot of something efficiently at a big meeting (e.g. budget an entire month's list, have five cover conferences, etc.)

The reality is that while many jobs in publishing can be done remotely, it is more efficient and easier to do these things with everyone in the same building. I don't think a day has gone by in my 16 years in the biz where I don't get out of my office to bring something to a colleague for discussion. Sure, I could call or email, but it's just plain faster to do in person, and if there's one thing you don't have excess of in publishing, it's time.

------------

Related to this would be the issue of ongoing staffing. When a senior staff person quits, you want to replace them quickly, with a plug-n-play new hire. You don't want to say, "Is there anyone else here in Omaha who can do this?"; or worse, "Who can we convince to come out here to Omaha?"

No, you will say, "Hey, I know three people over at Harper/Random/Penguin who have been itching to move up. Let's get them in for interviews."

If you want to relocate the portions of the industry that are unique to Publishing, then you have to either dismantle a highly efficient personnel-management arrangement, or you have to recreate the existing situation in a different locale.

I’m an editor living and working in Colorado. I love living here. I love the laid-back vibe and outdoorsy culture. But when it comes to networking opportunities, it’s definitely a little painful. You really have to put yourself out there to meet other people in your field. There are some innovative companies here, but there are also some companies that are completely stagnant. With fewer opportunities to change jobs, it’s not uncommon for some people to stay at the same publishing house for their entire career doing the same thing day in and day out. It’s not easy to move up. I don’t plan on relocating to New York, but I totally and completely understand why so many people do.

It's much easier for small presses now. I'm an editor who lives in New Hampshire. Another lives in California, and a third lives in Massachusetts. We have authors all over the country, and even an intern in Ohio. We all work virtually. It saves a bundle on overhead, and we can all live where and how we like. I go to New York for meetings about a dozen times a year, but that's all I need to do, thanks to the interwebs. :)

I've seen a lot of posts pitting NYC against Omaha or North Dakota. But that's really a false choice. There are any number of major metropolitan areas in the U.S. that would be perfectly suitable homes for the headquarters of a publishing firm. This country isn't like that famous New Yorker cover map of the U.S., where everything west of the Hudson is an arid wasteland.

As far as staffing is concerned: most modern firms are perfectly able to hire people who don't live next door, even people with specialized skills. Perhaps *especially* people with specialized skills: two medical device companies have flown a friend of mine from Boston to Southern California for interviews in the past couple of weeks. The more senior the candidate, the more likely the firm will court him/her wherever he/she happens to be. The lower-level employees move themselves if they can.

Would people move with the firm? Well, people do that regularly when their employer ups stakes and moves. Yes, a few of them stay behind. A firm moving from Manhattan to Queens would probably lose a few people in transit, too.

Isn't it possible, though, that some number of employees would welcome the move? Unless you're in the top 10% of wage earners, your quality of life in New York City can be pretty grim. Even as expensive as Los Angeles or San Francisco are, they're cheap compared to NYC. There are world-class museums in Chicago and L.A. and acclaimed theater scenes in Minneapolis and Seattle -- and you can afford to enjoy them without a second mortgage.

The Big 3 automakers thought they had to be in Detroit for critical mass. Aerospace thought it had to be in Southern California for critical mass. That's over now. Someday it will be publishing's turn.

NYC for everything publishing breeds a pack mentality, an echo chamber. If you want to see and hear the same people, the same editors, and hire the same talent from the same old snob places, then stay in NYC.

Publishing deserves a diversity of voices, and for that reason alone it should embrace a more distributed model.

I work in Berkeley and there are plenty of networking opportunities. I also don't think the reasons highlighted in the article are particularly striking. Full-color covers are not as limiting as many consumer goods, like say calculators or quilts. We have made cover decisions before based on the digital images the designers sent over. It's not that big a deal.
It is also not that difficult to train new staff. Sure, it takes longer, but you get them cheaper and in this industry there's a line waiting to get in. You can also hire people with editorial experience who've worked outside of publishing: there's still advertising, PR, design--basically any company that produces copy will need editors.
I've been told that NY publishers think they're the whole world and posts like this sadly confirm that stereotype. We have NYC transplants and I always ask them how it is different. Haven't had a meaningful response yet.

I hear that author with the $3 million starting bid will also consider interesting trades for her/his idea, such as a Subway $5 footlong or a functioning hoverboard.

I just don't get the Agency model. It's sole purpose seems to be to hold on the print sales. I have a series (Area 51) with RH and the difference in ebook sales under their model and the books I control is staggering. In print Area 51 sold over a million, far outstripping my Atlantis series. But in ebook, leading with .99 for first Atlantis book and $2.99 for following books, that series is selling 20x what Area 51 is doing under RH's control.
As Tom Hanks said in Big: I don't get it. The Big 6 are still too focused on selling to retailers rather than readers.

Was I the only one who thought King's Speech was about the Civil Rights leader?

Facebook link is fixed.

I too am eager to read what you have to say about 99 cent e-books. Thanks for the link the article.

I am MOST looking forward to your post on the Kindle "bestseller" phenomenon. I've noticed how it displaces the NYT bestsellers and brings precious Kindle real estate to strange and not always mouth watering books. I've long suspected that one could find a way to keep purchasing their own book at .99 and thus climb the Amazon trail rather unfairly. I CANNOT wait to read your post!! Have a great weekend, Nathan!

The video was awesome. I never thought to organize my books by the color of the covers. No wonder the look so messy. :)

I find Amanda Hocking's success story to be encouraging.

What a perfect video to say "Happy World Book Day" this week too everyone! (In the UK and Ireland World Book Day is on Thursday 3rd March 2011.) Ad World Book Night is being celebrated tomorrow in London and across the nation, so I'm looking forward to taking part giving out 48 copies of 'Love in a Time of Cholera'.

Haven't time to check out links right now but looking forward to doing it later.

Great video! But just exactly did happen to the banana boat?

"What", there should have been a what in there.

"Just exactly what did happen to the banana boat?"

What song is playing in the video? I didn't see it listed when the credits rolled...did I miss it? Loved it!

26 times? If we're only lending out to 3 year-olds maybe. I get most of my books from the library and have to wait for newer, in-demand titles. Right now I'm #39 for one copy of a particular new YA title. I'll let you know ;)

The 26 lends rule seems unfair. I have a feeling that most libraries get more than that out of their hardcover books.

Unless there is some study behind it...just seems like a number thrown out there. Plus how to renewals fit in?

Thank you for the shout-out, Nathan. Read the David Mitchell piece earlier this week and loved it. Another insightful wrap up.

Wow, I didn't know an iPad 2 was in the making! I wonder how different it is from iPad 1...

Loved your Facebook For Authors guide, Nathan! I have bookmarked it for future reference. :-)

I watched the Oscars too. I wish Inception had won but Colin Firth is wonderful and I guess I
understand why The King's Speech was chosen.

~TRA

http://xtheredangelx.blogspot.com

I could spend all weekend on those great links! I read the eBay one and laughed at the 10 million "buy it now" offer...watch out, Rowling, I'm scraping together my change.

Thanks for the FB information. I'm going to check that out.

As for Border's 20% off not even touching Amazon's prices...wow.

Have a great weekend!

Thanks for the author page fb info, Nathan. Have a great weekend.

Small correction on the Apple's ebook figures--it's over 100 million downloaded, not sold:

http://www.blogcdn.com/www.engadget.com/media/2011/03/20110302-10040827--img4447.jpg

Most definitely looking forward to hearing your thoughts on ebook pricing.

Yesterday on Galley Cat there was a post with a YouTube video from some librarians who analyzed several books in their library and how often they'd been checked out. They showed the wear and tear on the book and how much it would have cost them. The books, especially the hard backs, were in fine shape, particularly the kids books, and had been checked out more than 26 times, one had been checked out 120 times which is the one with some damage which the librarian said could be mended. It was interesting, though a fairly limited sample.

So, if you lend out an e-book 26 times, it gets worn out? Pity those poor little hardworking electrons...

That E-bay story idea is well worth $3 million, Nathan! I'm going to bid right away...(CHECKS POCKET)... not quite enough loose change there...(CHECKS OTHER POCKET)...maybe later.

I love MacGuffins! With cheese and fries, of course.

The Rejectionist is talking nonsense, adverbially. Anyway, she isn't even the Rejectionist anymore, just a poor writer like the rest of us. So, who's afraid of the big bad wolf now? Take that, Ex-Rejectionist! (POKES FORKED STICK THROUGH BARS OF CAGE.) You too, ex-agent Bransford! MMMWWWAAAHHHAAAHHHAAA! Oh, wait...

Ted, I haven't got a Subway $5 Footlong, but I could offer the corndog I got from Jacob Wonderbar for my old wreck of a spaceship (though it was kind of sassy). I already swapped the hoverboard for the time-traveling De Lorean.

Have you read Amanda Hocking's books, Nathan? She breaks every rule you've ever talked about on your Blog. The grammar and spelling in her books are atrocious (and I mean LOTS of spelling errors, not a typo or two), the stories plod along, and her first book in a series starts with a character waking up. I thought TWILIGHT was bad; but, as I started reading Amanda Hocking's book, I thought how much better TWILIGHT was written. Everyone in the writing world seems to be talking about Amanda Hocking these days AND a top literary agent signed her. This all leaves me very sad and confused. All the old rules about writing seem to have been thrown out the window.

I'm thinking about trying the 99 cents publishing program at Amazon, beginning with short stories. I'm thinking about hiring an artist to design covers or designing my own covers with photographs I've taken. My short stories have won quite a few awards and some have been published online, including on Sarah LaPolla's Blog, and I'd like to see if I can sell some short stories through the 99 cents model. If that works, I may try selling the novels I'm currently writing that way.

I have absolutely nothing to add on a post full of great links! (Although it would be nice if you could post something showing something more positive going on in the writing world."

In reply to:

Anon 12.54,

There are some really badly written books out there (I know Nathan will be frowning and/or shaking his fist at the screen depending on the largeness of his anger issues - if any do/don't exist.) But the thing is, sometimes it's not all about the writing. I know that sounds insanely stupid, but as a teenage girl, I have read the twilight series and I know that they aren't at all "well written" (depending on what your defenition of well written is.) I never read them however, for the quality of the writing- I read for the quality of the idea, for the hook of the first book that meant I would keep on reading despite the fact the writing wasn't up to a world class standard. Whilst I have never head of Amanda Hopkins, I am sure that is what people are liking so much about her books- the ability of the plot to draw the reader in and keep them enthralled no matter how good/bad the writing is. We can all agree that Charles Dickens is an amazing writer, but personally I have never been able to finish a single one of his books (I tried reading Great Expectations and after figuring out absolutely nothing would go right for the poor boy I gave up before I got too overtly depressed.)

So, I hope I stopped you from getting too worried about the fact that there are some authors out there whose grammer e.t.c. may be appalling, because, at the end of the day, they must have done something right to be doing so well.

And as to your final point: "All the old rules about writing seem to have been thrown out the window," at the end of the day, in the downright evil world that is the writing business, the only REAL rule is writing something that sells.

Sorry to have been so long winded. =)

HarperCollins makes me sad. It just means most libraries won't pick up their e-books now. Cause as someone who works in a library... I can't think of many books that have fallen apart after only 26 checkouts... The ones that fall apart at those low numbers are pop-up books or books that have flaps, or pockets with items.

And with Overdrive, unlike paper copies, you can't renew the books so if you can't finish the book in the time you have you'll end up wasting several of the "loans" that the library is now allowed to have. :(

The more and more I read about these kind of things and what publishers are doing, the more and more I think about self-publishing my own writing. They say they are helping out their authors... but if they really wanted to, they'd increase the royalties their authors received from e-books.

I haven't read Amanda Hocking, but regardless of what you think of her and the whole ePub and the 99 cent ePub in particular, she's written a post about it all that I think is pretty worthwhile, and very even-handed. Check it out!

Thanks for the mention, Nathan! I'm dying to see The King's Speech, and I'm anxious to hear your take on the .99c e-books, too. It's about time Random House caved because, despite 100 million books sold, I've had to purchase most of mine through Amazon even though I read them on my iPad. Happy weekend!

I wonder how readers will react to the slightly more expensive e-books. Will they stop buying them? Will they wait for sales? Is it possible the publishers will end up lowering their prices back down in order to get people to purchase their titles?

The idea behind the HarperCollins 26-use clause is that with two-week loan periods in many titles, a typical book would circulate 26 times in one year. However, as a library worker myself, I can tell you that many books circulate more than this before they need to be replaced (thus being lendable for more than a year), and libraries will buy multiple copies of popular titles in order to meet demand. I understand authors are worried about their royalties being hurt if a library can purchase one copy and circulate it indefinitely, but libraries also cannot afford to buy the same books over and over. I think a compromise could be reached. HarperCollins could lease the books for a certain amount of time (several years), or better, could increase the number of uses before requiring the library to repurchase. Most popular books are only in heavy demand for about two years, so perhaps HarperCollins could offer 45-50 uses before requiring a new purchase. Then perhaps, the libraries could buy another copy of the popular titles they predict will continue to circulate, while letting the less popular titles run their course and only repurchasing if a patron requests it. Even better, it'd be ideal if the second purchase carried perpetual rights, but that's probably asking for too much. (I saw similar proposals being voiced in the comments at HarperCollins' blog as well, with no response from the blog maintainers, and know there will be ongoing discussions about this at ALA, which I'm unfortunately not going to be able to attend this year.)

That eBay auction has been my favorite joke all week!