Rocket Bomber - publishing

There was a time when movie studios were charging $99 to sell a VHS tape:

“There would typically be a two- to three-month delay between the time a movie was available for rental, and when the movie could be purchased by the consumer. In reality, the video was available, but priced for rental shops and film enthusiasts who wanted to own a copy of the film at the earliest opportunity. The pricing was between $70 and $130” [wikipedia]

The era under discussion would be 1985-1995 – after rental became big business, but prior to the introduction of DVD in 1996. So that “$70” in 1995 would be equal to $105 in 2012; “$70” in 1985 is closer to $145. “$130” for the rental-only version would be $200 or more in today’s dollars.
[inflation calculator at westegg.com]

How dare the movie studios charge a rental place $100 or $200 for a movie that has already had a theatrical release when we all know the video tape only costs $1.80 to manufacture! The gall!

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Of course the consumer didn’t see that price: the investment was borne by the rental place. They did calculations that over the lifetime of the tape, they would be able to rent it out 100 times or more before the tape died; and obviously not every tape was purchased at a premium. And Eventually: the number of customers grew, the market matured, consumers became more informed and more discerning, and actual demand for titles began to set the price.

…Which is why DVD sets for Game of Thrones cost [approximately] two arms, a leg, and the still warm corpse of a Stark. DVDs changed the game anyway: By 1996, Blockbuster was in a position to dictate terms to the studios, rather than the other way around. Additionally, by the late 1990s the movie and TV studios had already figured out that the home market was in many ways more valuable than the first-run showings, and release delays and exclusivity windows shrank alongside the prices. And that was fine, too, for a while [I look back on it as a golden age of sorts for DVD] until online streaming and blu-ray further clouded the picture and led to the current situation (i.e. “a mess”).

There are series that are only streaming digitally where I’d actually prefer to have a DVD set. There are a couple (anime licensed expired) where there used to be a DVD but it’s no longer being manufactured and isn’t online anywhere* and so good luck with ebay, mate.

For those who aren’t anime fans, and who have no sympathy — indeed, no context — I have two words for you: Disney Vault.

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Pricing nonsense is not new, and if folks didn’t raise a royal fit in 1988 over $100 VHS tapes I don’t see why a library (that is to say: rental-only) copy of an ebook at $89 is a deal breaker. Additionally, if a publisher wants to charge $24.99 for an ebook — as many note, all but free to manufacture, just like those $1.80 cassettes and 17¢ plastic discs with a bit of foil in ‘em — if that particular ebook is brand new and hasn’t earned back it’s advance, editorial overhead, marketing budget, with a pinch of profit besides than there should be no more complaint than the $11.50 we have to pay for a one-time showing of a movie that is eventually going to be in the $4.99 bin.

It’s all business. Movies have costs past the $2,000 or so it takes to make a print and ship it to your local cineplex. We all know this, and happily pay the $11.50 plus $6 for a popcorn to see a ‘first run’ movie in theaters.

Books have costs, too. Sure, a book doesn’t have a $200 million production budget, but a book is much more likely to just sell 5000 copies – not 11 million tickets. And just like movie studios have hits and flops, publishers have bestsellers and… everything else. Just because the scale is smaller doesn’t make the business easier, or even substantially different.

And just like the home video rental business has changed—radically—over the past 25 years, the ebook business will eventually become relatively sane (more or less) given time as well.

This post is technically a link, that (under the old program) I would have tweeted without commentary:

“For years we’ve discussed the ridiculousness of ebook pricing, where some publishers seem to think that sky high prices for ebooks (often higher than physical copies) makes sense, despite the lack of printing, packaging, shipping and inventory costs. And, of course, we won’t even get into the question of the price fixing debacle”

The Good And Bad In Chaotic eBook Pricing : http://www.epublishabook.com/2013/10/25/chaotic-ebook-pricing/ – via the ebookPorn tumblr.

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* footnote: yes, I know "unavailable anywhere" is a relative term, given the options available to those both morally flexible and technically savvy, and let's leave it at that.

There have been just 4 transitions in ‘publication’ in recorded history:

Oral to written word: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing#The_beginning_of_writing

Note here: the invention and widespread adoption of writing in general is why we have a recorded history to begin with. So from 200,000 BCE or thereabouts until 3000 BCE – The ancient Atlanteans could have met and defeated both the Giants from Space and the Lizard People from the Center of the Earth, but since they didn’t write anything down, we just don’t know. Could an advanced society exist without literacy? I don’t know; the internet seems to do OK [*rimshot*]

— a strong master/apprentice system would work, and if one can get hands-on with any mechanical technology while an expert simultaneously explains it to you, then you can likely get by; European medieval tech reached some pretty awesome heights (clockworks, windmills, agriculture, architecture, small-shop manufacturing) while being 99.9% illiterate.

Aside: Atlantean High School Shop Class was probably awesome

Hand-written copies to movable-type/printing press: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

Movable type is great stuff, but the addition of the “press” made such an impression [heh.] that “press” is still a short-hand for much of the publication industry.

Note here: the basic tech behind Gutenberg (woodcarving unto blocks, or casting metal to make type; a vertically operated press to apply uniformly distributed force unto a flat plane) existed as early as the Roman Empire, 1st Century CE: the term “press” derives from the operationally-identical wine presses that had been in use for over 1000 years by the time Gutenberg sets up shop (records are sparse, understandably, but Wikipedia cites 1436.)

It might be best to compare Gutenberg to Henry Ford – neither was the sole inventor or innovator of the technologies they combined, but each engendered a revolution after that combination of several ideas birthed a single new production method that could be adopted and adapted by others.

I just handed someone a graduate thesis. [again.]

Vertical to Rotary:

Most of you were following along just fine right up to this point.

{sigh.} I’m striving to do this without puns (without additional puns) but I can’t: Rotary Printing was revolutionary. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_printing_press

There are a number of ways to translate linear motion into rotary motion (the internal combustion engine springs to mind) but on an industrial scale, whether we consider wind- and waterwheels, steam turbines, or electrical motors — the ‘native’ form of many (if not most) power options is rotary. If one were looking to build an industrial-scale ‘press’, eventually you have to abandon the ‘press’ part, technologically if not linguistically.

The advantage of rotary is speed. The progress continues despite any obstacle (so long as we can still talk to each other) but the acceleration of knowledge is an integral function dependent on speed.

From an artistic standpoint, quality physical 4-color offset printing is amazing. Not an ultimate evolved form, but certainly an Optimal Expression, like marble and bronze from the Classical eras, or oil painting of the 1700s, or progressive rock from the 1970s.

I just handed someone a graduate thesis. [again.]

Rotary printing technology fueled the publishing boom from 1904 until 1992: faster was better, cheaper cost structures meant expansion into riskier (that is to say: more interesting) genres, empires of print were built and prospered until they got bought out by conglomerates, and it was all fun and games and profits until Internet.

Physical to Digital:

Until 1904, change took centuries. — oh, I suppose change has always been ‘rapid’, but scales of both time and geography were much more of an obstacle to Gutenberg in the 1450s than they are to the author-publisher or blogger of today.

In 1904, a major technological change was all-but-handed-to established publishing houses (and newspapers) who could use the innovations on the ‘back end’, unseen production to rapidly accelerate their other, primary function: namely, sales of the printed word to the public. The technology was quickly adopted before it could become disruptive. In fact, it’d be another 6 decades or so before an ‘indy’ press could evolve, though the pulps of the 40s and 50s were certainly a precursor.

[and the indy press of the 1960s counter-culture relied not on industrial scale but now-inexpensive ‘antique’ hand-operated printing tech — one more graduate thesis, you’re welcome.]

Digital is not just an innovation in the back-end production, though. Distribution and customer demand are also directly impacted; our modern internet is much more like the free-for-all book market of 17th century Europe combined with the proto-newspapers of the late 18th century.

[Graduate theses, two of ‘em in fact: pick distribution or demand. No more freebies, though — from here you’re on your own.]

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Given that the ‘digital’ book revolution is only 42 years old at this point [Sorry, Amazon – you didn’t invent this market; you’re 36 years late to the party] I’d say, from a historical perspective—if not a business one—it is still way too early to call.

What we can expect from the new technology is that nothing is going to be the same again —

while also: there are certain aspects of writing that have been true since 1021 CE and the industry that has arisen since is just one more tool we, as authors, can use to be known — to get published.

From Atlantis to Homer to Horace to Gutenberg to Random Penguin.

• From the origin of speech until 3000 BCE: hundreds of thousands of years.
• From cuneiform to papyrus, from papyrus to vellum, from vellum to paper; millennia of technological progress: but the transition that matters is from scribes to print, 3000 BCE to 1450 CE.
• Print fosters scientific discussion, and engineering, and math; and eventually patents, and corporations, and corporate competition. In 1904, industry returns the favor with industrial scale printing technologies.
• And then, suddenly, digital and internet.

Hundreds of thousands of years, To thousands of years, To a single century, To a handful of decades, To Now.

Unless the whole of technology and civilization suddenly slows down: having everything change ‘overnight’ (once a year or so) is going to be expected. The hard part now is that technology is advancing faster than humans can accept and adopt it. The natural pace of change, on a human scale, is a single human lifetime.

How many changes can you accept in your lifetime? You and I will likely be more adaptable than some (who can’t program a VCR and don’t “do” computers) but even so: Our grandkids will come up with solutions to these technological ‘problems’ that seem alien to us.

Every book blogger* is writing one of these damn “insightful” “thought pieces” on the future of the book.

There are a number of players/factions to consider — Publishers, Amazon, Bookstores, Authors (both established and aspiring) — major changes in technology, and consumer behavior, and minor distractions like whatever motions Apple or Google are making towards this space this year (that will change next year). Pick your favorite horse in this race: with a wealth of information out there, it is easy enough to cherrypick sources that back up whichever conclusion best fits the proclivities of the blogger. What we lack is real data — number of kindles sold, number of (self-published, non AAP-member) ebooks sold, total number of books (e- and otherwise) sold and by how much and how much in each category including the bestsellers —

We are left with “experts” estimates of market share, some incomplete data about how the publishing industry or book retail is doing in aggregate, and a whole lot of anecdotes. (The anecdotes are understandable, perhaps; as a group we do like to tell stories)

“I was just at a Big Box Bookstore in Podunk Adjacent off of State Route Zero, and let me tell you what I saw there…”
“I’ve been self publishing with Swindlepub Digital Editions for ever now, and let me tell you about my sales there…”
“We at Dirty Slabs of Pressed Wood Pulp, LLC, are just a small press compared to the Top Ten or Big Six or Big Five** but not only are we forward-looking, with both a website and a facebook page, we’re also moving forward with ebooks — in about 18 months time. But recently we’ve been stymied by DanubeVolga. Let me tell you about their most recent nefarious plot…”
“Sisyphus & Damocles Books has been open for decades now, here in northcentral Bumblebridge, and we’ve been proud to serve our community. Recently though, times have been harder. Let me tell you our story…”

* (book bloggers as a term including the book/publishing business bloggers, book reviewers, authors, editors, the occasional mainstream-but-web-only magazine writer, and of course: drunk and pissed off booksellers — represent! — who blog in their free time)
** (why does talking about the book business this way make me think of college sports, and for all the same, wrong reasons?)
*** I hearby claim the trade names Dirty Slabs of Pressed Wood Pulp, Publisher and Sisyphus & Damocles Booksellers: Mine! Back off. If I win the lottery this week I’m going to have those incorporated by Friday.

Anecdotal evidence is the worst sort. We all have a story. Why, I work at a corporate chain bookstore where the phone rings off the hook, we’re grossing a good seven figures annually (no, not the number you initially thought of: better than that), and I personally am so overworked it seriously impacts my health. If physical books are dying, maybe they could do it a little faster, before I keel over from a heart attack?

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SO:

assertion one: “Ebooks are going to completely displace other forms of books because of all the obvious advantages — speed of delivery, lower costs, the advantages of digital storage over the requirement of physical space for books, and (of course) disintermediation: e- facilitates an order-of-magnitude increase in access to markets by authors, and access to works by readers.”

verdict: True. but…

To me, it seems like the revolution already occurred back in 1993 and you all missed it. Every argument made for ebooks is also an argument that could be made about web pages: text served up via html and http actually has numerous advantages over .mobi, epub, and pdf (the current “e book” formats available to us).

A web page is open, active, engaging, and part of a larger conversation. Via hyperlinks, an author can automatically and seamlessly link to sources, whether they are linking to research, to other related works of their own, to maps and images that support the text, to notes in an appendix, or to The Fine Video Version of one of the earliest Musical Stylings of Sir Richard Astley.

Web sites and the related tools we use to access and browse them have already consumed the newspapers, are currently munching their way through the magazine herd (killing off the old and weak), and soon enough will also turn to face book publishing like a hungry predator.

The common objection that would enter at this point is “But, well ebooks aren’t web pages. Completely Different.” Right…

There is absolutely nothing stopping me from publishing a novel on the web. I could do it as a collection of chapters linked from a table-of-contents index page, I could do it as a series of blog posts (like an old Dickens novel, in magazine installments), I could even just put up 100,000 words in a single HTML or text document. Unlike music, images, or video – text is small: the “T” in HTML is text, as is the first “T” in HTTP. Text is web native.

Hell, one could do it in a Reddit thread. [Redditor Prufrock451 has a movie deal. So don’t tell me Reddit isn’t a viable publishing platform.]

Ebooks are, in fact, web pages [right down to the CSS, XHTML, and XML] — it would be trivial to code an ebook reader as an extension to Firefox and Chrome, just as there are currently pdf readers — and the rest is all marketing, and payments.

Payment is what it comes down to, and why so many are so insistent that ebooks are both new and special, as their current income streams are (in whole or in greatest part) dependent on sales via the current channels (primarily KDP, with a nod to Smashwords). Ebooks, as a payment model for authors, are great, fantastic even. Indeed, I thought the old model where we sold books through bookstores was also pretty great, as both a sales opportunity and payment model for authors.

Setting payments and royalties to one side, for now: The function the publishers serve (served?) was only secondarily as a source of ongoing income. Publishers provided advance capital for the production of books, as the party (the only party?) willing to assume pre-publication risks. While books-in-aggregate are a commodity in much demand, selling units in the millions annually, with revenue in the billions, and while also serving as source material for TV Shows, Movies, and mountains of internet fan fiction — each individual book, though, is something of a flyer, a bet on the part of author, editor, and publisher that this one book has what it takes to sell not just a thousand copies, but hundreds of thousands.

A publisher would pay an advance against future royalties, either on delivery of a manuscript or occasionally, a payment before the book was even finished. Indeed, the advance might have been the only thing that enabled the author to actually complete the book, given certain financial realities authors (and the rest of us) face.

After a publisher was done with it, the book would enter the realm of marketing, and the dire punishment of retail bookstores. Bookselling is an awful, soul-crushing business where we tease authors with the likes of Patterson, Grisham, and Rowling but the reality is your book gets 90 days (or less) in a retail store, with some decent placement before customers (assuming customers are browsing bookstores these days: the internet tells me they aren’t) (my personal experience as a bookseller contradicts that) but after the initial release window: well…

Bluntly: you’re screwed. Nah, I kid. No really, though: if this is your first book, unless you win the publishing-and-bookselling-hunger-games, you’re screwed.

As an author your best strategy for publishing is to keep writing – each new release sells the backlist, while your backlist builds the fan base. And This Was True in 1990, 1980, 1970, 1930 — before Amazon, ebooks, the world wide web, and every other wrinkle in the publishing industry since.

At least temporarily, ebooks and the various e-publishing platforms (functionally, as of 2013, that’d be KDP for the Amazon fans and Smashwords to help you pick up all the rest) are an excellent mechanism for payments – if you work at it. But ebooks are not a publishing platform, any more than blogging software is a publishing platform, or a working knowledge of CSS and HTML is a publishing platform.

Given that the web is your future — disintermediation taken to a logical extreme — well then: we need ways of monetizing books on the web that don’t rely on Amazon. Direct sales? Advertising? Subscriptions? A return to the 1400s economic model where people wrote because they had something to say and were copied because what they said was interesting and no one got paid? Because historically, that’s how publishing worked.

…just one more opportunity to link you to my 2009 essay: Form, Content, Copies, Rights, and Plato
[someone remind me to update that – I suppose I could wait for a 5th anniversary, but I think I should get to it before that]

If one is either advocating or defending ebooks, I’d just ask whether your focus is on the potential of ebooks as a new format — or merely on Amazon’s payment model. — you know, both are important (getting paid may actually may be more important) but it would be dishonest to conflate the two.

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assertion two: “Bookstores are dead, the equivalent of buggywhip salesmen in an automobile age.”

verdict: False. well, “false” to a point…

I have a much longer post in the works on the social function of bookstores. If all we did was sell books, the fate of bookstores would be much more cut-and-dried, but your local bookstore is a social nexus: more of a coffee shop plus source of fallback (or primary) internet these days.

But even considering only the sale of books:

About once a day someone walks in, looking for a “coffee table book” on whatever topic: Alaska. Amsterdam. Australia. Belgian Beers. Coca-Cola memorabilia. Steam engine memorabilia. Sea shells. College Football. College Lacrosse. [Name your college] – [name the city] – [name the country] – [whatever]

“Of Course there has to be one of those full-color, large format books on whichever topic because I, with only 1.5 hours to prepare, suddenly thought that such a book would now make a perfect gift – let me go ask my Local Big Box Bookstore.”

[*expletive deleted*]

(My inability to meet demand — indeed, the inability of anyone to meet unreasonable demands — doesn’t make the demand less important: this is an economic opportunity) (see also: Case Study #5 and how damnably tricky it is to stock “coffee table books”)

Horsepower used to be, well, Horse Power: you either schlepped it yourself, or you got on a horse. There was also a transitional period (roughly, 1810 to 1910) when long-distance travel became steam-powered but local traffic was still by horse. Parallel to that, was the replacement of horses on farms with tractors, combines, and other agricultural equipment. The Horse was once the go-to option for so many tasks, but the internal combustion engine changed all that. …Almost. In the modern age: we have both NASCAR and the Kentucky Derby.

Cars replaced carriages for daily transport and tractors replaced draft horses on the farm, but horses are still used for sport, recreation, and ranching.

…and even in a car-dominated landscape, so many of us walk. Some for recreation, even. [Hell, some people jog and run for fun…]

This isn’t the non-sequitur that it appears to be — I previously wrote on this topic in 2010: Publishing Buggywhips.

The web has had 20 years to totally overwhelm bookselling. In a buggywhip analogy, this would be like going from 1902 to 1922 with the concomitant sociological changes that accompany technological change. Bookselling is actually holding up pretty well, considering.

People today still walk into a bookstore, and then ask me for a book. They’re willing to pay a little more for the right kind of book. Sometimes it’s a book they didn’t even know they wanted, until they saw it at the store — a book completely unrelated to their initial query (the question that actually brought them through my door).

To beat a dead horse: The physical book is a dead as the horse.

But have you thought about how many horses there are, still working? It could be a horse-drawn carriage ride around Central Park, or the once-a-year attention paid to horse racing around the Derby, or Olympic equestrian events, or a rare opportunity to see the Lipizzaner Stallions. Hell, it could be show-jousting at Medieval Times. Even in a car-dominated future without a need for horses, we have both use cases and economic models that prove Horses Aren’t Dead Yet. These are all special cases: some are traditional, others historical artefacts, some intentional throwbacks to a historical age – no longer an actual economic use but sold to the public as a recreational opportunity.

(Books: Not Dead Yet.)

Do I want to live in a future where the only book stores are Book Museums? No. No, I do not.

But if that’s my option, you can bet your ass I’m dressing up as Ye Olde-fashioned Bookseller down at Colonial Barnes & Noble.

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assertion three: “Well, *I* buy ebooks and everyone I know buys ebooks and my friends on twitter and facebook and offline buy ebooks and I just don’t see how bookstores are going to be viable in 5 years…”

verdict: So this is sampling bias, selection bias, confirmation bias or some combination of all three.

Let’s say you’re a blogger, writing about the publishing future and ebooks and perhaps specializing in ebook publishing tips for first-time digital authors. The comments on your well-thought-out opinion pieces and e-publishing link roundups all agree with you that dead-tree books are dead (or soon to be so) as are the physical storefronts that sell them, and even the delivery of books (physically) by UPS rather than digitally via Internet is only a transitional phase.

Ebook evangelists are like the newspaperman of 1923 bagging on the last remaining horses. Suddenly one notes the societal changes that have been occurring over decades, one picks the winning side, writes an essay, and then you pat yourself on the back. But there are many disruptions that will take place in the transition, and also future problems and fallout that you haven’t considered yet.

A world of ebooks without publishers is also a world without George R.R. Martin and Game of Thrones, a world without Robert Kirkman and Walking Dead, a world without J.K. Rowling and Harry Potter, a world without J.R.R. Tolkien and hobbits — hell, even a world without Tarzan, Conan, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon, Superman, Batman, and Finn.

We can sandbag on publishers all day, and not everything done in the name of business or publishing is gold, but if you believe that quality wins out, no matter the hype or the competition, or the handicaps the ‘independent’ faces — then fine: we agree to disagree.

The three legs of the tripod are Books, Film/TV Adaptation, and Fans — remove any one leg, and you no longer have a franchise: Star Wars originated as a film, but I can guarantee Lucas wouldn’t have made the Prequel Trilogy if it hadn’t been for decades of Del Rey Star Wars novels along with the massive collection of Dark Horse Star Wars Comics. Harry Potter was already a book phenomenon, but only steamrolled the teen & tween fanbase after Warner Brothers started making films. Game of Thrones (book fans know the series as “A Song of Ice and Fire”) was a perpetual runner up to Wheel of Time until HBO took Martin’s series under its wing. And while discerning comic book aficionados were both familiar with and (dare I say) rabid fans of Kirkman’s work, it took a TV Show to make the Walking Dead a mainstream fan property.

Lord of the Rings, anyone? How about three, count ‘em, three Hobbit movies? (There was only the one book…) Oh, or Iron Man? Who was an Iron Man fan 2005? …yeah, put your hand down; you’re lying.

What do all of these franchises have in common? Corporate backing, big-name publishers (OK, I’m giving Image Comics a pass here, they are ‘big enough’), fan enthusiasm, and books stocked in bookstores.

Right now, all those mainstream fans of nearly every franchise know about bookstores; there’s one out by the mall, down the street from the cineplex, next to Joe’s Crab Shack. Most of those fans — let’s call them civilians — don’t know or care about ebooks. They may or may not own a tablet, they certainly don’t own an ereader, they own a smart phone but they use it for Angry Birds, to text, and [*gasp*] to make the odd phone call. And they don’t care about ebooks. They buy one, or maybe two books a year. They outnumber you, ebook fanboy. Between the 22% who reported they read no books last year and the 31% that read between 1 and 5 books, That’d be half of everybody.

From the link above: “The shift toward e-book… is being driven by those who are college educated, those living in higher-income households, and those ages 30-49. Those groups disproportionately report they were reading e-books.”

If you match that description, fine. You have your personal anecdotal evidence and I just handed you 2-year old Pew Research data to back up some of your points.

But what about the Hunger Games, Twilight, Beautiful Creatures, Vampire Academy, Pretty Little Liars, Blue Bloods, plus a couple dozen you and I forgot about — Past the first two, I can’t say I’ve heard of any of these properties lighting up the ebook charts. But they sell books, initially sufficient to prompt the adaptation and then like bonkers once comely actors are attached and pictures hit the internet.

Yes, indeed: the internet sells books. But it’s more about teen heartthrobs and Google Image Search, and less about Amazon and KDP.

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What we have here is a stalemate: On the one side, we have ebooks. Apparently everyone, even my Mom [true fact], is buying ebooks — and I, the Lone (old-school, physical bookshop) Bookseller Left on the Internet… I’m just a plaintive, fading voice in the e-wilderness, unable to see the e-forest for the e-trees.

I’ve been assured that the digital revolution has already taken place and we’re just taking a decade or two to sort through digital winners and losers, and well: nothing I’ve said or can say will shake your convictions.

[*ahem*]

“To me, it seems like the revolution already occurred back in 1993 and you all missed it. Every argument made for ebooks is also an argument that could be made about web pages: text served up via html and http actually has numerous advantages over .mobi, epub, and pdf (the current “e book” formats available to us).”

The digital revolution already happened. I’m defending one payment structure: distribution and sales of books through bookstores. Ebook partisans are merely defending a different payment structure, Amazon et al. and the “electronic book” — but both models are susceptible to digital disruption.

“Modern” publishing (I’m going to pick 1836) had a good run, 1836-2007 — 172 years. Over the course of that run, corporations lived and died, business models rose and fell, new and cheaper book formats were born, and at the tail-end of that era: the internet came to prominence. We are now 5 years into the “new” publishing model…

Or, we are 5 years into a dead cat bounce. Are “Kindle ebooks” the future, or merely that last gasp of 200 years of publishing business?

I think the current environment has much more in common with the post-Gutenberg early era of newspapers (1605-1700): we are still figuring out what the platform can be used for, what we want to use it for, and how we can use internet publishing to make money. (I’ll remind you again here: Dickens’ first book was serialized in an 1836 magazine.) Straight, non-DRM web distribution is still the disrupting factor that has yet to be felt in Amazon’s KDP biodome, and however enamored one is of Amazon’s ebook payment structure — the payments have nothing to do with books or publishing. Project Gutenberg predates the Kindle by 37 years, the Internet Archive hosts 4.4 Million ebooks, and facilitates 15 Million downloads each month [hattip] — so, yeah.

Amazon’s e- efforts almost seem like a sideline in comparison.

The book is dead. Long live the book.

And before you come at me as obviously wrong [I am, as always, obviously wrong], ask yourself: “Am I about to defend books, digital distribution, or merely the new payment models that have been laid over the old publishing model?”

and with that parting shot: I open the floor for discussion.

I don’t want to detract at all from the points made (and the excellent writing done) by Porter Anderson over in his recent (20 June) Writing on the Ether column, While You Were Bashing Amazon

Summary: “On the Ether at JaneFriedman.com, Porter Anderson looks at Amazon Publishing’s latest strides — including $110,000 in Breakthrough Novel Award publishing contracts for authors and a new million-copy seller in translation.”

Flavour Quote: “Self-publication wasn’t a requirement of the competition, nor was it a problem. The rules of the Breakthrough Novel Award program prohibit entering material that has been under a publishing contract currently or previously. But as long as the rights have never left the author, an entry is valid. The entry period is normally in mid- to late-January. Up to 10,000 people can make one entry each. The competition, and the voting on the winners, is international and goes through several stages of selection and elimination. Walker remembers her self-published effort not quite languishing but not taking off, either. ‘I got a lot of good reviews. I won’t even tell you it was selling okay. It was tolerable, a few sales a week. For an indie author, that being my first book, and knowing it was part of a series, that was hopeful.’”

Money Quote: “While its challenges are contemporary, Amazon Publishing may have had no more difficulty finding traction in the market in its first couple of years than many of the well-established houses initially experienced decades ago. The ‘breakthroughs’ celebrated over the weekend may not lie only in those contracts for writers.

“And however many in Old Publishing may still decry Amazon Publishing as an incursion, many entrepreneurial authors recognize it as a new-work-nourishing player indigenous to an unprecedented global marketplace.”

As is typical for Anderson: this installment of Writing on the Ether is a well-thought-out, well-researched piece with plenty of links, quotes, and embedded tweets. And they post weekly. (Add JaneFriedman.com to your RSS feeds.)

You are both allowed and encouraged at this point to go read the whole thing.

##

Now, after reading about Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel contest and all the winners (a total of five authors across several genres) and the money involved (a $50,000 advance for a ‘no-name’, in 2013, is not unheard of but is still amazing) you might think that maybe Amazon isn’t too bad for books after all.

Maybe the tumult and pandemonium we’ve experienced over the past 15 years in bookselling and publishing (and technology, and the economy, and the plague of teen vampire fiction) have been worth it, because now on the other side things are easier than ever and hell, authors are even getting paid.

Indeed, for folks who are excited about books, the various Amazon imprints and the promotional programs and ebooks/Kindle/KDP and the huge stacks of money (filthy, glorious, internet-scale money) are all good things for books and authors, and the New Publishing that emerges will be better than the old regime it replaces. Sure, that’s fine.

“American Idol is an American reality-singing competition program created by Simon Fuller and produced by 19 Entertainment, and distributed by FremantleMedia North America. It began airing on Fox on June 11, 2002, as an addition to the Idols format based on the British series Pop Idol and has since become one of the most successful shows in the history of American television. For an unprecedented eight consecutive years, from the 2003–04 television season through the 2010–11 season, either its performance or result show had been ranked number one in U.S. television ratings. The concept of the series is to find new solo recording artists where the winner is determined by the viewers in America. Winners chosen by viewers through telephone, Internet, and SMS text voting.” : American Idol entry, on Wikipedia.

We can all remember how American Idol completely revitalized the music industry, right?

A contest is a contest, with winners and losers, and while I applaud the idea and congratulate the authors, I still object to manuscripts-as-lottery-tickets, and object most strenuously to manuscripts-as-lottery-tickets-as-a-business-model.

Writing is tough. Getting published used to be tough, now it’s “easy”, but the new barrier to entry is getting recognized, and our savior is not Amazon.

##

Let me pull back here from one more round of Amazon Bashing (because, as much as I enjoy it, it turns off many of my blog readers) and discuss publishing.

While many think the core unit of publishing is a huge multinational multimedia conglomerate, no, those monsters arose 30 years ago and gobbled up many of the ‘real’ publishers and subsumed them into the whole. The legacy publishers (post-gobbling) still exist as names-and-logos and are refered to as imprints of the larger ‘houses’ – ‘imprint’ as a term is also now often used to refer to some music labels (those wholly owned by the company that also distributes the music) and the music label analogy might work for some of you:

An imprint will have a staff that selects new works (books or music), works with the artist to polish and publish the work, ideally will have staff to market and promote the work, and also ideally will serve as advocate for the work in the event of legal trouble, or unfair competitive practices that limit the distribution of the work. Finally, an imprint should be interested in promoting the well-being of authors or artists (financially, primarily, but there are other ways to support authors), and encouraging and supporting them to produce more works.

Yes, I wear rose-colored glasses as I live in a sunshine-filled polly-anna world of rainbows and unicorns — but that aside, your publisher should have your back and the primary goal should be to make self-supporting, “good” works. A really trashy romance novel can still be a ‘good’ book; three-minute, three-cord, three-guitar-and-drums punk songs can still be ‘good’; a thousand-page tract on medieval farming techniques and the evolution of European plowshare and moldboard design (476-1349CE)… that only seven people will ever actually read… yes, can still be a ‘good’ work.

We all like to get paid. No disputing that. And the level at which a pulp novel is “self-supporting” is going to differ based on the goals of the author, the expectations of the publisher, and how much overhead each book has to carry.

For me: The core of publishing was the small publishing house that worked with their authors, built a small but meaningful backlist, didn’t sweat the money too much, and waited for the occasional bestseller not because it meant winning the book lottery, but because the occasional bestseller paid for the rest and supported the whole. Call me a big fan of Maxwell Perkins. (who is Maxwell Perkins, you ask? *sigh* – here, go read.)

In as much as Amazon’s Imprints can step in and achieve my ideal goal for publishers, to support authors in producing self-sustaining works, then I applaud their efforts and wish them well.

However, Amazon’s publishing efforts do not exist in a vacuum. A paranoid bookseller or small publisher might see these new imprints as part of a larger, systematic program carried out by Amazon to lock both readers and authors into a closed ecosystem (controlled by Amazon) while also continuing to parasitically suck the life out of the rest of industry.

In 2012, Amazon had $61.09 Billion in revenues. (They actually booked a loss of $39 Million because of acquisitions and investments in logistical support structure, but heh, they’re Amazon so Wall Street is cool with that.) A $50,000 advance to a first time author is one hell of a payday, though again not entirely unprecedented — but for Amazon: fifty grand is .0000008% of their sales in 2012. Less than one-millionth of the total. Amazon also ‘awarded’ four other runners-up $15,000 each; all together, for every million dollars Amazon made, they set aside $1.80 to fund this program. Amazingly generous.

I’d love to see this scaled up just a bit. And would it kill Amazon to make it an outright prize, and not just an advance on future royalties? Particularly when Amazon (and others) seem to have trouble with the accounting when it comes to author payments?

I could be a real ass and compare Amazon’s Breakthrough Novel Award with B&N’s Discover Great New Writers program, which directly awards $10,000 to two winners annually and comes with in-store support and display space — running the same kind of calculation as above, the cash prizes are $2.94 out of every million dollars in sales (B&N reported $6.8 Billion in revenue for fiscal 2013) — but I suppose the catch is in the submission criteria for B&N: to be considered you need a published book, and your publisher has to submit your entry for you. If you have someone at your publisher or imprint who is supportive of you and your work, who “has your back”, that’s kind of a minor point. (the getting-published-on-dead-trees-bit is the taller hurdle)

##

Prizes and recognition are both excellent things for books. Not just these new programs but the established awards (Nobel, Booker, National, Pulitzer, et al.) and genre awards (where to start?) and I can’t say for sure that Amazon’s new program is bad, ill-advised, or exploitative — but given that the prizes are all publication deals with Amazon (not merely the recognition and money), it strikes me as more of an extremely creative way to manage the e-slush-pile of manuscripts than an award, and I object to it on those grounds.

Here’s an idea for Amazon: A Breakthrough Imprint Award — find an editor or publisher (publisher, in this case, referring to the person who runs a small press, magazine, or imprint) and give them enough money to hire a small staff, give them the “keys” to KDP such that author royalties would not go down and the imprint could take a small chunk of Amazon’s cut on a book, and give them 2 years to find authors and build up a backlist, and a brand. Let current imprints apply, too, but set aside enough cash to seed 50 imprints (or more) and really get the ball rolling on Amazon publishing. Back-of-the-envelope numbers – a quarter million would fund 2 full-time editors and a part-time office manager for two years at less-than-New-York-but-hardly-starvation salaries. $25 Million would fund a hundred of these seed programs — and with established e-book publishing channels taking care of the old printing and distribution tasks, books could be coming out of these imprints within months. A couple-hundred editors engaging thousands of authors with the intent of publishing great books — 100 imprints all working on defining their niche and building a great backlist. Give your publishers/EICs wide rein to consider any business model they like: monthly magazines, serialized novels, multi-author anthologies, “old fashioned” ebooks — so long as they sell as e-books or e-singles over your platform.

That’d be $12.5 Million a year as an ongoing investment — though I suppose you could declare a “winner” and cut the program early at any time. You could also treat that $250,000 as an advance against royalties (the 5% per book or whatever is determined) so you would still be out some cash, but in the process of making it back.

I give away these great business ideas because *I* personally don’t have that kind of cash hanging around. Amazon does. Barnes & Noble is in trouble but they could certainly spare $25 Million. The major houses might scrape up the same amount, too, if they thought it was worthwhile. (I’m starting to doubt their judgement.)

It’s a pity so much money gets pissed away on app development these days, when for a fraction of that we could be supporting the production of books. (and with the same-or-better success rate, if you ask me)

PULP.

Space opera, horror, spy stories, noir, aliens, westerns, romance, and stories of “adventure” — cheap, lurid, shunned by the ‘legitimate’ publishers, considered to be devoid of literary value, and utterly fantastic. The pulp magazines (and their later paperback reprints) didn’t sell in the bookstore but out of racks at the drug store, newsstand, and five-and-dime. The covers were vivid and promised action, adventure, and sex. The pulps were mined for decades by later authors — as well as filmmakers — and from these humble roots Most If Not All of our modern fiction derives. It may take someone like Stephen King, John le Carré, Anne Rice, Elmore Leonard, Danielle Steel, Robert B. Parker, or Nora Roberts to ‘rehabilitate’ a genre in the eyes of some, but I often find I prefer ‘original’ pulp (the trashier the better) to more evolved forms.

…and of course, where there is money to be made: even the stodgiest of New England literary publishers will come around. A few decades of history (and a history of past sales) will give any setting or genre enough of a patina to be called “an american tradition”.

This is not the introduction to a long dissertation on Pulp, however (one could earn several post-graduate degrees just surveying and cataloging the stuff), instead I wanted to make a completely different point:

E-Books and Self Publishing are the New Pulp — and this is also utterly fantastic.

##

Pulp.

The Wikipedia entry for “Pulp magazines”:

[blockquote]
“Pulp magazines (often referred to as ‘the pulps’) are inexpensive fiction magazines published from 1896 through the 1950s. The typical pulp magazine was 7 inches (18 cm) wide by 10 inches (25 cm) high, 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) thick, and 128 pages long. Pulps were printed on cheap paper with ragged, untrimmed edges.

“The term pulp derives from the cheap wood pulp paper on which the magazines were printed. Magazines printed on higher quality paper were called ‘glossies’ or ‘slicks’. In their first decades, pulps were most often priced at ten cents per magazine, while competing slicks were 25 cents apiece. Pulps were the successor to the penny dreadfuls, dime novels, and short fiction magazines of the 19th century. Although many respected writers wrote for pulps, the magazines are best remembered for their lurid and exploitative stories and sensational cover art. Modern superhero comic books are sometimes considered descendants of ‘hero pulps’; pulp magazines often featured illustrated novel-length stories of heroic characters, such as The Shadow, Doc Savage and The Phantom Detective.”
[/blockquote]

There are some minor additions to wikipedia in the block above: I did not alter the text, but I did add some links to topics wikieditors cited above (they either missed ‘em or were to lazy to go back and give readers a helpful pointer to other wiki articles; fixed that). I might also point interested readers to the Men’s Adventure magazines of the 50s, the last expression of the Pulps in actual pulp [here’s that wikipedia article], as well as to Wikipedia’s (mildly anemic) coverage of genre fiction generally.

The first half of the 20th century was rich ground for stories — because the plots, tropes, backdrops, and character-types of the 19th and previous centuries were pretty fertile to begin with and they were well-composted with a heavy layer of The Pulps.

Second blockquote:

(Quoting myself this time) “Form, Content, Copies, Rights, and Plato” : Matt Blind, RocketBomber.com, 17 November 2009

[blockquote]
“Paperbacks were and weren’t radical:

“Yes, they were cheaper. While initially introduced as value editions of the classics and bestsellers, soon the lower costs of manufacture induced some publishers to create new works (and whole genres) to take advantage of the format. Stories which might never have seen print due to either ‘lurid’ content or lack of a ‘literary’ appeal suddenly found a new home, and mountains of books were printed to feed the pulp market. Some of these were reprints of material previously available in fiction anthology magazines — a format that is, sadly, mostly extinct — the magazines fed a fan base that later bought the books, and the magazines were a crucible that forged not just the fans of the works but also their creators. Mystery, Romance, and Sci-fi all exist today as genres — popular genres that support their own hardcover releases — because of the decades of pulps… but that would be another essay.

“A paperback book has a floppy cover, but was still recognizable as a book. If one weren’t hung up on the literary ‘value’ and ‘merit’ of a Book-as-object, then the opportunity to buy one at a cheaper price because you want to, you know, enjoy it is a no-brainer. Here was the first movement toward books as popular entertainment, and also provided a way ‘in’, to merge centuries of Pop Culture Trash back into the literary tradition.”
[/blockquote]

third blockquote:

How Book Publishing Has Changed Since 1984 : Peter Osnos, The Atlantic, 12 April 2011

[blockquote]
“[H]ere is where books were sold in 1984: The biggest names in retailing were Walden, Dalton, and Crown, still relatively new as national chains. They made books available in malls as populations moved to the suburbs. Led by Crown, which was mainly in the Washington, D.C. area, the chains adopted discounting as a strategy and limited their selections to put greater emphasis on bestsellers and ‘category’ books such as self-help, diet, and romance. Barnes & Noble and Borders, which became dominant in the 1990s with superstores (absorbing Dalton and Walden, respectively; Crown went out of business), were still in their early stages. The rise of the chains had the greatest impact on department stores such as Macy’s and Marshall Fields, which in their heyday were centers of bookselling alongside housewares and clothing. By 1984, that era was ending.

“Independent bookstores — according to Carl’s estimate, there were about 3,500 full-service booksellers, which is twice the number there are today — played a major role, since they had the ability, when enthusiastic, to turn first novels into bestsellers. Some of today’s leading independents, such as Tattered Cover in Denver and Powell’s in Portland, were already influential. But many other stores of that era closed, overwhelmed by the chains and superstores, and eventually Amazon and the rise of online retailing. ‘Hand-selling,’ as it is known, is still the independents’ specialty, and while their role is smaller than it was, they remain at the spiritual core of publishing. It is encouraging to see so many of them holding their own and adapting to the digital age in various ways. In the past three years, several hundred new stores have opened, often where there were none before. At their best, the ‘indies’ anchor communities with author signings, reading groups and other events.

“The Book-of-the-Month Club and The Literary Guild were still very prominent in the 1980s, with millions of members. Their monthly choices were eagerly awaited by publishers. But, like the department stores, the ‘clubs’ gradually lost their place as bookselling moved into so many new venues, and their remnants focus on niche markets with much smaller constituencies.

….

“Mass-market paperbacks sold in drugstores and newsstands, which were expanding into malls also and were a very substantial business. One of the major developments at Random House in 1984 was the August publication as a trade paperback ‘original’ of Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, an innovative novel that skipped the hardcover stage, captured the mood of Generation-X readers, and sold, over time, untold (I’m guessing millions) of copies. From then on, these originals, also known as “quality” paperbacks, to distinguish them in price and style from the drugstore variety, were ‘cool,’ and their aura expanded the market for trade paperbacks beyond the classic reprints that were their staple adding an important new category for readers at just the right time.”
[/blockquote]

I’m embarrassed to quote so heavily, but the article is an excellent source of perspective on the industry: Please read the whole thing and also read Peter Osnos’s follow-up, “Good Reviews Are No Longer Enough”.

Once again, though, I can add to the block from my own research: here are some primary sources on the book departments of the downtown department stores, which can be found on Google Books: from 1920 and 1949, which I first cited in an Amazon take-down back in 2009. For more on the 1990’s rise of the Big Box bookstores, I’d point you towards this essay, this link roundup, and this math- and graph-heavy post.

The Atlantic article gives us a definite point in time: 1984 — before the Big Box, before the internet, but also well after Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls and Naked Came the Stranger by “Penelope Ashe”. 1984 is 50 to 80 years removed from the Grand Pulp Era and at least 20 years after the last of the pulp magazines. Bright Lights, Big City is cited as the first “paperback original”, which is a tad disingenuous considering the decades of pulp-reprints in the format, but considering that just 10 years earlier Stephen King’s Carrie got a hardcover release — this may in fact be the case. At any rate, Bright Lights, Big City sold a ton of books, got made into a movie, and was a big success: and was a book that skipped the hardcover. It wasn’t so much that Jay McInerney’s book “proved” the value of a paperback, or marked the day that Pulp “won” — it’s more that the mass-market paperback format was fully co-opted by mainstream publishers. Lower required investments (in author advances, and in printing) changed the calculus, and increased shelf space (in mall bookstores, and the nascent big boxes) meant there was demand.

A small-scale revolution.

##

The mistake so many are making when it comes to e-books and self-publishing is that they strongly feel they are shaking the very foundations of publishing, upsetting the established order of publishers and editors and gatekeepers and damnable rejection letters and bringing forth the Author’s Utopia where they and their works can Connect with Readers forever and ever amen.

But publishing is not a monolith. It may seem like there are only six publishers (soon to be five) but really: the publishers haven’t been the same since the big media consolidation of the 1990s. Smaller imprints subsumed into the morass continued to produce great books, but also largely only managed to do so, so long as they were able to fly under the corporate radar. I personally love “publishers” like Baen, Del Rey, Orbit, and Tor, but even more-so than most readers (since I am a bookseller) I know who actually ‘owns’ that business.

It can be hard to make a movie, too. This isn’t the non-sequitur that it seems:

A major summer-tentpole blockbuster movie requires the input of dozens of creatives, the technical expertise of hundreds of professionals, hundreds of millions of dollars, a lot of computing power and many hours of work in post production, and (frosting on the cake): a wholescale marketing blitz including internet trailers, TV commercials, print ads, toys in fast-food kids’ meals, and the personal appearances of actors and directors on cable, late night, morning shows, and red carpet debuts.

And then there’s YouTube. “Meh, a movie is just a video, after all: what’s the hype?”

Even an “indie” movie, or one without special effects, requires a lot of work by multiple people in specialized roles and with specialized skills. A “Director” can write, act in, film, edit, and upload a “movie” to YouTube — taking care of all of the required roles both on and off camera — and the finished work can be amazing. I’m not saying genius doesn’t exist. But many YouTube videos struggle to match reality-TV standards of production, let alone cinema-ready-polish.

Since many of us watch untold hours of YouTube, we are of course familiar with a lot of this. It probably goes without saying, and would be obvious even if I didn’t rub your face in it.

With the YouTube model made painfully obvious to you and now firmly in mind: let us once again consider self-publishing.

Unlike video, which are major productions (and often referred to as ‘productions’ in the press), Books are often assumed to be the work of a single person. This ignores a lot of what goes into a print edition: typesetting, printing, distribution, sales. Even in the case of e-books, though, where the printing et al. is done by computers and internet servers — there is the research, editing and revision of the manuscript, book cover design, pre-publication marketing, post-publication marketing, and the ‘legacy’ to consider. The long-term marketing of a book after it’s a scant six months old and slips into “the backlist” can include writing more books to increase the length of the series or the profile of the author, getting reviewed (on online sales sites but also preferrably elsewhere), keeping your book “in front” of readers in a world where you honestly only get 90 days to “hit” on the market, and overcoming the “sophomore slump”: sure, you’ve got one book out there already, but if it didn’t set the world on fire there is an open question whether you’ll ever be able to sell another.

“But, but… self-publishing! ebooks! it’s different now!”

E-Books are not the panacea some hope, and if you press the point: we’re going to have to stop you. Push it too much and you’re just selling e-book-snake-oil to a whole class of gullible creators. Can we all respect and repeat the point:
E- does not fix all.

A broken system that extends lottery-ticket-style winnings to a few, while ignoring everyone else, is not suddenly fixed when we bypass the single-channel Big Game to offer smaller jackpots to multiple winners via the internet. The ease of YouTube did not suddenly usher in a cadre of web-only TV shows to compare with The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Arrested Development, or The Wire.

I’m being intentionally harsh. I want to get you thinking about the system: It’s rigged, and it’s rigged against you — and as much as you think you’re participating in a Revolution, you’re still letting the Lottery Winners of Publishing skew your expectations. Amanda Hocking, J.A. Konrath, E.L. James, and John Locke are not your business model.

The model you want to emulate is not the major publishers, c. 1980-2000yesterday, but instead the pulps of the 1920s and 1930s:

We Need E-Pulp.

We need web-anthologies, the equivalent of the pulp magazines of yore, for the new short fiction that has no other outlet. We need editorial selection (and editorial input, and maybe even some editing) to make sense of the massive influx of new writing made possible by e-. We need e-magazines selling at 99¢ an issue, and selling in volume — enough volume to afford to pay authors again, by the word or otherwise.

We need whole new publishers like Harlequin, and new imprints like the sci-fi imprints of the 60s, 70s, and 80s — e- is the New Pulp, and we’ll need a new escalator. Aside from the content, the other amazing thing about the pulps was that this-little-publishing-sideline-industry served as an incubator where new story ideas were tested and new authors were tempered. Amazon wants to own the new system, but the pulps of the 20s and 30s were not an outreach program conducted by the Hearst Corporation. Dozens (if not hundreds) (if not thousands) of back-room and back-alley outfits were publishing rags: over the years, hundreds of thousands of pages that had to be filled with content. Decades later, these were followed by dozens of mass-market paperback publishers looking to fill racks at newsstands and drugstores, and the reprints continued right up until the 70s — when original content by the likes of King and Parker et al. started to take over the mass market. The whole of the comic book industry was part of this movement, and thank you. Some imprints that are now Key components of major media conglomerates (Pocket, Bantam, Berkley, Dial, Dell) got started doing mass-market paperback reprints; Random House and Penguin (two of the largest publishers and after the impending merger about to account for 45-50% of ALL publishing) both got their start in the 30s doing cheap paperbacks. No, really.

##

What does this mean for authors?
Congrats. With e-books, You’ve rediscovered an 1880s publishing model: Serial publishing [novels in installments, that sell for a few bucks per] and If Amazon Really Is That Amazing, I guess you’re done.

Oh? Not satisfied? You want distribution into bookstores? You have aspirations and would like to, just maybe, work with an agent or editor to make your books more enticing, more saleable? Gee, I wish we had thought to build up some sort of system for that before Amazon introduced their Kindle Direct program.

What does this mean for the publisher?
You’re already 5 years behind. You might be 50 years behind. #TheNewPulpIsTheOldPulp

What does this mean for the retailer?
We have to carry everything —and yet, we get no credit. If anything, we get blame for not keeping up with the ‘trends’ when no one else was keeping up (and when it was pure speculation and not even an actual product not more than 6 months ago: and we get crap if we want to downscale because damn who could actually keep up with it all) —and still, still get no credit for what we actually do.

##

I didn’t ask to become the Book World’s Resident Internet Historian, but damn me if I’m the only one who remembers who we are and where we came from, and can draw the requisite parallels.

In the 20s and 30s, Book Publishing (as an industry) was hardly ossified: new technology and new outlets meant publishing was still (still!) in it’s infancy. While we today think of this period as staid, personality-driven, provincial, and perhaps a bit quaint: I’d say that impression formed based on what we were assigned to read in high school and did not (and does not) reflect the reality. These decades were exceptionally dynamic, both in terms of content and in the business models being developed. Powerhouses Penguin [1935] and Random House [1927] both date back to this period; they are the current #1 and #2 publishers and are merging – fulfilling a destiny that began in the 70s, when the Media Giants were first assembled from their robot-lion-parts, and the 80s, when the monolithic retail chains that enabled even greater consolidation appeared on the American landscape.

Books and Publishing have undergone massive change – and changes have taken place every decade since the 30s. While we [I] obsess over Amazon now, the retail landscape has been changing for over a century, and has changed drastically for nearly every segment — books included. Where we once had the main-street or city-square retail outlet – over the past century we’ve gone from main street to mall to mall-adjecent to ‘lifestyle center’ and back to urban-walkable-main-street again. The green grocer, baker, butcher, and pharmacist are now all just aisles in the Super Market – dry goods, sundries, and even USB flash drives (these days) included. Between 1913 and 2013, physical retail is damn near unrecognizable.

And Over The Whole Course Of The 20th Century, 100+ Years of Physical Retail, there has always been the other path — what was once fulfilled by the Sears & Roebuck Catalog and is now satisfied by Amazon. I’ve made the point mulitple times that Amazon is not Retail but Mail-Order but the distinction is lost on most. Amazon is an add-on and adjunct to stores-in-neighborhoods; Sears began the 20th century as a catalog but ended it as a nationwide retail chain that was also a real-estate developer and mall landlord. I don’t know what Amazon might want to ‘build’ nor where they will make their physical beach-head: but if they seriously want to challenge Wal-Mart at least one offensive front is going to have to be in realspace.

If you show up in 2013 and claim that a ‘new’ format and publishing ‘model’ changes everything – well, sure if you think so but maybe you should do your reading first.

I’d say the primary change is in payment models, and engagement: one can engage readers directly (over internet platforms) (not all of which are under your direct control; you rely on the forebearance of Amazon, Facebook, and many others) (so it’s not really direct now, is it?) (and not exactly new, in as much as we’ve been sharing off-line for millenia) — but damn if things like Amazon and Paypal don’t make it easier to collect.

In the past, as an author: you had to hustle. Selling short stories, shopping manuscripts, working the magazine circuit for whatever payday you could manage while holding out for the larger payoff a novel might provide. Constantly writing, constantly submitting, constantly waiting.

Now, with the internet, and e-books: it’s all easier. Upload everything.

And then — Hustle: find readers, engage them, get them to read your stuff online, maybe they even go so far as to download a file, or buy [Buy!] your ebook. Constantly working your own blogs to get the work out, writing guest-articles on other blogs to increase your profile, monitoring traffic and hit logs — joining Tumblr, Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter and working those — Sharing, blurbing, networking, waiting — Wait. Is this any easier? Some things are easier, sure: there’s an online bookstore you can direct readers to, as opposed to hoping they have a physical bookstore in their neighborhood, but that is literally the last step in a thousand-step journey and none of the rest of it is any easier, folks.

The Beauty And Lasting Value of Pulp is two-fold:

First: it’s [it was] a ready paycheck for authors and artists (those covers didn’t paint themselves) and the pulp magazines were a commodity at the time. Someone bought the rags.

Second: it’s [it is] an archive and a vehicle by which new fans find the work. Fritz Leiber and Doc Smith are two of my favourite authors and not only did I never read them when they were anthologized, active authors — hell, I missed the first generations of reprints and only knew them by reputation for years until the second round of reprints. These weren’t even necessarily “archival” versions: Leiber got a set of paperbacks from White Wolf Publishing, Doc Smith’s Lensman books got a re-release from Old Earth Books in the late 1990s.

##

The “real” costs of self publishing are all opportunity costs. More:

http://janefriedman.com/2013/05/20/infographic-5-key-book-publishing-paths/
http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2013/05/the-real-costs-of-self-publishing-book
http://www.booksandsuch.biz/blog/the-self-editing-myth/
http://writerunboxed.com/2013/05/15/six-core-issues-facing-writers-today/
http://livinginthemaniototo.blogspot.com/2013/05/on-self-publishing-and-perils-thereof.html
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/publicity-for-ebooks/?utm_source=feedly
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/build-digital-relationships-with-consumers/?utm_source=feedly
http://www.publiclibraries.com/blog/why-are-ebooks-so-expensive/
http://www.digitalbookworld.com/2013/bowker-launches-selfpublishedauthor-com/?utm_source=feedly
http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/isbn-advice-for-self-published-authors_b70730?utm_source=feedly
http://inkwelleditorial.com/how-amazons-algorithm-can-help-you-sell-more-ebooks-online
http://projectteambeta.com/publishing-world-deciding-to-self-publish-by-sarah-wyndes/

Over time, a google search of “The New Pulp” will also be worthwhile: and here it is: https://www.google.com/search?q=the+new+pulp

Previously:
Original Projection : 1st update September 2012 : 2nd update December 2012

“Ebook Sales” data in this case are the numbers reported by the 1200 or so publishers who respond to the AAP surveys: The AAP no longer does their own press releases with this data but I’d like to personally thank Shelf Awareness for including the information (as it becomes available) in their excellent email newsletter. (go sign up.)

[tl;dr-math]

The formula for the sales projection curve is

ebook(t) = k * (1 + tanh(-π+((π/80)t)))

Where t is the time variable, counted by months, and k is a constant one selects out of one’s ass (a surprising number of scientific constants work that way) equal in this case to $130 Million. The constant k is also the assumed value of ebook sales at the inflection point in the graph.

Using fractions of pi — (π/80) above — is how we “stretch” the s-curve to match the observed growth over time. My first projection used (π/60), an assumed dynamic growth phase of about 120 months. To get the projected graph to match reported sales, however, I had to slow things down a bit — (π/80) translates to a “dynamic” phase of 160 months, about 13 years. For the graph below, our starting point (t=0) is the month of August, 2005.

This also means we hit the inflection point back in May 2012.

[/tl;dr-math]

My [*] on the Projected Sales is the same disclaimer as last time:

• The only data available to me are ebook sales as reported by the Association of American Publishers: so these correspond only to US ebook sales from established publishing houses and does not include self-published ebooks.
• Merely looking at a dollar sales figure (again, the only data available) glosses over the fact that ebooks are sold at lower price points: unit sales of books will be higher than the dollar figure might suggest
• My projection is not the only interpretation – but I’ve tried some other models and ebooks sure look like they’re following a fairly common sigmoid growth curve
• …however, if ebooks do not merely cannibalize sales of other formats but instead push books into new genres, new business models, new retail channels, and effectively blow up books as we know them: why sure, I guess there’s no upper limit & my projection is wrong. You can make any assumptions you like along those lines. My graph represents a fairly short future time frame (3-5 years out) and a relatively stable publishing industry. (Well, stable other than the disruption currently happening due to ebooks.)

##

Now, some new thoughts:

First, I need to see the next 4 months of data (Jan-Feb-Mar-Apr 2013) to see if there is a bounce in Early 2013, just like there was in 2011 and 2012 (corresponding to new owners of devices buying content, aka the post-Christmas-Gift Bounce)

Second,

How about we turn this around? Let’s say my projection of ebook growth was correct up through 2011 (and presumably beyond) and it’s the data in 2012 that was in some way “wrong” or skewed?

Let’s Just Guess that publishers’ reported ebook sales numbers in May-June-July-August of 2012 were affected by Fifty Shades of Grey. Random House reported profits (not sales, Profits) were up 75% year-over-year due to the 50 Shades phenomenon, and additionally, “About 50% of revenues from the trilogy were from ebooks”. It’s going to be very hard to parse that 50% number and compare it to the 70 Million ‘copies’ sold, and also to go from there to the actual number of readers: How many people bought just the first book? How many ebooks sold were the 3 volume “box set”, and do the box sets count as one book or three? How does the cost of printing figure into the calculation of “revenue” — does the lower price point mean ebooks sold More Than Half, or does the slimmer profit margin on An Actual Printed Book mean that ebooks sold Less? edit: actual number at about 15 Million. see end note “update2” and also ref the PW article here.

50 Shades was a definite outlier, though, no matter the number: the “downturn” in AAP-reported ebook sales toward the end of 2012 is at least in part an expected correction.

I want to say there is more to that story, though.

I’d say the numbers Sep-Dec 2012 also show that the established publishers are losing (additional) ground to self-publishing and authors using direct-to-e-book platforms like iBooks, KDP, and Nook Press.

Just like the ebooks-as-a-format saw steady growth before suddenly tearing off in 2010 — following the “mainstreaming” of ereaders and tablets, when there finally was a market — self-published ebooks are going to follow the same trajectory now that there is a “mainstream” market:

At least 5 Million readers (and maybe twice that or more) bought the 50 Shades ebooks — A huge chunk of readers have been turned onto a “new” genre, erotic fiction [a genre that was already fairly extensive, almost entirely online, and that predates ebooks-as-we-currently-define-them by at least a decade].

There were also stories all over the place in 2012 (in papers, in magazines, online and on TV) reporting on 50 Shades and its origin as a self-published book — the success of E. L. James has removed most (if not quite all) of the stigma of self-publishing, and other authors like John Locke and Amanda Hocking, both of whom have built readerships across multiple books and over years, are proving that it’s not just a one-time special exception: Self Publishing can work.

The gap between AAP-reported data and my projection? It was about $5-10 Million per month in the 2011 (excluding January spikes) — but now (after 50 shades) we’re looking at $25-30 Million per month in September 2012, and perhaps $40-50 Million per month by the end of the year.

I feel confident in my projection — though I’m also leaning heavily toward adjusting the projection once I get more data. And if Apple, Amazon, or B&N want to get off of their secrecy kick and could maybe just tell us how big digital self publishing is: well, that’d be just fine by me, too.

It may be a full year from now (when we have all of 2013 numbers, and no curveballs thrown) before we can know which of the data points are outliers. I plan to update the chart every 4 months, as the data comes in.

[update1, 5:45pm 13 April 2013]
An extra little bit of math for you: Monthly Sales of $50 Million in ebooks divided by an average price point of $2.99 per book, divided by 30 days in a month, would be half a million self published ebooks sold and downloaded every single day.

Question for the class: Is that number too high, or too low?
[/update1]

[update2, 9:55pm 13 April 2013]
Found a number, via Publishers Weekly, in their reporting on Random House & other publishers ebook performance in 2012:

“Fifty Shades sold over 15 million digital copies, while the Fifty Shades Trilogy Bundle sold over 850,000 e-books. RH had another 1 million–copy e-book seller in Gone Girl.”

E-book Sales Bolster Publishers’ Bottom Lines : Jim Milliot, 29 March 2013, Publishers Weekly

More math: 16 Million ebooks (rounding up) vs 54 Million print books — and as reported ebooks accounted for 50% of the revenue. If all other production costs have been covered (as I assume they were after the first half-million or so sold) then a digitally-delivered ebook is at least 3 times as profitable as An Actual Printed Book — please note that when one has to actually cover the production costs, and pay an author advance, there is going to be a much different calculus involved — and I’ll leave the question of how the differing price points affect the calculation as an exercise for the student
[/update2]

[update3]minor edits made 9:30pm 14 April 2013[/update3]
[update4]minor edits & format changes, additional links added, 7:50pm 14 April 2013[/update4]

Brigid Alverson (whom I’ve never met but know on twitter) has an excellent write-up currently posted to Publisher’s Weekly on the current state of the American manga industry: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/comics/article/56693-manga-2013-a-smaller-more-sustainable-market.html

I was first informed of this excellent article via the equally excellent comics-news blog The Beat [aka comicsbeat.com] : http://comicsbeat.com/must-read-shocker-there-is-still-a-us-manga-industry/

And now that I’m done thanking others for their hard work and excellent journalistic instincts —

[no, really, what I do here is much easier; being in the peanut gallery is not only less work, we get to pick-and-choose when it comes to predictions]

…I’d like to take a moment to congratulate myself for posting this way back in 2008:

[blockquote]
Manga isn’t growing by leaps and bounds anymore; it never was a license to print money and now the initial boom (which I’ve dated to 2004-2007, though others say it started earlier) is settling into something more like steady single-digit [year-on-year] growth.

Steady single-digit growth isn’t just good, it’s excellent. We all need to get our heads to a place where we can agree on that, instead of obsessing over what the fan world used to look like and lamenting the crash of the anime DVD market. It’s a shame, that, but manga isn’t anime and with Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan all partnered-up (or getting into the game themselves) the books will be available for quite some time.

quick review for those who haven’t been reading my stuff for the past year:
Between the 5 of them, these companies account for about half of the US book business. [48.8% – Source: Michael Hyatt, Dec 2006] Each of the 5 also acts as their own distributor, shipping new titles direct to book stores. Since not everyone is going to know this off the top of their head

• Random House = Del Rey
• HarperCollins partnered with Tokyopop
• Simon & Schuster partnered with Viz Media
• Hachette = Yen Press
• Macmillan partnered with Seven Seas
  The only major player not in the game is Penguin. see also: 5by8 #25, Squeeze Play, on publishers and licensing, and 5by8 #26, What’s the Target? on publishing and sales.

We can discuss which third tier (or major) manga publisher is going to go under or is struggling or might not meet their deadlines (or has never met their deadlines) but at $10 a pop and with this much publishing muscle behind it, manga as a category isn’t going anywhere.

Steady single-digit, year-on-year growth is a Great place to be.
Got it?

Good.

[/blockquote]

Since 2008, a few things have changed:

Random House still has an excellent business relationship with Kodansha, and Vertical, and distributes DC Comics to bookstores besides. While Del Rey is merely one of the top 3 sci-fi/fantasy/spec. fic. imprints with a much reduced comics line-up: Del Rey is One Of the Top 3 Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Spec. Fic. imprints, and Kodansha in direct control of those US manga licences hasn’t been a bad thing either.

HarperCollins, if someone at corporate had been paying attention, could have launched a whole YA Graphic Novels imprint into the hole Tokyopop left, using the Warriors GNs as a base and other nee-HC-Tokyopop titles as a built-in backlist. Huge Missed Opportunity, guys.

I think the Scholastic Graphix imprint is another big deal in this space – yes, obviously manga is a bigger market than just YA/Teen — but just like pop/rock music: tweens and teens are the manga market leaders and the biggest growth opportunity.

I also want to encourage Seven Seas. Damn. You guys are tenacious – whatever keeps things running over there: please keep doing it. I don’t buy all your books but I love that you’re still in business.

I pointed this out 3 years ago but I think it might be time for another “the Emperor is wearing no clothes” moment.

Many of the partisans on all sides of the larger ebooks vs bookstores vs publishers vs authors vs Amazon debate get caught up on just one side or another of the love-hate-polygon.

“I’m a Kindle Direct author and I’m making 5 figures a year after a decade of publisher rejections – publishers suck!”

“As a small press, we’re holding out against Amazon and the big six while still pushing into bookstore chains and the indies — while also marketing online. Authors: we’re in your corner”

“We may just be an imprint of a major publisher, but we’re actively engaging our readers, establishing an online presence, and pushing content other than books that’ll keep the readers coming back.“

“Here: read our books for free – we know you’ll buy them, or the sequels, and how is an e-book sample different from plucking and reading copy off the bookstore shelf?”

“I encourage you to read and buy the books I’ve reviewed: if you choose to buy, please conisder using the affiliate links on my page (it’s like leaving a tip!)”

“My local bookstore closed, so I’m never shopping bookstores again. Amaazon FTW“

“Amazon put my local bookstore out of business, so while I have to shop online now I’m going used, ebay, and Indie“

##

Here’s the thing:

The common ebook formats are just XML/XHTML and CSS packages of your plain text. No, really. The only complications are ‘proprietary’ formats that implement varying degrees of DRM. Otherwise: it’s all open source web pages, basically. If you’re already writing for a browser, there’s no need to go out of your way to ‘optimize’ for e-readers: when you already have the web, you don’t need Amazon to publish.

What you need Amazon for is access to a market: 200 million or so readers who already browse and buy online. But don’t conflate Amazon’s user base with Amazon. If you buy into the KDP (or other “publishing” platforms; Amazon/Kindle is largest, so sees the most converts) — you’re just admitting that this Captured Market is more important to you than reaching out to all readers.

I get it. It’s easy.

Not only did they build up the reader base – they handed you a key. Sure: it’s easier to game a system that only serves a small subset of super-avid readers, those who read dozens of books each month — rather than risk putting yourself out there for the market to decide your worth. Most folks only read one book a year. One in four read no books at all.

But don’t tell me that your mastery of the online-tutorial-levels of publishing means you’ve “won the game” and the rest of publishing is superfluous. What’s the real differentiator? How do we know which e-books are truly the winners? And does an Online success necessarily mean the same book won’t also succeed in bookstores?

https://www.google.com/search?q=Amanda+Hocking
https://www.google.com/search?q=E+L+James

Amazon wrote your book for you? Amazon created the fan base?

You’re telling me steampunk, lycan, faerie and fey and otherkin, and the various and ever expanding vampire fandoms, plus dozens more fandoms I’m thankfully ignorant of – none of these existed before Amazon? Or that none of these fandoms existed before the Kindle?

I totally get that signing up for KDP is easy — and if you’ve already written something and have either felt slighted or completely ignored by the current publishing industry — Amazon seems like your savior. Just remember: the web has already given you all you need to ‘publish’ a book. Indeed, ebooks are nothing but web pages — and web pages can do a lot more, if you’d care to try.

So long as the data can be found (sadly, the AAP no longer does their own press releases; thankfully, other sources with access to BookStats do post the monthly ebook numbers) I’ll continue to update the graph.

I’d also like to remind the folks at AAP/BISG/bookstats.org that posts to RocketBomber.com are available freely under a Non-commercial CC license: they are welcome to include my analysis (or adaptations of my analysis) in their own reports. I’ll even waive the non-commercial requirement (which would be a sticking point, since they charge big bucks for the data now) so long as they still include an attribution. You share with us, I share with you, new things get created, new analysis and viewpoints proliferate: internet!

Those of you new to this blog should check out:

The Original Projection: June 2011
http://www.rocketbomber.com/2011/06/24/ebooks-predictions-math-that-lies

And Update 1: September 2012
http://www.rocketbomber.com/2012/08/30/ebook-sales-projection-2012-edition

[tl;dr-math]

The formula for the sales projection curve is

ebook(t) = k * (1 + tanh(-π+((π/80)t)))

Where t is the time variable, counted by months, and k is a constant one selects out of one’s ass (a surprising number of scientific constants work that way) equal in this case to $130 Million. The constant k is also the assumed value of ebook sales at the inflection point in the graph.

Using fractions of pi — (π/80) above — is how we “stretch” the s-curve to match the observed growth over time. My first projection used (π/60), an assumed dynamic growth phase of about 120 months. To get the projected graph to match reported sales, however, I had to slow things down a bit — (π/80) translates to a “dynamic” phase of 160 months, about 13 years. For the graph below, our starting point (t=0) is the month of August, 2005.

This also means we hit the inflection point back in May, 6 months ago.

[/tl;dr-math]

My [*] on the Projected Sales is the same disclaimer as last time:

• The only data available to me are ebook sales as reported by the Association of American Publishers: so these correspond only to US ebook sales from established publishing houses and does not include self-published ebooks.
• Merely looking at a dollar sales figure (again, the only data available) glosses over the fact that ebooks are sold at lower price points: unit sales of books will be higher than the dollar figure might suggest
• My projection is not the only interpretation – but I’ve tried some other models and ebooks sure look like they’re following a fairly common sigmoid growth curve
• …however, if ebooks do not merely cannibalize sales of other formats but instead push books into new genres, new business models, new retail channels, and effectively blow up books as we know them: why sure, I guess there’s no upper limit & my projection is wrong. You can make any assumptions you like along those lines. My graph represents a fairly short future time frame (3-5 years out) and a relatively stable publishing industry. (Well, stable other than the disruption currently happening due to ebooks.)

As data becomes available, I’m happy to post future updates. I think the next e-book sales projection will be after the Jan-Feb ebooks sales numbers go public — covering this fall plus the post-holiday-ereaders-given-as-gifts bump we’ve seen in years past. I’m guessing that will be in May, about 5-6 months from now.