Whence Sails the Publisher's Ship? (Part Two)

I apologize for taking so long to get the second portion of this post published. I’ve been up to my eyeballs finishing up my second novel, Willow Brown, American Fairy.

In my last post, I discussed the Bad Thing that has happened to the traditional book publishing industry, which was the advent of affordable and accessible self-publishing for authors. This post deals with the second Boogie Man: ebooks.

Books in electronic format have been inevitable since sometime in the 1960’s. Two key technological developments in that decade led the way: microminiaturization of electronic components and the cathode ray tube display (CRT). Things moved along slowly on both those fronts until the 1980’s, when LSI (large scale integration) allowed the first complete microchip computers and CRT’s became cheap enough to be commercially available to more users. The 1980’s saw the arrival of personal computers and the world changed. Suddenly, anyone could display things on their CRT, things they had written themselves, but more importantly, things they had stored, and that was perhaps the biggest advancement of all. Floppy disks, then hard drives became repositories for our words. Software advances helped fuel the fire and soon dedicated word processors and later personal computers (that did many other things as well) found a place in private homes.

Once the concept of electronically created and stored words took hold, the publishing industry jumped on board like everyone else, and for good reason. Writing, editing and printing became vastly faster and easier. Demand exploded for smaller, lighter, portable computers. Those big clunky laptops of the early 90’s grew sleeker, slicker, faster, and the screen quality improved. Reading a book on a computer was doable, but still cumbersome, especially on a bus. And very few were available.

Enter Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon. Bezos sells books. Lots of books. It took a few years for Amazon to turn a profit, but even before it did, the publishing industry had changed. Online book sales over the Internet challenged the long-standing business model of the bricks-and-mortar bookstore. That whole industry has enjoyed (maybe a poor choice of word) a big paradigm shift. Jeff Bezos is a boogie man for the traditional publishing industry, but that’s a subject for another post.

Bezos’s brainchild is the cheap, handheld ebook reader, the Kindle. With the Kindle, Amazon brought everything together in a single package: convenient, portable ebooks, wireless delivery of those books, and easy purchase - just click one button. (So easy in fact, when you buy a Kindle book, the very next screen has a “Bought this book by mistake?” button to undo the action.) Barnes & Noble and a host of others rushed to market with their own ereaders and books. Apple - well, that’s another post.


Of course, the other thing Jeff Bezos includes free with every Kindle is a tether. You have to buy your ebooks from Amazon. What you actually purchase is a “content delivery system”. Same at Barnes & Noble with the Nook. Not all readers are so restricted, and many embrace the ePub book format that can be used on multiple readers.

Ebooks, and ereaders, have changed the entire market for books, and they’ve really confused the publishing industry. The Big Six publishers have embraced them ... sort of. There are many articles about ebooks versus paper and the struggles of the authors, agents, publishers and booksellers to adapt, and I’ll not rehash them here. The only comment I’ll make is that the Big Six contention that the production cost of an ebook is nearly the same as for a paper version, is a pure lie. I’m a self-published author who publishes ebooks through Kindle Direct Publishing. I know what it costs to put out an ebook.

So where is all this tumult leading? I don't presume to have an answer, but I'll give you my take.

First, paper books made from trees are not going away any time soon. There are still large groups of people out there who like the feel of a real, physical book in their hands, myself included. Electronics are convenient, for sure, especially if you live in a small house like I do. I believe we'll see limitations on what's available in paper someday, a reverse process from what we saw when ebooks first came on the scene.

Second, ebooks are here to stay. They're not a fad. I believe they'll get lost in the concept of content delivery, and in a few years you'll no longer be able to buy a dedicated ereader, but instead will be forced to buy a tablet device if you want to buy ebooks.

Third, we'll start seeing authors able to sell ebooks directly to readers without the big resellers like Amazon as a middleman. This is happening already on a small scale, for authors who don't use a proprietary format. With the social media options available nowadays, an author can build a following without the help of the traditional publishing houses, and many of us are.

And finally, I'm sure that next year something will come along to make this entire post obsolete, and we'll all laugh at my predictions. Technology just moves too fast to make accurate predictions about the future.

Just ask the Big Six publishers.

Whence Sails the Publishers' Ship? (Part One)

If you’re paying attention to the media at all, you know the book publishing industry is in a state of turmoil, and has been for several years now. Ebooks, Kindles, Nooks, bankruptcies, store closings and behind it all is the evil nemesis, the Dark Lord of publishing: Amazon. As publishing’s ship sinks or sails, whichever metaphor you prefer, there’s a lot of confusion out there as to cause and effect, a lot of name-calling, a lot of “man your battle stations” stuff going on. However, the turmoil is about two completely separate issues that are often confused, both by the publishers and by the media. This post will deal with the first Bad Thing: Cost Effective Self-Publishing. My next post will deal with the second Bad Thing: Ebooks.

First, we have self-publishing. An author has been able to publish his own work since there was dirt. All that was required was the capital to pay a printer and a bookbinder, and then the wherewithal (or money) to market and distribute your own work. A century or so ago, that was how it was done. Enter the new business model, based on the professional publisher, a one-stop shop for authors. We’ll edit your book, do the interior design, promote it, market it, distribute it, the whole package and we’ll even pay you a percentage of the proceeds. Just sign here… An author could still publish his own book, but it was difficult to market and became increasingly difficult to compete against the publishing industry club. Their tactics of labeling any independent publishing houses for hire as “vanity presses” was very successful in discouraging authors from bucking the trend. The Big Six publishers were the experts, the gatekeepers, the elite.

This business model persisted until well into the 1990’s. Nothing wrong with it, I suppose, except that anytime the production and distribution of goods or services is controlled by a select group of people or companies, a degree of arrogance develops. A belief that their way is the only way. An inability to believe a new method is any good, or to even admit there is any other method possible. I can think of a number of companies that fell to ruin because of that lack of vision: Polaroid, Blockbuster and most recently, Kodak, which finally filed for bankruptcy protection last month. Kodak, which developed and holds many patents for the very digital photography technology that destroyed it. Another example is, of course, the music industry, which was unable to adapt to rapidly changing technology.

Eventually, there arose a new way to self-publish: print-on-demand (POD). A normal book run at the so-called vanity press self-publishing services could be several thousand copies, which the author has to pay for, warehouse and distribute. But POD publishing allowed the small print lot, even it was only a single copy. Shipped direct to the buyer, with no warehousing. When the print-on-demand suppliers coupled with on-line distributors (like Amazon and Barnes & Noble), a completely new industry appeared and exploded in growth. No more finding a literary agent to sell your book to a publisher. An agent who takes ten percent of the proceeds. No more publisher, who takes the lion’s share of the proceeds, leaving the author with twenty or twenty-five percent royalties, paid months after sale of the copies.

Now the term “self-published” carries the same stigma as “vanity press author”. The Big Six and their whole industry (agents especially) look down their noses at those of us who have chosen to self-publish. This stigma attaches even to the bookstore level. Barnes and Noble and the defunct Borders have never allowed self-published books in their stores, unless you know an individual store manager very well and promise to buy back any copies that don’t sell. And an overlooked portion of their industry that disgusts me just as much is the reviewers out there in the media, who also make it a policy not to review self-published works. “We have to draw the line somewhere.”

I’ll admit, not everyone should self-publish. I’ve read some self-published books, and I’m of the strong opinion that most people don’t want to read the average person’s drivel. Most of us have no idea how to write a book. Most of us don’t understand grammar well enough, or character development, or even punctuation for that matter. (Like one book I read where University of Washington was italicized. Sorry, a university is not a ship, nor a book, so it belongs in plain font.) I haven’t mentioned knowing how to carry a story along through 100,000 or more words. However, for those who take the time and money to learn those skills and who are smart enough to hire a professional editor to review their work, self-publishing is a marvelous way to go. Those POD self-publishers charge nothing upfront. Zero. Zilch. In fact, they pay you, at a nice percentage, every time a book sells.

So the publishers try desperately to ignore self-published authors, hoping we’ll just go away. However, the second nightmare for the Big Six is an even bigger threat: ebooks. More on that in my next post.