As the ebook revolution continues, the very nature of a book is evolving. Such as Byliner, a new hybrid of journalism and books, where we find longer-form journalism. They'll publish works online for a short while, then they'll be available as paid downloads or as books. They will split the revenues 50-50 with the authors.
Other sites are trying similar experiments in different forms of journalism/book publishing; even Amazon is getting into the act with their "Singles". I predict we'll see a lot more of these experiments, as the freedom from the tyranny of physical book lengths and physical distribution enables a great degree of experimentation at little cost.
Meanwhile, the burgeoning ebook field has its superstars, such as Amanda Hocking, who's made hundreds of thousands of dollars in a short time with her ebooks. Now she's gone and signed a four-book publishing deal for more than $2 million with St. Martin's Press. Which will get her works in a different form in front of many more readers. Print is still kicking it, seems, but it's clear that ebooks are what got Amanda Hocking her deal. Authors no longer have to wait to be discovered; they can start selling ebooks and making money right away. And if you are successful at selling ebooks, you may find a lucrative deal from a traditional publisher laid in front of you... and these days, those offers are going to have to be much better to entice you away from the 70% royalties you can earn from an ebook.
It's easy to forget sometimes that ebooks aren't just fiction; the nonfiction ebook is also getting very popular. One thing that's struck me, since I first started making ebooks back in 1995 with Acrobat 1.0, is that the technology allows for an ebook to be different than a printed book. Yet very few publishers of ebooks have ever taken advantage of this. Mos publishers of ebooks, being publishers of books, just take the files they have prepared for the printer and save it as a PDF. There; ebook complete, they seem to say.
This reminds me of how television shows were made initially. When television was just coming on the scene in the 1950's, producers of TV shows mostly took their radio broadcast and put a camera in front of it. They then realized they had to pay more attention to what the actors looked like, and there had to be a set since it wasn't being constructed in the audience's mind. But one fixed camera was all they needed... until somebody figured out they could pan, and zoom. And when camera prices got a bit more reasonable, then you could have two cameras.
Fast-forward to today, where you have location shots, handheld cameras, computer graphics seamlessly blended in, splitscreen, fades, wipes, tracking shots... an immense array of techniques to choose from.
With ebooks, we're really at the very beginning of the form. Authors are just starting to realize, even with fiction, the liberating possibilities of the ebook form. Length is no longer regulated by the price of printing each page. Heck, you can put in extra information... scenes that were cut, research information, alternative endings.
For non-fiction ebooks, the possibilities are even more numerous. Audio, video, interactive graphics, examples with links. An example of what can be done is shown in the video above, where Mike Matas shows off what you can do on an iPad with an interactive ebook. His new company Push Pop Press is making software so that other publishers can create works like these.
I hope publishers begin to add more into their non-fiction ebooks. I think RPG rulebooks are a perfect place to add in extras like interactive examples. Heck, even just formatting all the charts so they display properly on different size screens would be nice... But it all takes time, and so far publishers haven't been convinced the market is big enough for an ebook to warrant the time necessary to craft a special ebook edition. Publishers, it's time to recheck your assumptions as the ebook market grows at an incredible rate. The first publishers to do enhanced ebooks may be taking some risk, but they are also well positioned to prosper as the market grows.
Plus, doing an enhanced ebook is a great PR hook right now since it's so rare. The publicity value right now may well pay for the extra effort. It's good marketing, folks.
A tip of the hat to my son Xander Peterson for pointing me towards this TED Talk... good spotting!
It's an e-reader, a tablet, and maybe a dessert topping.
When is an e-reader a tablet? When Barnes & Noble decides it can become one... they are letting developers submit applications for their color Nook e-reader, the Android-based device that hackers had already been transforming into a full-fledged tablet for some time.
Sure, it's not the speediest Android tablet out there, not by a long shot. But $249 for a 7-inch Android tablet is not a bad price at all. I think B&N has heard the rumors about Amazon developing an Android tablet, and decided to beat them to the punch.
So the ebook reader and the game playing tablet markets are beginning to collide in more interesting ways. I think this is a good move for B&N, if they go for it whole-heartedly. Aside from Apple, nobody's a clear winner in the tablet market yet. Go on, sell a zillion Nooks! It'll be fun to see how Amazon responds.
Demographics... the very stuff marketing is built upon.
While Apple at least coughs up some numbers of hardware sold at irregular intervals (usually when they're launching a new version), Amazon has always held their Kindle sales numbers close to their vest. They'll hint that they're really happy with the numbers, but they won't actually provide any hard numbers. Here's some data from a third-party source, and it indicates that Apple is beating up the Kindle as far as the UK market goes.
The numbers in the above link are quite interesting, but it's good to remember they are just talking about hardware. UK readers seem to like computers, but then again computers are already everywhere. As dedicated e-readers fall in price, we'll see their numbers shoot up. Kindle for $99 by Christmas, I betcha.
It's not clear how many books are being sold by platform, but I think the Kindle is the big winner still. The new iPad 2, being thinner and lighter, may help shift numbers in their direction. But it's still expensive compared to a Kindle, and price is definitely a factor.
The recent bankruptcy of Borders has opened a scary question: Can authors be held liable to consumers if an e-bookstore dies? It's really not clear what liabilities authors who self-publish are actually setting themselves up for, later on.
I guess with the amount of money some ebook authors are raking in right now (Joe Konrath is looking at somewhere north of $500,000 in sales for 2011) nobody's really going to be worried about this. But it is something to think about for the future.
This news item from AppleInsider notes that Georgia is looking to put iPads in all of its middle schools, replacing all the textbooks. Other schools are testing this, and it looks like it will be a growing trend. Especially if textbook publishers ever get smart and embrace it, but that may require new publishers. College textbooks can easily run hundreds of dollars per quarter if you buy them new... enough to buy an iPad for one quarter's worth of books is not unusual at all for an engineering major.
Imagine that, once you have your classes, you could go to a page where you could download all your books to your tablet. Better still, how about paying maybe $50 each instead of $100 or more? Perhaps even less if the professors start putting excerpts in there from their own works, instead of full books.
A dream scenario for students, a nightmare scenario for textbook publishers bloated on decades of high prices. They will delay this advance as long as they can, but there's an opportunity for new publishers to step in and make a killing. I hope, for the student's sake, they do so.
And please note that this could mean tens of millions of tablets sold for students... on top of other tablet sales. Want to bet whether those students would be putting games on their tablets?
I've been writing about how the whole ebook market has undergone massive acceleration in the past year, and if you want some hard data, look no further than this post. Amanda Hocking, a 26 year old writer who has never had a traditionally published novel, is selling excess of 100,000 ebooks a month. In January, she sold 450,000 ebooks. OK, yeah, they were only $3 apiece, and she only gets 70% of that... even if you can't do the math in your head you can tell it's a pretty good sum ( yeah, almost a million dollars in January... what will she do the rest of the year?).
Here's what one publisher said: "There's no publisher in the world who can offer her better terms than she's getting on the Kindle store all on her own."
OK, maybe if you've got an offer on the table for a $200,000 advance for your novel, maybe you should take it. And maybe not... and if you're sitting on a novel that's been making the rounds for months or years, why the hell aren't you putting it on the ebook market and making some money right now?
The ebook revolution is just getting started... we have just seen the beginning.
I know I'm getting my novels moving... no need to worry about a publisher, I just need to write some novels and make sure they're good. (Not an easy task by any means... but when I have those it's just a few short steps to market).
The Android Market is expanding its reach... they have added ebooks to the offerings. Soon, we'll probably see music and movies, too on the Android Market. That's kind of cool for phones, but of course with the flood of Android tablets coming this year it will be really useful.
More places to sell ebooks probably means even more ebook sales. Ebooks have been on an amazing trajectory lately, after more than a decade of existence on the fringe of publishing. This year looks like a transformative year, when ebooks really become the most important aspect of publishing. The revolution is really occurring among authors, as they realize that self-publishing is more than just a viable option, it's usually the best option.
It's not all that easy, though. Ebooks still need to be edited, and most especially they need to be formatted. Ideally, you should make sure your ebook looks good on each platform. For novels, that's not as hard, since most ereading software and hardware does a good job of flowing text into the constraints of the device's screen. If you're dealing with charts, tables, illustrations, or a particular format (such as a rule book), it's quite a different thing entirely. Sure, you can take a file that you would ordinarily send to a printer and convert it to another format... but the result almost certainly won't be optimal. And it may be unreadable.
Then there's preparing a cover... creating blurbs... a web site... figuring out how to deal with various places you can upload your ebook to... marketing your ebook... There's a lot of things that an author will have to deal with as a self-publisher. Services are springing up to help authors with these things, but it's still a market in flux.
Android's announcement is good news, but it just makes it more urgent than ever that authors figure out self-publishing.
My interactive novel... I still have a dozen copies.
A very nice article recounting the history of the Choose Your Own Adventure books can be found here. I was not aware of the story behind these books; I was much more aware of interactive fiction in the game industry. TSR had a number of them, the Lone Wolf series was a classic, and of course the solo adventures from Flying Buffalo were a wonderful example of how to do it right. I even wrote an interactive novel (choosing a path, yes, but with dice rolls) for Iron Crown Enterprises, Treason at Helm's Deep (yes, it was set in Middle Earth).
The interesting part is that both of the creators of CYA books (who are no longer on speaking terms) are both trying to bring these back to life, one as Apps and the other actually reprinting the books.
Seems to me that ebooks are a perfect venue for CYA books, especially if you can jump right to the page you want. No flipping required! It's another interesting possibility for the classic pen-and-paper RPG to explore, and one that shouldn't cost a lot to develop. Interactive ebooks could be a useful marketing tool to spread the word about your RPG setting, and one that makes money in its own right. Marketing that makes money directly is my favorite kind of marketing...
Expect signs like this at many of your local Borders stores.
Borders is declaring bankruptcy, but that hasn't stopped them from pushing their new ebook publishing "service" for authors.
Michael Stackpole, a best-selling fiction author and self-publishing guru, has an exquisite takedown of Border's offering here. It's worth a read... the gist of the matter is that Borders is offering to take 25% of your ebook sales for merely preparing your ebook for publication and then offering it to various ebook publishers. Pretty much something you can do yourself, or hire someone to do for a flat fee. It's your classic all-around bad deal, and I fear it's not the last one we'll see offered to authors unsure of how to proceed into the ebook publishing realm.
Of course, with Borders entering bankruptcy, there's the question of whether you'd actually ever see any of your royalties. All in all, this is one to avoid.
What will happen to Borders? I think a merger with B&N is a strong possibility. In any event there will be many fewer retail bookstores around, and many publishers will have taken a hit from the books they shipped to Borders that were never paid for. It's all going to drive business to the remaining stores, and even more strongly boost the burgeoning ebook market.
Google has launched its eBookstore to take advantage of the millions of books it has scanned. And grab some of the revenue that Amazon and others have been raking in as ebook sales finally begin to take off. The eBookstore has some interesting features, of which the most useful is that they intend to help independent bookstores. How? By cutting them in on a slice of the pie... Google's standard terms are 70% for the publisher and 30% for Google. If you're an independent bookseller, you can put the book up on your web site and Google will give you a slice of that 30%. How much? That hasn't been disclosed, because the deals vary from bookseller to bookseller.
An independent bookstore that's cut a deal with Google can put ebooks from Google on its web site, and at least make some of the revenue. Right now there's really no way for a bookstore to get any slice of what Amazon or iBookstore is selling. Google clearly wants to try and enlist some help from retailers who are otherwise left with a shrinking number of physical book sales while Apple and Amazon rake in the money from the fast-growing ebook market.
I'm not sure if more independent booksellers will glom onto this opportunity, or if it will really help them out. But it certainly can't hurt, and it's a glimmer of hope in a dark time for bookstores. I think bookstores will have to push harder on the social aspects of their business; a gathering place for book lovers, coffee drinkers, authors and enthusiasts to meet and share their love for knowledge.
Google's eBooks effort still has issues to deal with, though. Their free Google Books app is not as polished as similar apps, and clearly needs work. Also, their basic concept is that you don't download the book, but keep your copy in the cloud. Which means you can access it anywhere on any compatible device, and take up reading from where you left off, and not worry about losing your file. On the downside, you need an active Internet connection, which is a real negative compared to a Kindle or other ebook reader. (Google does have a way for you to download the book files, though.)
Google is allowing individual authors to put their books in the eBookstore, so this is yet another venue for authors to hock their ebooks (read more details here). It remains to be seen just how strong a sales venue this will be. Clearly the key selling point is that your book in the eBookstore will appear in relevant searches; the theory being that this will result in a lot more sales since people will be finding your book more easily (though this seems to make sense only for non-fiction books; I doubt fiction titles will be found through searches).
One more thing about this is the whole protracted court case over the Google Books concept. There's a settlement that the court has approved preliminarily, and this will allow Google to continue scanning books. There's still more than a few people unhappy with this idea (that books can get scanned in without their prior consent), but it looks like it will be the new reality. Marketers, start your search engines...
I'm a game designer, marketer, and writer. Best known as co-founder of Hero Games and co-designer of Champions, I've also designed other paper and electronic games, written and edited books, manuals, and articles, and marketed many products, from entertainment software to medical devices; I was Director of Marketing for TSR after its purchase by Wizards of the Coast. I live between the redwoods and the beach, not far from where my great-great grandfather jumped ship to enter the Gold Rush.
Posts
