dear publishing industry
Today it finally happened: on my way out of the house this morning, I realized that I’d just finished the last book I was reading, and it was therefore time to pop the next one off the to-read stack. The next one being a luscious-looking hardcover volume. I looked at it, looked at my backpack, felt my shoulders a bit, took a deep breath…
…and ( Read more... )
7. People don't even buy books at all, as compared to buying other media like videos and music. How many copies does a book generally have to sell to break even? Let's say it's priced at trade paperback / cheap hardcover prices like around $20; to break even it needs to sell in the range of 5,000 to 7500 copies -- the typical size of a first print run for *most books.* In 2004, when book sales were stronger than they are now, Nielsen Bookscan estimated that of approximately 1.2 million books published in the US that year, about 2% of those titles sold more than 5000 copies.
There's lots more to say -- seriously, this is stuff I ponder every. fucking. day. The Death Of Print(tm) has been doomsaid even longer than the Imminent Death Of The Net(tm), and lots of cold hard cash has been sunk into trying to figure out exactly what you, Nathan J. Mehl, want to pay money for. The yous of the world don't agree what you want, don't agree what you're willing to pay, don't agree who should get what share of it, don't agree how you want it delivered, in what format, for what platform, with what licensing terms, with what degree of reliability, with what level of immediacy -- and you're still a small chunk of the market, which isn't huge as it is.
Bookstores today are less about the distribution of books than about providing a customer experience. When bookstores get books from a publisher or distributor, they hope they sell, and if they don't, after X months they send 'em back for a full refund. In other words, bookstores might as well be selling on consignment. This leaves publishers holding the risk. If they had an alternative way to deal with that problem, they'd be thrilled to use it. Publishers like places like Amazon because returns are low; Amazon will just mark things down until they sell and can warehouse stuff a long time.
So what am I mostly reading in digital form? Books which I have a hard time finding in print form, which are text-only. For example, I'm reading the become-public-domain pulp SF for which I'd have gladly paid if it were just possible to find Poul Anderson and Harry Harrison in print. And on a related note, no small number of SF type authors are releasing in electronic format ahead of print publication, via means other than Amazon type venues -- and so I've started to buy various things there as new releases. If I decide this is a book I'm going to want to keep around, I buy a print copy as well.
What am I just not buying electronically? Many kinds of reference works, books which are graphic-heavy, books which are essential to my work, which is ultimately the preservation of seemingly-anachronistic lore.
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For my part, as an author, I'm unlikely to ever entirely eschew print because of the special hubris that authors possess, which allows me to imagine my words lasting for generations or centuries rather than until someone does or doesn't port 'em to the next new format.
There are works -- written, performed, and other -- for which I'd love to be able to buy a lifetime license and simply have redelivered via the method and using the medium of my choice, whenever an old one becomes obsolete. You know, so I wouldn't have to re-buy Sgt. Pepper, as the classic example goes. But that's a complex one in terms of revenue and operating cash.
Without question, electronic products will continue to be a growing part of the market. And I will likely be in it forever, or so it appears at this point in my life as even my efforts to have nothing to do with electronic publishing and computers anymore by moving to a life teaching people to make string with a stick seems to have left me still here thinking about electronic publishing.
Anyway, for my self-published crap, I'm planning on drm-free epub.
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