Honesty is such a lonely word

I recently had a rejection which stated they thought my story would find a home somewhere, but that I should not have said in my query that a previously published e-book had not sold many copies (I gave a few reasons, including my lack of time promoting plus maybe people just didn't like it) though it was a finalist for an award. I thought it was better to be honest up-front: after all, can't they easily check that it had a poor sales record? I had read somewhere that lack of sales could be off-putting for future publishers, but I didn't want to pretend that it had sold well. What is your advice? 

There is currently no way - for Australian publishers, at least - to know how many copies of an ebook have been sold. BookScan is the technology used to track print book sales, but as yet ebooks are not part of BookScan. And it may take some time for there to be accurate reporting of ebook sales anyway, as the retailers who currently have to report ebook sales - e.g. Apple and Google - are mostly not booksellers at their core, so they aren't as attuned to the rhythms of publishing as a bookseller would be. 

However, you're under no obligation to say how many copies of any of your books have sold, in print or digital. While it's admirable that you want to be honest about your sales record, almost every author starts her or his career with small sales and no publisher is going to expect that you've sold a tonne - otherwise they'd have heard about it already. And if they really want to know how many books you've sold, they can ask you. 

The other point in your question is that you mentioned in the query that you hadn't had much time to promote the book, as well as giving other reasons. Well, don't do that again - you have no way of knowing why your books do and don't sell, and neither does the publishing industry (if we knew, we'd patent it). So don't make excuses, don't give reasons which may or may not be true. The salient points are that you have written and you have published, so you already have experience. State your experience; state what your current project is. Be proud of the fact that you have both. That's it.

This bubble will burst

For all I know I've written about this before but I simply can't be bothered going back through the archives - so no doubt you can't either. Which means I can write about something I've possibly written about before and no one will notice, right?

These days I'm only adding to this blog if (a) there's a question sent to me or (b) I have the time, and there's been less and less of that lately. Keeping up with what's going on takes a lot more time than it used to, and meanwhile there seem to be more and more submissions to read despite being told more and more people are self-publishing ebooks. And there's a reason for this.

We - you, me, the industry, readers - are aware that there are a lot more self-published books around now than ever before, as there are increasing numbers of writers who (can sometimes) believe that evil publishers/agents are the only thing preventing them from being The Next JKRowling release their creations into the wild. This is worrying, for several reasons:

1) Readers are already overwhelmed by choice.

2) There is no solid way for these readers to choose between this plethora of titles.

3) Publishers are possibly going to lose established big-name authors to the world of self-publishing, even for a short period of time, and if certain authors do that then a big hole will appear in the publisher's revenue, and into this hole will fall several years' worth of unpublished debut novelists (yes, Matthew Reilly, Di Morrissey et al are, to an extent, subsidising emerging authors on established lists - so if you are an aspiring-to-be-published Australian author, the next time you're tempted to say, 'Ew, I would never read that', please think twice).

However, the fact that we're all seeing a lot of submissions - even from writers who have self-published ebooks - suggests that writers still yearn for a 'traditional' publishing experience, or at least a publishing experience that means they don't have to do everything for themselves. This is a clue that what we're in now is a big bubble that will eventually burst, because this level of self-publishing can't be sustained, for the following reasons:

i) Readers will eventually turn away from self-published ebooks, even in the high-churn genres like romance, because if you read ten books a week, you don't want to spend that amount of time again trying to work out which ten books you should read - you want to choose quickly and get reading. This applies even if you're reading one book a week or less.

ii) Those authors who have self-published the novel they've been working on for ten years will soon realise how much work goes into getting people's attention so that they buy it/read it, and also - if they've followed proper processes - how important editing is* and how much it costs. They'll also realise that, in order to sustain any readership they have created, they need to write another novel fairly quickly - they can't take ten years, or even three years, as they'll lose the attention of the readers they've worked so hard to gain. And if they don't actually build much of a readership with that first self-published release, they'll be tempted to not try it again but, instead, to attempt to find a publisher who can do that work for them despite the fact that they haven't sold in large numbers and haven't investigated why.

iii) Most ebook vendors will draw the line at a certain point - if only because they'll have to buy a lot more servers to store the gazillions of ebooks - so they'll cap the number of titles they're prepared to sell. At that point they'll start to curate their selection, like any good bookseller does.

iv) Publishers will go to certain lengths to stop certain key authors from abandoning them and self-publishing - these lengths may not necessarily involve paying them more money but may involve thinking differently about the publisher-author relationship.


Of course, you may say that, as an agent, I have a vested interest in authors not self-publishing. Perhaps - although I believe that traditional (or legacy) publishing is going to continue to exist, for the reasons mentioned above. But my main interest in all of this is as a reader. I am overwhelmed by choice. I would like someone to tell me what to read, which is why I take my local bookseller's recommendations even for ebooks. But I'm lucky: I have a local bookseller. Many, many people do not. They don't even have a local library. And for those people, this giant ebook wading pool is going to get too crowded - it may already be too crowded.

It's very difficult to tell an author to not self-publish an ebook when they feel that they've been thwarted by the publishing system. Just as it's very difficult for me to tell authors, when I reject them, that they're not going to make it. But as someone who reads a lot of submissions, I can assure you that there's a reason why many writers aren't going to make it: they shouldn't. What happens when those people who really shouldn't be published choose to self-publish is that a whole lot of not-so-good ebooks swim around with all of the other, very good, ebooks and then a reader wades in and chooses one, thinking that all the ebooks in this wading pool are the same, and then wants to throw it back straightaway. That reader may or may not decide to pick up another ebook - if they do, and the second one isn't that wonderful either, how long do you think they'll actually stay in that wading pool before they decide that the water is stagnant?

At that point some readers may abandon books altogether - or they may start to seek out more distinct avenues of discoverability. This is where online booksellers with distinct identities and curated stock, and libraries who can reach out to readers beyond their local area, should come to the fore. Publishers also need to do their bit - agents too. If we can find the time, obviously. Because right at the moment we're busy propping up the falling sky.

I'll go out on a limb and put a time limit on how long this self-publishing bubble is going to last and say between another year and two years. Those authors who are in the first flush of doing it now - the ones realising how much time, work and sometimes expense it takes for not many readers - will make their decision as to whether or not they'll take another tilt at it within that time frame. My guess is that most of them will not go again. Because writing is hard enough - and publishing is hard too. Put them together and that may be too much hard work for most self-published writers to sustain.

There will be exceptions - some spectacular. Some of those exceptions will be authors who then switch to traditional publishing as it will be more appealing. Out of this whole bubble we will, hopefully, bring a lot more talented writers to the fore - and that's where ebook self-publishing will prove to be most valuable: the fittest will survive, and therefore be given the best chance to thrive. If we can just keep readers with us for long enough, they will be the ultimate beneficiaries.


*I was lucky that an editor volunteered to look over this post before it was published. She made some small, but incredibly valuable, changes. Never, ever underestimate the value a good editor can bring to your work.

Here's an idea, publishers: a first-novel imprint

The publishing industry is having an interesting time - and I am purposely saying 'interesting', not 'challenging' because we can all put forward our own interpretation of things. What's clear, though, is that we can't do things the way we used to, not even how we used to do them three years ago. We are in  the Customs queue for a brave new country; some of us have visas for it and some of us don't. Some of us will be granted asylum there but will still have to prove that we have the credentials to be there.

What's needed in this brave new country is, well, bravery. New ideas. Old ideas reworked. A willingness to try something different. What's not needed is a whimpering poor-me look back to the past. The past is past, appropriately enough. We can't change what happened then to make what's happening now different. We can, however, change the future.

In my private time - mostly spent on public transport each day in the company of hundreds of strangers - I occasionally come up with ideas. Sometimes I tell people these ideas and they don't like them or say they can't work. And that's fine. But in this instance I have an idea that I've been mentioning now and again for about seven years and no one has yet taken it up despite the inherent merit I'm convinced it has (bien sûr). It's not an idea I can do anything about without a big business loan that I probably will  never be able to pay back. So maybe if I put it on this blog, someone else can use it.

In the past I've written about why people, perhaps, don't read Australian novels as much as the industry would like them to. One of the reasons is, no doubt, the cost of those novels. Most people I know in the publishing industry won't pay $30 for a debut novel - let alone $35 - so I can't imagine why they want other people to do just that. Part of the cost of putting any book together is paying an advance to the author, getting the cover design  and so on. There's also the challenge of letting people know that the novel exists - how do you promote a debut novelist when there are so many other writers competing for that publicity attention.

I believe that the solution is a first-novel imprint that is visually branded and marketed as such, with a price point between $15 and $20 for physical books and $10 to $12 for ebooks (but it should be the same price each time, not changing with each book). The cover design could be templated, to cut down on the costs - each cover would look subtly different to the others but not enough to require a new design each time. The advances could be modest and maybe offer the author a reward if they sell a lot (a royalty riser at 5000 copies sold, for example). In my experience a lot of novelists would happily take no advance if they thought it meant their book would get out into the world with support from a publisher who will edit it and promote it effectively. The novel is already written - it's not like the advance pays for their writing time, as it can do with non-fiction books.

Having an imprint that is identified as being for first novels only enables booksellers to consistently sell books on that imprint. The price of the books also makes it easier for them to convince people to try a new author. Most of us would take a risk at $15; we're not going to take it at $30.

And if the figures don't work for print books, at least do it for ebooks. There are plenty of debut novels out there as ebooks, yes, but there is still value in a publisher saying, 'This is what we've chosen to publish, and we've edited it and given it lots of attention, and we believe it's great.' That sends a signal to booksellers and readers that the book can be trusted, to an extent. And we do need to win back readers' trust where Australian novels are concerned. Wouldn't this be something we could try, to do just that?

The Australian market cannot be treated like the American or UK market. Our closest comparison is Canada, in terms of size. A first-novel imprint wouldn't work in a huge market but it can work in a small one where it would be different and new (for a while) and get attention for being so. It can also work in a small market where you're not dealing with hundreds of thousands of potential debut novels - just thousands of thousands. So maybe some publisher will see this post and think it's a good idea, and do something about it, and bring more Australian storytellers to public attention. Then they can have second novels and get published on the standard old imprints - and make way for still more new voices to be heard, and new stories told.

Does self-pub mean no other pub?

Quite a few of the writing apps now support ePub export for eBooks. If a writer self-publishes an eBook on Amazon or the iBookstore, does it hurt their chances of finding an agent?

Generally speaking, I believe per se that it does not - given how many authors are either doing or thinking of doing this, it may soon become the norm that agents get submissions that have already been published as ebooks. What hurts a writer's chances of finding an agent, as ever, is if their manuscript/ebook ain't that great.

If an author approached me with a book they've self-published as an ebook, I'd certainly ask them questions about why they want an agent now and what they think an agent can do for them. It's also worth bearing in mind that while agents may not have a problem with self-published ebooks, publishers may. Agents may take on these sorts of books and then discover that publishers don't want them, and that's the sort of thing you could only find out by doing. If enough publishers say they don't want these sorts of submissions, then I guess authors who want to find a publisher will stop self-publishing ... for a while.

This question is very long and it is about ebooks

I'm reading in various places lately the advice that authors who aren't sure about electronic self-publishing can (even should, according to some) bet both ways, by self-publishing some stuff and seeking professional representation for other stuff. I'm thinking about self-publishing some spec fic under a pseudonym, and continuing to seek an agent for other works in a different genre under my own name. My question is, if I acknowledge the pseudonym openly (wishing more to use it for branding purposes, not to pretend that a subset of my work isn't really mine), does this self-publishing turn off (specifically Australian) agents and publishers as it once might have, given that a) self-published books seem to be more accepted by many readers than they used to be, and b) I would be seeking representation for a different type of work, written for sale under a different brand?

I'm curious also about the idea that large sales of self-published ebooks would (at some fuzzy value of 'large') become an advantage in seeking representation and publication (for, let's say, other as-yet-unpublished works) in spite of any remaining self-pub stigma, since it would imply a platform and a potential financial win for a conventional paper publisher. Do you have any thoughts about what kinds of values of 'large' an author would need to be in possession of for this to be the case? If an author could claim to have sold, say, 2000 mainstream fiction ebooks, would that make you think they were a commercial proposition? Or would you only start to notice if it were more like 20,000, or more than that? Or is there still some quality-driven (or snobbery-driven, even) stigma that overrules the idea completely? I think these are questions requiring new answers, now that it's clear that self-publishers are not limited in the number of copies they can physically distribute and sell. I've seen a lot of opinions on this from leading self-published authors, but not so much explicitly from publishers or agents.

I guess I'm asking whether you think there has been much change in the risk of shutting yourself out of the publishing industry by going down the self-publishing route, especially in light of new attitudes (at least on the part of some authors and readers) to self-published ebooks and this currently-fashionable advice about having a bet both ways.

I've read your question a few times and it's still slightly doing my head in. And that's because you're basically asking me to predict how publishing will 'end up' overall. And that topic makes my head hurt because it's just everywhere, all around, at the moment and I often feel like I can't get my actual agenty work done because I have to spend all this time thinking about change and how to manage change and how it may affect authors and publishers - and agents.

I've already written some posts about what's changing in publishing and my potentially crackpot theories about what may happen - they're here if you're interested - so I've possibly already addressed some of what you want to know.

Generally speaking, though, I have this to say: we don't know what is going to happen. I can't, with any certainty or real authority, tell you that this or that is going to happen and, thus, what you should do. What is going on now is unprecedented since the printing press was invented because, well, we're dealing with the invention of a new type of printing press. So I can only offer more crackpot theories. Pay attention to them at your peril.

First I'm going to address the question about what will constitute 'large' sales. Currently sales figures have to be taken in the context of their territory - the figures that make a bestseller in Australia barely raise an eyebrow in the US, for example. That is probably about to change in the English-language market in relation to certain types of books. There will be a day, probably not too far off, when I believe certain types of genre fiction by certain authors - even those published by large multinational publishers - will be published as digital only. At that time the worldwide rights holder will probably not think there is much reason to sell rights to other English-language territories when they could release the English-language ebook into world territory all at once. That way they get to keep all the royalties and they don't have to worry about getting files to other publishers, etc. If that happens, how, then, do we measure 'large' sales? If there is only one territory, what is the benchmark for a bestseller? These are questions I cannot yet answer. And accordingly I can't answer your question because it depends on what's going to happen in future.

Now let's look at the self-publishing 'stigma' - true, it's not what it once was - for certain types of books. Again, what's changing in publishing is probably going to change at different times in different ways depending on the types of stories and content involved. If you are self-publishing a children's picture book at this point in time, you'll probably still find there's resistance to that; if you are self-publishing an urban fantasy ebook, not so much.

So now to your question about whether or not you should self-publish some material and not others - I've written before about how authors can think about categorising their content. If we combine that with what was said in the paragraph above, there is certainly an argument for self-publishing some types of stories and not others. Will this prevent you from getting an agent or publisher for the 'others'? I really don't know. Publishers and agents may decide that protecting their brands is more important than anything and, thus, anyone who has published other stories/content that don't fit with their brands isn't welcome. Maybe that's how they'll sort through the increasingly large amount of submissions that we'll all see. But that's a hypothesis.

Something else to consider: if you are writing enough material that you can publish in two or more streams - and keep up the pace - I'd say go for it. But that's a lot of writing. At this point in time, when authors are actually in a very good position to start making decisions about how, when and where they're to be published, I'd advise a bit of patience. Keep writing, stockpile some stories and see what happens over the next few months. And it's probably only a few months we're talking about. The pace of change that's happening now is such that everything is going to look different for certain types of books within the next year or two.

And if you really want to keep track of what's going on, as it happens, I cannot recommend The Shatzkin Files highly enough.

The Shatzkin Files

'All publishers are global now. All book retailers are global now. The publishers and retailers who embrace that reality soonest will have the best chance to be around the longest.'

So says Mike Shatzkin in his latest edition of 'The Shatzkin Files'. If you are interested in what's changing in the publishing industry and you do not yet know of his blog/e-newsletter, click immediately on this link and sign up (there's a 'subscribe' box on the left-hand nav):

http://www.idealog.com/blog/

Random thoughts about the future of publishing

Rather than attempting a narrative, I'm just going to jot down what's in my brain about digital publishing and the future of the publishing industry. (These are just my opinions - I have not made a scientific study.)

1 - E-books and e-readers

In the thinking and talking about how to price e-books and why people may want e-readers instead of or in addition to print books, there are a couple more things to take into consideration. Namely, that there are some of us who love, love, love print books who are also concerned about the dead-trees aspect of print books and look on e-books as a tree-friendly alternative. Also, when you buy a print book that's the total cost of that print book. When you buy an e-reader the initial cost per e-book is high because it's measured against the cost of your e-reader - if you buy a Kindle for $189 and your first e-book is $20, you're essentially paying $209 to buy that e-book. Obviously the cost of the e-reader is amortised over time. But those who are setting the prices should realise that part of the squawking about the cost of e-books is to do with the fact that readers are paying for e-readers and they don't then want to pay a lot for e-books on top of that.

2 - Authors and covers

Once all the publishers' backlists are digitised and there are thousands and thousands and thousands of e-books available, will covers for each individual book matter any more? Perhaps not. Rather, the author's brand may have more significance as a visual cue. Just like the old wax seal on an envelope, the author's personal brand will identify their e-books as a product of their (electronic) pen, so if you're an author you may wish to think about developing a visual brand - a logo or something like that. This brand can be applied to your e-book covers or could be used as a template that can be modified slightly for each e-book, thus providing an instant visual identification for your e-books. Or maybe I'm just trying to create work for graphic designers.

3 - The future is now

I often feel like there are quite a few folks in publishing who are collectively like a person who's been told the winning Lotto numbers and failed to submit an entry in time, and is about to complain long and loudly about their loss. We've had years to watch the music industry go through this; we can't say we weren't warned. Radiohead's little experiment with In Rainbows should be noted - and noted hard - as an example of what a big-selling author may decide to do some day soon. If blockbuster authors go it alone there will possibly be a period of calibration during which new authors won't even get a look-in at publishing companies, because there just won't be the money around to invest in them, but eventually we'll all need new stories from new people. If for no other reason than, to be blunt, people die (and I'm thinking of the industry in twenty years' time, not necessarily next month or next year).

4 - We have failed our teenage readers

There are so many excellent books for young adults - there have been for years. If the publishing industry (that includes me, by the way - I am not standing on the outside looking in) had looked at teenagers purely as customers and thought about how to retain them, I wonder how differently we'd have done things. I don't actually think we publish books that carry our teenage readers through to their thirties and forties and beyond (given that many non-genre novels are published for those latter age groups) but I'd be happy for someone to give me evidence that I'm wrong. It just seems that once YA readers are in their twenties they're on their own, and many of them stop reading - the rapture of their teenage years has gone. It's no wonder speculative fiction captures so many young readers - because it provides the rapture - but in the general fiction world I'm struggling to think of a concerted effort to publish stories for young people once they're over the age of eighteen. These are the very people whose worlds are now mostly digital - these are not people who are going to want print books in ten years' time. And as Clay Shirky said, 'No medium has ever survived the indifference of 25-year-olds.' Today's 15-year-olds will be 25 in a decade. Think about the teenagers you know and how they interact with culture - it's mostly digital, isn't it? That's what's coming; these are the readers we need to be thinking about and planning for right now.

5 - And finally

This is an interesting read: http://paidcontent.org/article/419-why-online-retailers-will-squeeze-out-publishers-in-the-book-business/

The future of publishing

This is a very interesting interview with John Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-first Century. The link is also here:

http://www.brooklynrail.org/2010/11/express/is-publishing-doomed-john-b-thompson-with-williams-cole

I find his last answer interesting - Thompson talks about books not going away because people are 'love the ideas that are expressed in books; they love the stories that are told through books and all of it'.

Yes, well, ideas and stories aren't peculiar to the artefact that is books: they can exist in the digital and ebook space just as readily. So, again, there's a confounding of 'book' with 'story' or 'content' and they're actually different things. Stories/content aren't going anywhere, but books may well be. Not now; not in five years' time. But once today's ten-year-olds have hit their peak culture-absorbing age, we'll be seeing a lot more digital and a lot less print.

My earlier posts on this topic:

The emperor has no clothes

The author, the book and the new frontier

The price of e-books

For those of you wondering why e-books aren't a dollar each, this is a post worth reading:

http://michaelhyatt.com/why-do-ebooks-cost-so-much.html

An article like this makes me feel less alone

Because it's all about me, obviously ...

The indomitable Nathan Bransford has written an interesting, deftly handled piece about rejection, e-publishing and related matters. Read it here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/nathan-bransford/the-rejection-letter-of-t_b_607979.html


And I'm getting to the NF queries!

E-readers, iPads, chickens, eggs etc

Recently I took delivery of a Sony Reader. I had to buy it - new - on eBay as Australians can't buy it online from any official Sony website. Nor will Sony offer me any technical support for my shiny ruby eBay purchase because I'm not a 'real' customer. And I certainly can't buy e-books from the Sony store, but I can from Books on Board and other online e-bookshops who don't care that I live in Australia.

While I have bought a handful of e-books, I mainly use the Reader for work. I load it up with manuscripts and I convert all my submission emails to txt files and put them on it too. And I have to say that it's changed my life. No longer do I have to lug manuscripts home and wear out a shoulder joint in the process; no longer are my house and office adorned with piles of paper. I find that this new way of doing things helps me better keep track of what I've read and it's just more efficient all round. It also means I can take a smaller handbag on the bus (see above mention of shoulder joint for implied benefit) as the Reader is very small and slender.

One reason I made the decision to buy a Reader rather than wait for an iPad was because all I needed an extra device for was the reading. I already have an iPhone, which I love and adore, and I didn't want to buy a glorified, oversized iPhone just for the e-reader capability. Another reason was that the iPad weighs a lot more and isn't as compact in size, and thus the weight and size advantage of an e-reader over physical manuscripts or books would be somewhat lost. So, even though I'm an Apple loyalist - iMac, iPhone, iPod - I've demurred on this occasion, and I don't regret it.

I wish the Reader were available to more Australians, although I understand the difficulties of introducing an e-book-only device in this country: there just aren't that many e-books produced for the Australia/New Zealand territories. So if you were Sony you'd be thinking (collectively) that there's no point going to the trouble of making the device available if there's not a lot for people who aren't in the publishing industry to put on it. And while there isn't a device like it in this country - and Kindle doesn't count, really, because it's for Kindle books only - there's less incentive for publishers to create e-books. Thereby we come to the classic chicken-and-egg scenario, and frankly I don't think Sony should be the one to go first.

Australian publishers are slowly starting to produce e-books - although two (Macmillan and Allen & Unwin) have been doing it for a while - but it's not really fast enough. They're also not, as far as I can tell, planning to produce e-books for overseas titles for which they have the ANZ e-book rights, which is a source of frustration. Many is the time I've gone through the buying process for foreign English-language books on Books on Board, putting in my payment details, only to be presented with a screen saying that the e-book is not available in my territory. No, and neither is the print book. Except in the library, which is where I have to go if I want to read it. And that means the author doesn't get the royalty they would have received if I'd bought the e-book. Which will probably never be produced in this territory. Around we go again.

So we're still waiting to find out what's really happening here, but time is running out. And in the meantime I can't buy many Australian books for my non-Australian Sony Reader and I would really like to. I would probably buy more of them, especially if the price were lower than the RRP. But I can't. Cheep cheep.

E-books into print books

I have one e-book published, and the editor spent a lot of time making suggestions, many of which were incorporated in the final manuscript. I feel an obligation towards her, as well as gratitude for taking me on board. Sales are very small: I gather it is mainly to do with self-promotion, and I seriously don't have spare time (I often don't even have time to write, hence am very frustrated!). I also don't have much expertise in this area, and even with the internet it takes a long time to research.

The other manuscripts I have floating around out there being 'considered' by other publishers/agents are ... just floating. The e-book I consider to be their equal or better, according to one's personal taste. Would it be really rude to send it out for consideration as a print publication, on the grounds that it has been a finalist for an e-book award, despite poor sales? (If perchance it was successful, I think the e-publisher should get some of the profits, whatever they turned out to be.) I'm sorry if this sounds like a weird question, I'm just trying to think laterally, but would hate to hurt anyone professionally or personally.

There are a few issues to consider here.

First is the fact that you no longer have e-book rights to sell along with your print book rights, and this may be a dealbreaker for some publishers (even if a lot of them aren't quite sure what to do with e-book rights yet). Some, not all. Just so you know.

Second, the question of 'gratitude'. It's nice to be grateful. Some of my authors make decisions out of gratitude and I always ask them to not do this, because publishing companies aren't charities. They don't publish your book because they feel sorry for you. They publish your book because they like it and think they can make money out of it - not necessarily in that order. While it's good to not burn bridges, don't let gratitude overly colour your business decisions. So, no, it wouldn't be rude. The e-book publisher is not offering you print publication. Why should you then not seek it out separately? And the e-book publisher will make money from the e-book sales that would probably increase if you have a print publication too.

Third, e-book sales will be small for most e-book titles for a while until everyone gets the hang of digital publishing. Don't worry about it, just do your best with the time you have for promotion/marketing, learn what you can when you can and that's all you can do. Writers very rarely have the luxury of just writing. Most of them have other jobs, children, husbands or wives, other family members to care for, friends, pets and sometimes farms. You do what you can. Don't give yourself guilt when it's not necessary. That's what major religions are for.

E-books, iPhones and the great digital unknown

The whole eBook thing is in itself exciting (love my iPhone & would love room on the bookshelf), but it’d be nice to know that it’s being introduced in a way that doesn’t completely disembowel our local industry. Risks & opportunities.... Maybe writers’ remuneration needs to be calculated in a different way, like pay per view/click through, or as an extra licence fee through something akin to APRA for the music industry. That would be collected from the distributors like Barnes & Noble rather than from the consumers direct, if B&N is offering consumers the opportunity to share their books with friends for “free”.

If the electronic revolution does bring down the publishers’ production & distribution costs (although remembering most people will stay on paper), maybe there’s some argument that there could be more in it for those at the bottom of the food chain? I wonder why they haven’t fitted these eBook readers with earplugs & an audiobook option for those who’d prefer to listen than read during a long commute, or for kids, or the vision-impaired. Maybe they have, but they haven’t marketed this. Then I could see that this technology could actually bring in more ‘readers’/consumers than currently purchase hard books. Maybe writers will have to be more business minded & consider Merch opportunities when writing and film/tv spin offs. Just putting words on paper isn’t going to pay the bills if the push for ‘cheaper’ continues.

Whoa ... there's a thesis worth of answers for all of this. I'm not sure I can do your query justice, but I'll try.

1. The cost of things - The creation of the book involves more than the cost of paper and distribution. A lot of the cost goes into paying the salaries of the publisher, editor, publicist and sales reps, not to mention the higher-ups. Yes, it's a factor, but it's not enough of a factor for a publisher to slash their prices by, say, half. If you want to test this theory, try self-publishing an e-book and then try editing, distributing, promoting and selling it yourself.

2. More moolah to the creator - The idea of profit-sharing between writer and publisher is afloat but, unsurprisingly, is not being taken up by publishers. That's because it's a new idea and changing the publishing industry is like turning around a rusting Soviet tanker when it's heading for Stalingrad. It may catch on in time. But it will mean that the writers concerned have to be willing to be businesspeople, because it will be quite a different relationship to the current co-dependent, mutually fractious creative liaison.

3. E-books into audiobooks: Digital (e-book) rights are different to audio rights. Amazon stepped into a world of woe when they tried to use software to convert their Kindle books to audio, because the publishers (rightly) said that they didn't have the audio rights and thus weren't allowed to do what they planned. No doubt in the near future there will be cases when these rights go together, specifically so the e-book can convert into an audiobook or vice versa, but it's not really happening now. And trying to explain rights would take me a few hours. (It's taken me several years to get my head around it.)

My own nebulous theory about e-books and the digital future is that e-books may well attract a completely new readership - people who didn't read print books, for whatever reason, who are at home in the digital environment and prefer to read their content that way. Cultural artefacts are consumed or not consumed for a variety of reasons: 'I want to look smart'/'I don't want people to think I'm dumb' are high on the list. I think a lot of young - and older - men don't buy books because they're not sure what they want to read and they don't want to walk into a bookshop (or library) and say that, because it's never been made easy for them to do so. The internet makes it easy. The internet does not say, 'Dummy, why can't you spell?' The internet understands that you can be unable to spell perfectly or read for two hours without a break and still want to read books. Someone very dear to me fits into this category. I hope that access to digital copies of books will mean that he doesn't ever feel like he's 'too dumb' to read again.