No, yes :) As I said, the emarket is currently tiny, so essentially there’s no one to market to. We’re small and independent, so I doubt we’ll ever adopt many current print marketing practices. But who knows, the shake-up in publishing is only beginning.

John Wilker touched on some of the issues. TV audiences are continuing to fragment, so it’s unlikely that will prove a wise publicity medium. Newspapers and print magazines too. Our ultimate objective is what John said, word of mouth–or word of mouse, to be more exact.

Part of our background is in internet marketing, so there are a lot of avenues for us to explore before we will be in a position to look at traditional marketing–if we ever do. Don’t forget, it’s not just publishing which is changing, access to the market is also changing significantly and rapidly.

Mostly though, we’ll let the big retailers reach our mass market for us. We’ve been on Fictionwise almost a decade, and other promising ones have opened in the past couple of years.

Publishers in the future will be less about services, and more about guaranteeing consistent and predictable quality for the consumer. There will be an explosion of books on the market as the publishing barriers to entry almost disappear, so the consumer browsing online mass retailers will need trusted brands to guide him.

Which comes back to the “word of mouse” I mentioned. It will be more difficult to buy customers in the future via ads etc, they will have to be earned. It’s going to be interesting :)

“I’m still trying to work out what practices the publishing industry engages in which are as irksome as that used to be. eBook pricing is a hot-button, DRM is another. More?”

Sure there are more, although some may not become obvious until we have hindsight. Pricing and DRM are the big two, I think.

Currently visible:

Restricted formats – consumers can’t buy from everywhere and read on one device. Amazon is the big culprit now, with their proprietary format for the Kindle.

Patchy ebook release – I see readers complaining about some books of an old series being digitized, but not others.

Restrictive reader rights – people can’t sell their ebooks, or pass them on. This will remain an issue while ebook prices remain too high.

From the crystal ball:

Ads in ebooks – I see Amazon just filed a patent for individually targeted ads in ebooks and POD. If it’s ever implemented, that’ll annoy a lot of people who read for the immersive experience.

Restricted choice – print publishers have supported their business model by severely limiting what content and length they accept.

Restricted availability – there’s quite a lock on print distribution between all the big boys. There are around one billion people capable of reading a book in English–how many of them have easy access to your last print book?

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A note of the market: There is no “the market”, there are multiple markets, and it will continue to fragment. This means there’s no right price, or right level of quality. It also means there will be no easy broadcast medium to reach the parts of the market where your potential customers are.

This means there’s no right way to set up (or rejig) your publishing business. You need to set it up to support what your sections of the market want.

As a simple example, take proofreading. Our top-notch proofers catch about 90% of errors in a book. If that doesn’t suit our readers, we will need to double-proof, so we catch 99% of errors.

You won’t last long if you’re set up to build BMWs, but are selling Fords. Or vice versa. There will be too many competitors who will align their business to the market. That’s what I meant in my previous post when I said “Ebooks won’t support that”, referring to the waste in current print pub practices.

Oh look, I wrote a book :)

I will say that in looking at the music industry and the book industry “Operational costs” are out of whack. Think back to 10 years ago. A single would cost $3 or so. now we won’t pay more than .99

The value is still the same, but the cost has been reduced. marketing? what’s that? radio placement?

The same applies to books, but hasn’t sunk in (IMO) yet. Marketing? editing, etc. we’ll leave the paper based parts out.

I’ve rarely read a book that didn’t have at least 1 editing mistake, so we shouldn’t be paying a lot anyhow, not to knock copyeditors.

Marketing? what would that be now? placement on an end cap at B&N? wasteful for sure. Radio spots? Publicity? is that a TV commercial? Word of mouth is cheaper than a spot on Desperate Housewives, LOL. And in my experience way more effective.

I think publishing is still (even for ebooks) tied very much to brick and mortar.

I wouldn’t pay more than $10 for an eBook, because at more than that, I want more than I’m getting. I want a dust jacket, I want something physical. There’s an inherent beleif (and I agree) e should never cost as much as it’s old world equivelant. You really do get less.

Great post Nick, a good read for sure

I’m a genre epublisher (mainly), we sell our ebooks for average $5, and we’re doing quite nicely in a tiny market.
When the market grows, we’ll sell around $2-3 and do even better.

Well, cool! But I’m curious: do you have, or need, a publicity department? Is there a ceiling beyond which you can’t go without significant additional overheads which would require additional investment and resources?

Piracy won’t destroy anyone. Yes, it damaged the music industry, which sold $15 CDs with one or two tracks the consumer wanted. And it’s already hitting books too, priced at $10-25.

I tend to agree with that, actually, but I’m still trying to work out what practices the publishing industry engages in which are as irksome as that used to be. eBook pricing is a hot-button, DRM is another. More?

MCM –

yeah, your reasoning seems right to me, but as you see, the idea of pricing an eBook between the hard and soft jacket prices is not going to fly with many people. And it’s interesting; if you consider DVDs box sets of TV shows, they tend to be much more expensive immediately after they come out, and then less so, and no one says “that’s too much” in quite the same furious way. They do, however, object to Regions and to delays in getting the show.

Possibly people will take some persuading to get used to the idea that eBooks cost anything at all… I’ve been thinking that paper copies should include the eBook automatically for the moment, and even maybe vice versa; buy eBook, get paper sent to you at leisure…

Karen W N –

Yes, things cost, but trying to suggest ebooks can’t make money at $9.99 is too much like creative accounting. Ebook readers are literally not buying it. You get less with an ebook, especially a DRM-ed ebook, and you should pay less. Maybe in the future ebooks will have all kinds of extras that aren’t in print books, like DVDs have, but right now they don’t. If anything, the formatting is worse than print books; no one seems to be proofing it. Publishers need to wake up and smell the e-ink, and find new business models or they will find themselves shrinking even faster.

I don’t think it’s creative accounting, I think it may be the reverse – uncreative accounting and models may be the problem here. I don’t know; I don’t understand the economics of the industry and I don’t have access to profit and loss charts which I wouldn’t be able to read if I did.

However, to say that ‘readers aren’t buying it’ just isn’t enough to tackle the point I was making. My concern is that I believe there is – whether or not publishing is an example of it – an tendency in us at the moment to look at objects and services and say: oh, well, yeah – I want one of those but I’m not paying that price for it, so you better cut it down! And that worked when the market was rising like an idiot-rocket on a fiery trail of bad debt, but it was never sustainable. So now here we are. We have to learn to say: ok, I want that, and I believe its value in my life will be such that the price is worth paying even if it means I don’t have so much beer money this week. OR: actually, to hell with it, I don’t want that enough.

We’ve been taught over the last decade to demand lower prices and fund them with fake growth. Basically, we thought we were getting lower prices and we weren’t – we were mortgaging ourselves. I mentioned air travel in the main post because there’s an argument that the actual cost of your flight is around seven times what you paid for it. If that’s true, or even partly true, we’re banking a huge debt which we will inevitably have to pay off. (Again.)

To bring this all back around to the discussion in hand, YES! You are right. Badly formatted, un-enriched, DRM’d eBooks suck. DRM costs everyone money, doesn’t protect, and detracts from the value of the item. It’s insane. The eBook product needs to improve. HOWEVER when it does, people need to get on board. Enriching will cost money, and so will proper formatting. Removing DRM will save some, but the overall cost of the thing you’re talking about has gone up, even if there’s some fat to be cut away from the thing in the first place. We’ll pay somewhere; either on the barrelhead, or in terms of quality, or in a reduction in what publishers do.

_____________________

And now I have to go write my new book, or no one will care about me any more except my wife. :)

Karen is correct. I’m a genre epublisher (mainly), we sell our ebooks for average $5, and we’re doing quite nicely in a tiny market.

When the market grows, we’ll sell around $2-3 and do even better. Did I mention we also pay 35-50% author royalties at the moment?

As for quality, all ebooks are well edited, proofed and covered–I’ll put our ebooks beside our NY competitors any day.

The traditional publishing industry had an incredible amount of waste built into its infrastructure and methodology. That’s the fundamental problem. Ebooks will not support that.

Piracy won’t destroy anyone. Yes, it damaged the music industry, which sold $15 CDs with one or two tracks the consumer wanted. And it’s already hitting books too, priced at $10-25.

No surprise there. But it won’t destroy products which are reasonably priced, and not made sub-standard by DRM or other hindrances. There will always be ‘bad guy’ pirates, or poor pirates, but the ethical Western consumer will support reasonable products, especially when the artist/creator is getting a decent chunk of the pie, eg 40%.

The industry did such a great job creating this rule of thumb that when you remove the objects and say “you’re buying the story”, the audience pauses, scratches its head, and says: “Uhhh… but it costs you nothing to make that…”

It’s the difference between manufacturing and creating. Hard to articulate, especially after years of defining the market in a certain way. Information was trapped in physical shells all this time, and now it wants to be free. Proving otherwise is extremely difficult.

Ultimately, the music industry has been able to convince its audience that $0.99 is an acceptable price for a song, which is, on average, the same price it’s been all along. They re-established status quo after much debate.

Books have a steeper climb ahead of them because of the many different packages they use, but ultimately, I imagine an eBook in its first year will be priced somewhere between a soft and hardcover edition. We’ll just have to wait a while for the debate to work itself out…

Also, @Karen Wester Newton, the way publishers have traditionally made money on paperbacks is through volume sales, where “midlist” authors receiving modest advances, but selling consistent numbers, keep the joint afloat and offset some of the ridiculous celebrity advances that never earn out.

Yes, things cost, but trying to suggest ebooks can’t make money at $9.99 is too much like creative accounting. Ebook readers are literally not buying it. You get less with an ebook, especially a DRM-ed ebook, and you should pay less. Maybe in the future ebooks will have all kinds of extras that aren’t in print books, like DVDs have, but right now they don’t. If anything, the formatting is worse than print books; no one seems to be proofing it. Publishers need to wake up and smell the e-ink, and find new business models or they will find themselves shrinking even faster.

The product is a story. The story is the same, whether delivered electronically or in paper. The end user does not understand the P&L of the publishing company (in which personnel is the biggest line item–I used to write these P&Ls). In a free market society (which we did have at one point), things are priced for profit, and if the market will bear it, good. If not, bye-bye.

So unless people are using the paper for toilet paper once they are finished reading, what is the freaking problem with pricing them the same? Perception–that is the issue.

And yes, my books are available as ebooks before they go to (returnable) POD.

Reading on an iPhone is not good for the eyes (heck, black text on white paper isn’t good either) — displays that can switch between e-paper/e-ink techology to OLED will pave the way for cheaper readers. but until then, e-books will be “overpriced” if the majority of people will be asked to buy a separate device to read them.

I’m not trying to bring in the “i don’t read on my computer” debate, though. I just think that the cost of an e-book isn’t just the file but the way a reader can use the file. if e-books were comfortable to read on backlit screens, then maybe the cost would make sense right now. Until then, we might have to see a reversal of normal pricing schemes — whereby the item becomes more expensive over time before leveling out instead of starting at a premium and dropping as adoption rates increase.