“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is,” Steve Jobs said in 2008.
“The fact is that people don’t read anymore.” It was an off-the-cuff
attack on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader, which he predicted was doomed to
failure.
Five years later, Apple’s iBookstore competes aggressively against Amazon, and
in 2012 e-books accounted for nearly 30% of all books sold in the US.
According to new figures released by the Publishers Association, the total
number of books sold in the UK last year – paper and electronic combined –
rose 4pc to hit £3.3 billion in 2012. Digital
sales, including the Kindle range and smaller tablets such as Apple's iPad
mini, were up 66pc to £411 million.
Satisfying though it is to see a clever person like Mr Jobs get it wrong, I
have to admit that, as a writer, I was also sniffy about the potential of
e-books. This was due at least in part to snobbery.
When e-publishing was introduced, the eager early-adopters were individual
writers, often those whose books, having failed to excite a literary agent,
had languished on the dusty hard-drive for years. Suddenly, the web provided
access to a readership via channels that weren’t patrolled by Bloomsbury
naysayers armed with commercial preconceptions and pat rejection letters.
So I thought that the e-book revolution would be a chaotic orgy of vanity
publishing, in which thousands of crazy scribblers could upload their
constipated novels about the collapse of British values or their overwrought
rehashings of Lord of the Rings.
I reckoned two copies of each e-book would be downloaded – one by the author
and the other by a delighted cousin who’d designed the cover. Having had
three "proper" books published (Icebox and Mischief,
novels published by Headline in 2000 and 2002; and Surely Not!, a
humorous book co-written with Bill Dunn and published by Pocket Books in
1999), I intended to avoid the whole embarrassing palaver.
But circumstances change behaviours. The credibility of e-publishing took an
early leap skywards in 2000 when
Stephen King chose to serialise his novel The Plant online,
reportedly making half-a-million dollars from the experiment. E-reader
devices have since become acceptable, even hip, like screwtop wine. Amazon
sells more e-books than tree books these days.
And high-profile writers can see an advantage. David Mamet, winner of the
Pulitzer prize, is
e-publishing his new work because “nobody ever does the marketing
they promise”. In other words, the publishers’ only remaining contribution
is to stump up for publicity – and they don’t even manage that. The hell
with them, is Mamet’s advice.
The downside is that you’re also saying to hell with the significant benefits
of having an editor in your corner. One solution is to join a group of
mutually-supportive beta-readers, who will review your work-in-progress. If
you can harness the feedback, it’s an effective blend of market research and
mob-edit.
So, this month I launched a novel into the e-market – the culmination of
several months’ slog, proofing the text, writing the blurb, doing the cover
design (or, actually, paying someone to), getting the internal text layout
right (or, actually, paying someone to), developing and launching a website
(or, actually – yeah, that too). All the stuff that a publisher used to do,
the e-author has to do for himself. Or pay someone to.
You also have to make endless commercial decisions. How much am I going to
charge? What’s an attractive price for a novel in India? Did I, months or
years ago, sit down and type the words "Once upon a time…"
in the expectation of conducting board meetings with myself to thrash out
medium-term revenue-recognition strategies?
And once the book is out there, the work really starts. Someone remarked that
publishing a book was like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and
waiting for the echo. Now that every writer in the world has lined up along
its edge, the Grand Canyon is full to the brim with rose petals – and
there’s no chance of an echo, however faint. The task is to get your petal
noticed in a fragrant blizzard of descending floral bits and pieces.
Cyberspace enables a busy ecosystem sustained by the readers of e-books. There
are collectives of bloggers, and flocks of Twitterers, and e-librarians
compiling vast Alexandrine superlibraries of e-reference. If an e-author can
attract the attention of this enthusiastic and discerning population of
readers, interest may flicker and ignite. But you can’t just show up with a
box full of books and start flogging them. If you plan to self-publish at
some point, I’d suggest you pop in about now, get to know people, and buy
the occasional round.
You also have to do something that most writers and most Brits – and therefore
practically all Brit writers – find difficult. You have to tell everyone –
at work, at Starbuck’s, at Pilates, at the bus-stop – that your book’s
available and that it’s really, really good. I know – the very thought of
being so pushy makes me cringe too. But self-publishing – one has to accept
– is a sales job.
It can be lucrative, though. David Gaughran, author of the e-publishing manual
Let’s Get Digital, calculates
that nearly a third of Amazon’s top selling books are self-published.
The writers of those books are collecting 70% of the purchase price, which
is three times what they’d be given by a traditional publisher. The readers
are generally paying half what they’d be charged by a traditional publisher.
Everyone’s a winner, except perhaps the traditional publishers.
So it’s an exciting time to be writing. And editing. And designing. And
accounting and marketing and business planning. Though frankly, I’m looking
forward to concentrating on making fiction again, which is what all this was
for in the first place.
