Electronic Publishing Without a Net: Where Should an Author Start?
So you have published your third novel. Oprah hasn’t called, but you are still confident your fourth novel will catch fire. Excited, you pack it off to your agent. Weeks pass and nothing. The market has gone soft. Your publisher isn’t interested. They don’t want to pin the long tail on their pinata. Your agent is still shopping it but it isn’t looking good.
The doubt creeps in. Then the fear. You turn things over and over in your head. Maybe digital is the answer. But where do you start?
Does this sound familiar? There is a lot of talk these days of the publishing business becoming hit driven obessed. That means little attention to developing new talent. That means jettisoning old talent arbitrarily. That means becoming like the movie and music industries. Is it true? Could it be? And if you are an author on the bubble what do you do?
I recently talked with an author — formerly with Random House — about where the opportunity was in digital. An outline of what I told him is below. I am wondering if you were asked about making money in electronic publishing, what you would say? Or not say? Let me know in the comments if I am on target.
- Internet marketing is easy but internet commerce is hard. Digital commerce simply won’t bring in enough money to cover the revenue lost by declining print sales. This isn’t a bad thing. It will simply be an adjustment for the industry. The digital business needs to mature a little more before publishers can rely on consistent returns.
- I don’t know of any author making heaps of money on the internet right now. Stephen King hasn’t seen a windfall from his digital experiments. And the most dedicated and networked authors still aren’t able to quit their day jobs. If you are hoping to see a significant amount of money from your internet efforts, it is probably still too early.
- Things are changing pretty fast. What is hard today is easy tomorrow. I am bound to have a different opinion in six months.
There are three ways to look at digital as an opportunity…
If you just want to write & be read and you don’t care (so much) about a pay cheque then the internet is a boon. There are a couple of previously unpublished authors that are doing amazing things with the internet. One guy named Scott Sigler and another named Tee Morris — incidentally both are horror/sci-fi authors — have built up large followings independently using webtools. They have pioneered what are called podiobooks — where the author does a voice recording of a unreleased novel and releases a chapter or two at a time. The audio files are typically recorded on the cheap and offered to fans for free. You can find them on iTunes. Similarly in print, sample chapters — and sometimes whole works — are given away by authors. This helps overcome obscurity but it doesn’t necessarily help your wallet. Once a large enough fanbase is established these authors, likely, will land a contract with a publishing house or they will be able to profit from selling self-published print editions directly to fans or selling self-published digital editions through Amazon.com or sites like mobipocket.com. For now, as far as I know, authors like this aren’t making a living from it. Also see the example of Cory Doctorow. Cory built up a fan base by blogging and being a general internet gadfly. He gives away his novels and has now been signed by Holtzbrinck for his latest YA book — LittleBrother.
If writing is your livilhood and/or you feel you should at all times be paid for your work then the options aren’t as exciting or as numerous. The number of online magazines publishing fiction are few. The ones willing to pay well are fewer. Success getting paid depends heavily on the genre you work with. Online publishers may take on your work on a revenue sharing basis — meaning they serve ads around your story and they give you a percentage of that money. You would need to approach magazines independently and work out terms. I don’t know of any that serialize whole novels. Alternately you could simply submit your novel directly to an ebook distributor. Or you could record an audio version of your book and sell it exclusively through iTunes. Both iTunes and Amazon allow for independent authors to submit digtal files to sell. Amazon even offers authors better terms than they would get through a publisher. On the down side the submission process can often take a long time and it is hard to drive awareness. Lastly, you can also approach companies like Lulu.com, iUniverse, or Trafford publishing to do a short run of printed books. Of this bunch I find Lulu the most attractive because you set the terms. You get to choose how much the book is going to sell for and they only print a copy after you have sold it — so your risk is minimal. See this example by 37signals.
If writing is your passion and you don’t want to give it away — and you can also wait awhile to profit from it — then you may want to consider simply marketing yourself more aggressively online. Sure websites are great, but there is a whole lot more you could be doing to let people now who you are and what you are about. This is known as conversational marketing. It is the equivalent of talking to strangers for fun. The idea is that you put yourself out there instead of your work. This can take many shapes and it has many flavours but it also takes up a lot of time. With this option, for every one hour you spend writing, I would recommend you spend an hour managing your reputation online. That isn’t for everyone but it is a worthwhile third-way. The market can change and the once hard-to-publish novel can become fashionable in time. When that happens you will hopefully have a large ‘following’ on the internet. That following will make it easier to sell books and that will make your project more attractive to the publisher.
These are the only three approaches but, in summary, it comes down to what your expectations are. If you are free and easy with your time and content then amazing things can happen. If you want to follow a more traditional model in the digital space, that opportunity is there. If you want to play wait-and-see but still get your feet wet, you can do that too.
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