Tag Archives: books

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Publishing economics round-up

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OK, here’s another link-collection post, but there’s more of a theme to this one: I noticed I had a whole bunch of pieces about the economics of publishing, so why not shove ’em together and see what juxtapositions we get?

We’ll start with this article discovered at TechDirt, an impassioned rant from a librarian that responds initially to the American Booksellers Association and their anger at big-box stores for deep-discounting books:

In order to draw customer into their stores, Target and Wal-Mart are making ten bestselling author’s books available for under ten bucks. (Wisconsin is missing all the excitement—they have a law against dumping goods below wholesale prices —but Amazon has joined in the fray, so Wisconsinites can still go online and pre-order bestsellers at low-low prices.)

The American Booksellers Association has even asked the Department of Justice to intervene. […] But I’m also taken aback by the horrified response of the book industry. I thought the big crisis was that nobody reads. Now it turns out the problem is that books are so popular with the masses they’re being used as bait to draw in shoppers.

Come on, guys, get your story straight! Which is it?

Reminiscent of ebook pricing and the strange circular logics that emerge when it is discussed, no? There’s lots more good stuff in there, too, about the internet and libraries, peer-reviewed journals and the true value of information (as defined by its accessibility)… as a former library employee who was permanently frustrated by upper-management attitudes to changing technologies, it’s nice to see some common sense being spoken aloud in that sphere.

Ever wondered how much a “best-selling” author makes from a book? It’s less than you might think, especially if you’re not Stephen King or J K Rowling; via BoingBoing, here’s Lynn Viehl running the numbers on her latest novel:

So how much money have I made from my Times bestseller? Depending on the type of sale, I gross 6-8 percent of the cover price of $7.99. After paying taxes, commission to my agent and covering my expenses, my net profit on the book currently stands at $24,517.36, which is actually pretty good since on average I generally net about 30-40 percent of my advance. Unless something triggers an unexpected spike in my sales, I don’t expect to see any additional profit from this book coming in for at least another year or two.

My income per book always reminds me of how tough it is to make at living at this gig, especially for writers who only produce one book per year. If I did the same, and my one book performed as well as TF, and my family of four were solely dependent on my income, my net would be only around $2500.00 over the income level considered to be the US poverty threshold (based on 2008 figures.) Yep, we’d almost qualify for foodstamps.

Now, what happens to the remainders after a debut book has passed its initial “window of opportunity”? Sometimes they’re pulped, of course, but sometimes they’re sold off super-cheap. Via Ian Hocking comes a bit of soul searching from new author MFW Curran, who wonders which is the best outcome for writers:

Judging by the people walking out of the shop with armfuls of novels, if someone did buy The Secret War for £3, would it be such a hardship? True enough, I won’t get anything from that sale, but if it leads that reader to pick up another of my books, that must be good, mustn’t it? I myself have bought books from remainder shops and have then gone on to pay full price for another of that author’s books […]

So this leads me to another question about “what price is a book to an author?” Especially a debut book? Can a writer bear to have a debut book sold for bugger-all if it will lead to a following? Is it worth it for no gain in the short term only for a longer term outlook?

With the rights to my books reverting to me around summer of next year, there is a question about where do I go from here in terms of publishing and many people have suggested self-publishing. But what of the first book? Should this go out gratis to entice people to buy the next two or three? Maybe as an e-book? It’s definitely something worth thinking about.

And while authors nervously joke about it, and friends and family may tease that they’ve seen your book in The Works or a similar remainder bookshop, you know, I don’t think it’s a bad thing at all. Remainder bookshops may seem like a graveyard for novelists, but perhaps its just a new beginning or an opportunity.

Whatever gets it out there, right?

Looking at the music business, I’d suggest that giving as much as you can bear away for free is the way forward… but as has been pointed out to me many times, music and written fiction are very different businesses in some respects. That said, I think the freemium business model is going to be hard to escape, at least in the near- to middle-term; it’s unappealing to many publishers and writers alike, but there aren’t many other options on the table.

Finally, another link from MetaFilter, though one of more general application. The last couple of years have made me realise that I need to undestand a lot more about economics, not only as a writer but as someone who wants to understand how the world operates as a system; hence, I’ve added the History of Economic Thought website to my list of resources that I really need to get round to reading. The web design is very late-nineties retro, but the actual content looks pretty useful.

If you’ve any further recommendations of good introductory sources on economics (or comments on the articles above, natch), please drop a note in the comments!

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Should the state subsidise bookstores?

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Here’s some food for thought from occasional Guardian book-blogger and Clarion graduate Damien G Walter. We all know that the book retail industry is in a bit of a pickle on both sides of the pond, but have you considered that it’s one of the few cultural spheres which receives no government assistance? Perhaps the state should step in and support book retailing in the same way as it does theatres, concert halls and museums? Take it away, Damo:

… these problems are all symptomatic of a fundamental crisis at the heart of both book-selling and publishing. Books and reading, among the most fundamental cornerstones of our cultural (and hence spiritual) life, have in recent years been allowed to slide into existing as a purely commercial industry. In every other area of our cultural life, visual arts, theatre, TV, etc etc, we acknowledge the need for public subsidy to mitigate the less pleasant outcomes of commercialism. But because of their relatively strong commercial basis (theatre would long since have disappeared outside London without subsidy) bookshops and publishers have not made a case (and perhaps have never tried) to get support from the state.

Would Waterstones be better able to fulfil our cultural needs beyond selling books if it received subsidy to do so? Would independent bookshops flourish if they could access grants to support their existence?

Is it time that bookshops and publishers made the case for public subsidy?

The obvious response to this (at least from me) is “isn’t that what libraries are for?”, but the counter-response would be “yeah, and when’s the last time the government increased library budgets with a focus on enhancing the experience of readers rather than drop-in internet users and community groups?” Over here in the UK, that was an awfully long time ago… and despite the best efforts of library staff up and down the country (plus some of the more dedicated borrowers), the situation gets worse every year. So maybe a strong campaign for increased library funding would be a better plan than suggesting recently-successful businesses go to the state with cap in hand… there’s plenty of recent evidence that state bail-outs rarely work the way they’re supposed to, after all.

How do you think the book retail industry can be rescued – if indeed it can (or should) be?

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Asimov estate authorizes new I, Robot sequel trilogy

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Isaac Asimov's second Foundation in paperbackPerhaps I haven’t been paying attention, but I haven’t seen news of this in the places I’d most have suspected to see it – apparently the estate of the late Isaac Asimov have given the go-ahead to a new sequel trilogy of books in the I, Robot canon, to be authored by Mickey Zucker Reichert [via SlashDot; image by ToastyKen].

Renai LeMay (author of the post linked to above) is pretty incensed by the idea:

Firstly, who the hell is Mickey Zucker Reichert? I’ve been reading science fiction and fantasy novels for the past three decades and I’ve never heard her name mentioned. To think that a low-profile author could do justice to some of the best-loved work by one of science fiction’s grand masters is simply preposterous.

Secondly, these books are absolute classics of the genre and stand on their own. As some of the first fiction to explore the possible ethical implications of relationships between robots and humans, they should be left on their own as a signpost in the genre. They should not be followed up and continued. Isaac Asimoc died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author’s intentions need to be respected here.

This is one of the most ridiculous attempts I have yet seen in the speculative fiction genre to cash in on some of a dead author’s most famous work.

That’s some masterly bluster right there; I could almost hear the spit hitting my monitor. I’ve seen Reichert’s name about the place; while I’ve never read her stuff, she’s hardly an unknown. And as LeMay’s commenters point out, this is hardly the first time a similar posthumous cash-in move has been made on a popular science fiction franchise… hell, it’s not even the first time it’ll have happened to Asimov’s material. LeMay’s distress is understandable, but more than a little overstated, perhaps.

I don’t have a lot of sympathy for other-author sequels. I thought the recent Dune additions were shamefully bad… but then they seem to sell rather well, so that opinion is evidently far from universal. But is it really that big a deal? Should we be defensive of the literary legacies of our favourite late authors on their behalf, or should we shrug off copyright exploitation for the inevitability that it is, and wait for reviews from sources we trust to determine whether to invest our time and money in the end result? Do bad sequels inevitably and irreversibly poison the original work, somehow?

A connected (and somewhat more contentious issue) is whether Asimov’s estate should be allowed to exploit his work in this manner. It’s one thing for his family to receive money from work Asimov did himself, but to receive money for work by someone else based around the ideas and characters he created is something rather different. You could look at it as something similar to commissioning (presumably) high-quality fan-fic on a profit-share basis, perhaps – completely legal, certainly, but a llittle more fuzzy from an ethical angle.

Any Asimov addicts in the audience? Will you be buying or boycotting Reichert’s robot books when they get published?

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Packaging the genre: publishers as curators

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There aren’t many business methods worth copying from the record business at the moment, but should book publishers be trying to work more like record labels? Over at the if:book blog, one Bob Stein thinks there’s something to be learned from the days when books had a distinctive look that immediately identified their publisher as well as the author:

I find myself thinking a lot about what i call the “Foyles” model. in the not too recent past Foyles in London shelved books, not alphabetically by subject or genre, but by publisher such that there was the Penguin section and the Bloomsbury section. For a more recent example, video stores usually shelve Criterion titles on their own — precisely because of the power of the brand. From this perspective I see two sorts of physical store plays — one could open a completely new sort of superstore . . . . where publishers, like perfume companies, effectively rent space to show their wares (fulfilling in some cases with actual books but also via POD and online). The second is a publisher branded cafe/store…

It’s not that crazy an idea, really… it’s pretty evident the current book-barn approach isn’t working so well. Perhaps I’m more attracted to the idea through being a genre reader, where publisher trust is stronger and more focussed: I’m statistically more likely to be interested in a book published by Gollancz or Tor than I am one from Penguin or Bloomsbury, for instance.

Visual branding plays a part, too, as pointed out by Joanne McNeill at Tomorrow Museum:

If there were a Tony Wilson of publishing, you bet I would buy every book printed…

Well, yes!

This all ties in rather neatly to Jonathan’s Blasphemous Geometries column from December last year, where he suggested that someone should give science fiction the Criterion Collection treatment. And there’s a new column from Mr McCalmont due later today, as it happens…

How strongly does a book’s publisher influence your likelihood to buy that book, if it’s by an author you’re not familiar with? And what about packaging? I rather liked the look of the Gollancz Future Classics collection, but I know a lot of other folk found them ugly or odd.

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Ebooks cost a lot of money to make; will no one explain why that has to be so?

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Andrew Wheeler wants people to stop saying that ebooks don’t cost publishers lots of money to make:

Creating an individual ebook format — one of the current suite of them — costs roughly as much as creating a print-on-paper edition; the costs of the actual paper and ink are vanishingly small in this equation. Some ebook formats, such as the currently fashionable one, have a baroque process of creation that involves multiple transformations and iterations of quality control, which drives up costs further. And the cost per unit is massively higher for ebooks than for printed books — infinitely so in some cases, since there are plenty of ebook editions that have never sold a single copy.

Now, I feel the need to respond to this post, because I’ve chimed in on ebook economics before and it’s a topic I care a lot about. However, I’m going to first point out that I have a great deal of respect for Andrew Wheeler, both as a blogger and an editor, and I’m fully aware that he knows a lot more about the inner workings of the publishing industry than I do; I’m not going to tell him he’s wrong, because he isn’t. I’m not going to refute the claim that ebooks currently cost a lot of money to make. I am, however, going to say that they shouldn’t cost a lot of money to make, that they don’t have to, and that the longer they do, the smaller the chances of them ever becoming a viable industry in their own right.

Part of this isn’t the fault of the publishers; as Wheeler points out, there are a dozen competing ebook formats with arcane creation processes; there are DRM frameworks; there are ebook vendor requirements that predicatably take advantage of the over-the-barrel status of the publisher and milk them for as much as they think they can get away with. This is pretty much how new technologies always work; I can see parallels with the digital music business as it meared the Napster era. The publishers dragged their feet then, as well, and in the process allowed an openly accessible file format (the mp3) to gain ascendancy in a series of distribution networks that they had no investment in or control over. I expect book publishers are well aware of this parallel; what surprises me is that they’re not talking to the consumers about it more actively.

I do need to quibble on one of Wheeler’s points:

… the cost per unit is massively higher for ebooks than for printed books — infinitely so in some cases, since there are plenty of ebook editions that have never sold a single copy.

Now, again, I’m not saying he’s wrong here – he’s seen figures and spreadsheets that I’ll never be shown, of that I’m certain. But if you’re running a set-up where the per-unit cost of an infinite good is higher than that of the physical finite version, either there’s something massively wrong somewhere in the production chain, or my understanding of the publishing process has a huge flaw which I would sorely appreciate being corrected on.

Allow me to explain: some of you may be aware that I work for UK small press PS Publishing. Now, we don’t sell ebooks (yet), but we make PDF versions of our books available to reviewers. Those PDFs are almost identical to the file we send to the printers, except for being saved at a lower resolution to save on disk space and download times. In other words, the work to produce a template for the reproduction of a physical book or an electronic one can be exactly the same; the same editing, proofing and typesetting/layout process, all the way up to the stage where the book is released to duplication.

The obvious answer to that statement is “well, you’re using PDFs and no other formats, so of course it’s easy”. Well, yes; and that’s kinda my point – if the publishing industry continues to allow intermediary vendors to shaft them with ludicrous hoop-jump requirments and costs for multiple proprietary formats, then they’re never going to make a dime out of selling ebooks. There needs to be a concerted push by the industry for a single, simple and secure digital format that everyone uses; then leverage can be applied to the makers of reader hardware to support that format, plus the formats used by public domain material (e.g. the humble and ubiquitous PDF, which is either unsupported or charged for on most current readers of which I am aware).

Part of the establishment of that file format should include software for easy conversion of proofed electronic galley files directly into it, so that once a book is ready for printing, it’s also ready for ebooking in one click. At this point, there’s no way the per-unit cost for ebooks can be higher than print, because that ebook is ready to ship, and any intermediary vendors should be willing to eat the storage and distribution costs out of their final to-consumer price. If they’re not, you go with the one who will; the rest will soon follow. Now, sure, you’ve still got your marketing and promotion budget to consider in to that per-unit cost, but that’s the same outlay for both editions up to this point in the process, and with a digital format that cost is spread over a theoretically infinite number of units at no extra cost.

By comparison, after that final file is deemed ready for production, printed books must be printed, warehoused, shipped, lifted onto shelves in brick-and-mortar stores and run past the till scanners there, too… and all that money has to be coming from the profit margins. By any rational analysis from outside (with the caveat that I’m not an economist or an accountant), that must cost more than making digital books available; I’m prepared to believe that there may be reasons that it doesn’t, but I’d suggest that those mysterious reasons point to a heroic flaw in the economics of book publishing as it stands.

To reiterate: I’m not saying Andrew Wheeler is wrong to say that ebooks cost more to make than dead-tree books; I’m saying that disparity in cost is impossible to understand for anyone not privy to the way the system works – people like me, and people like the ones who want to buy ebooks but find them either unavailable due to antiquated regional licencsing, hobbled or useless thanks to proprietary and restrictive file formats, or just simply too damned expensive by comparison to the dead-tree version.

Wheeler’s final point s that many ebooks never sell a single copy, which surely only underlines my point that making every effort to reduce that inexplicably high per-unit cost is the only way to make them a viable business. As Blue Tyson says in the comments below the post, “[p]ricing them double is a pretty good strategy to sell zero, certainly.” If your current system means you have no choice but to charge an arm and a leg for an infinte good, your system is surely broken. I think part of the problem is considering the physical and electronic versions as two separate products; that proofed and typeset file is the product, and the ebook or bound paper are just the delivery systems for it.

Now, I’m fully prepared to admit that there are things I don’t know about how the system works, as mentioned above. The point I’m trying to make here is that until the consumer has been shown why that price must be so high, they will never stop complaining about it. I’d genuinely like to know the truth of the matter, and as such I’d like to invite Andrew Wheeler (and anyone else with the pertinent experience and knowledge) to set us straight; I’ll happily publish a response here, or link to it if published elsewhere. Sunlight is the best disinfectant, so they say. 🙂