Tag Archives: publishing

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Orbit to take short fiction to the digital market

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From the press release:

Orbit (US) has offered to publish digital editions of all original short fiction written by its authors. The digital editions will be distributed widely through major retail channels, for reading on a variety of devices. Authors will be paid a royalty for each story sold, rather than the flat fee more common in the short story market.

Tim Holman, Orbit VP & Publisher, said: “We know that writing short fiction is important for many of our authors. By offering to publish their short fiction – and to publish it quickly – we will be providing a new way for them to connect with readers. The initial response from our authors has been great, and we are looking forward to launching the first stories later this year.”

Maja Thomas, SVP Hachette Digital, said: “Publishing timely and well-priced short fiction has long been one of HBG’s goals. The digital reading revolution and the proliferation of new devices and mobile platforms now make this possible.”

Interesting. Here’s Nick Mamatas’ initial assessment:

Why, you ask? My theory:

To train the audience to associate digital purchasing with publisher rather than author or the (online) bookstore, thus allowing HBG to more easily sell ebooks direct to the consumer without having to cut in Amazon, Apple, etc. (This can also lead to cheaper ebooks, once one can keep much of what otherwise would be the discount to the trade.) That part of the idea isn’t even a bad one.

And Charlie Stross’ response to such:

If approached, I shall politely tell them what I get paid for my short fiction sales elsewhere, and offer them the opportunity to compete.

[…]

Orbit is part of Hachette. Hachette’s current policy — dictated from a boardroom high in the stratosphere and divorced from earthly considerations — is that DRM on ebooks is mandatory. This won’t be waived for these stories without a major internal argument; so I’m assuming it’s business as usual for now.

Royalties on ebooks are around 20%; viewing this as a new sales channel, they might go higher (25-30%).

Pricing on short story ebooks … they’d look like complete tools if they priced short stories at the same level as novels, so I’m betting on a price point in the range $1-5, probably $2.50-5 (the $1-2 price spread would be better for sales but is difficult, because the cost of processing the credit card/paypal transactions puts a floor of around $0.5 under each sale).

Asking $5.00 for a 12,000 word novelette with DRM on top is not going to boost sales relative to, say, $8 for a 120,000 word novel, also with DRM. So I expect sales to be no better than their current ebook sales, which is to say, dismal. Let’s be optimistic and say they can shift a thousand copies of each story — 1000 sales via Kindle is enough to put you in the monthly Top Ten Bestsellers on that platform. That’s revenue of $5000 for a story, of which somewhere in the range $1000-1500 goes to the author. More realistically they’re going to sell 100-250 copies, meaning the author might get $100-250, eventually, after a couple of royalty periods (6-12 months). Compared to the $600 they’d get from Asimov’s SF, for example — with their rights back after 12 months.

For a tenth of the words that go into a novel that would earn them $10,000.

Does Not Compute, does it?

[…]

If they want to make it work they will have to start paying the authors an advance against future earnings, or run it like tor.com (at a stonking loss for the first couple of years as they build their audience).

That last bit is quite telling, really. I used to hear a timespan of five years bandied around as the duration a print mag needed to survive before it would start making a profit; it’ll be interesting to see how Tor.com makes out over the next few years. But then they were lucky to have had that initial investment behind ’em… I could do amazing thigs with Futurismic if someone would just lend me ten grand… 🙂

It’s also nice to see a major genre publisher realising that not only is there a market for short fiction, but that their writers want to produce it. Common sense would dictate that the lesser-known writers will see the most advantage in pumping out the short stuff, which should maintain the idea that short stories are the genre’s proving grounds.

What do you reckon – can Orbit make digital short fiction work on the royalties model at a price point that keeps both writers and readers happy?

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Quicklinkage: writers on writing, Godin on slush

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Some quick links collected in a spare segment of a manic Monday, in lieu of our usual fare (i.e. me waffling on about stuff): here are some science fiction writers going all meta on our arses and writing about writing:

And to close up with a topic for discussion, here’s Seth Godin’s take on the oft-reported death of the slush pile:

If you have something good, really good, what’s it doing in the slush pile?

Bring it to the world directly, make your own video, write your own ebook, post your own blog, record your own music.

Or find an agent, a great agent, a selective agent, one that’s almost impossible to get through to, one that commands respect and acts as a filter because after all, that’s what you’re seeking, a filtered, amplified way to spread your idea.

But slush?

Good riddance.

What do you think: is this a case of Godin just not understanding the way fiction publishing works, and hence applying an inappropriate business model to it? Or is he prophesying the unavoidable future of fiction publishing? Your thoughts and opinions would be appreciated.

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Do free ebooks actually affect the sales of dead-tree books?

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For those retaining an interest in ebooks and publishing economics, here are a few interesting links. First, via Nick Harkaway: proper academic research that asks what happens to book sales if digital versions are given away for free? The answer: well, it’s not entirely clear, but it probably doesn’t do much harm.

The present study indicates that there is a moderate correlation between free digital books being made permanently available and short-term print sales increases. However, free digital books did not always equal increased sales. This result may be surprising, both to those who claim that when a free version is available fewer people will pay to purchase copies, as well as those who claim that free access will not harm sales. The results of the present study must be viewed with caution. Although the authors believe that free digital book distribution tends to increase print sales, this is not a universal law. The results we found cannot necessarily be generalized to other books, nor be construed to suggest causation. The timing of a free e-book’s release, the promotion it received and other factors cannot be fully accounted for. Nevertheless, we believe that this data indicates that when free e-books are offered for a relatively long period of time, without requiring registration, print sales will increase.

Secondly, via numerous sources (of whom Richard Kadrey was the first I noticed), the number of books available in the iPhone apps store has overtaken the number of games. Some wise words on interpreting this statistic from Penguin’s digital publishing boffin Jeremy Ettinghausen:

“I travel on the tube every day,” he continued, “and you do see people reading books, reading newspapers and playing games. As publishers we need to be on the things that people are using during that distraction time, that commuter time.”

But he argued for caution in focusing on the number of titles being published, stressing that “it’s very easy to produce books for the iPhone”.

“It’s interesting to see what’s selling,” he said, “rather than what’s being submitted – quite a lot of the books are free downloads, whereas the games tend to be paid for. I’m more interested in what’s going out than what’s going in.”

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Amazon trying to bypass publishers, acquire ebook rights direct from writers and agents

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Here’s an interesting new development in the Amazon ebooks scramble – the online retailer is apparently trying to obtain Kindle publishing rights for some older and otherwise unlicensed titles direct from authors or their agents in the UK [via @DamienWalter]:

UK literary agents and authors have been approached directly to sell e-book rights to Amazon as it builds its Kindle e-book arsenal ahead of the UK launch of the iPad. US e-book publishers including Rosetta Books are also approaching UK agents and authors to buy backlist e-book rights, with Rosetta favouring an exclusive Amazon deal as part of the package.

[…]

A second UK agent said the approaches were being made by Amazon department Kindle Evangelist. “The way they represent themselves is, ‘We are following this big author, he/she is not available in e-book form, why not, can I do anything to expedite that?’ You may say ‘E-book rights have gone to Random House’, in which case they’ll accept that. But if you say ‘No deal has been done’, they might try to be more proactive—engineer a way to encourage the marriage [with the publisher], or even look to acquire the rights themselves.“

That should stir up the kerfuffle again, I’m guessing.

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POD = DOA?

Via Chairman Bruce, a piece at The Economist about the rise of print-on-demand publishing:

Despite all its advantages, POD is unlikely to take over the world. This is because in contrast to digital printing, whose per-unit costs stay pretty much the same, traditional offset printing exhibits strong economies of scale. As long as you have bestsellers with hundreds of thousands of copies, on-demand printing is not going to displace the conventional sort, says David Davis of InterQuest. Then there is regulation. In some countries, such as China, a licence is needed to publish books; others, such as Germany and France, have price controls for books.

All this makes it difficult to predict POD’s impact on publishing’s supply chain, which is already in upheaval, mainly because of the internet. Readers should benefit from the greater variety. More authors will get published, for instance, but there will also be more competition. Publishers may save money, but they may also lose their role as gatekeepers. The losers are easier to determine: used-book sellers, logistics firms and, of course, the makers of offset-printing equipment. […].

Some believe POD could spur demand for books. Dane Neller, the boss of On Demand Books, which makes the Espresso, wants to put one wherever people might feel the urge to read, from cruise ships to train stations. But he gets most excited when talking about taking the devices to poor countries. “The potential to democratise knowledge,” he says, “is huge.”

I’ll leave the incisive commentary to Bruce Sterling, as he’s umpteen times better at it than I am:

Who really NEEDS print-on-demand books? Guys outside the distribution chain. And where do THEY live, one wonders. Oh wait, look. Here at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Those young guys with the cellphones. About a billion of ‘em.

I think it’s interesting to consider the potential effects of POD technology on a niche market like science fiction (or queer lit, or Lovecraftian retrohorror, or [insert small-volume-yet-international-and-surprisingly-tenacious literary scene here]), though, because it’s easier for a scene of that size to pick up and take over the gatekeeper mechanisms that POD would corrode.Whether they’d do as good a job is, of course, a matter for lively and passionate debate… 🙂

However, the caveat here is that I don’t understand the publishing business as an insider, and that we could probably all do with reading Charlie Stross’s ongoing Common Misconceptions about Publishing series (assuming you haven’t already, natch – I need to scrape together an hour or two to sit down and take notes while going through ’em in detail).

That said, I’m not sure that inside knowledge can effectively counter the suggestion that external technological and/or economic forces might completely up-end an entire industry, and render it unrecognisable (or at least unprofitable) in short order. If you’ve got informed input (or a good question!) please pipe up below and share it with us. 🙂