The Word Cloud

Okay, so there's lots of horror around at the idea of e-books. What I'd love to know is, if the only proper publishing contract you were offered was an e-book only contract, with no physical books produced, would you sign it?

Emma

Not until I had exhausted all possible routes to being published as a book.

I believe we are all aware of my position on this, so no :) x

Same view on this as Weens. It wouldn't feel like being published.

Sure I would - if it's a genuine publishing contract and not a vanity outfit. This is 2010, -e-books will get bigger, particularly in the USA (where more people have those e-readers).

Why? Well if I can expand my reader base, there is a greater chance that publishers will sign me up - today's market is all about 'known' profitability - however bad my writing is !!

SMW - if you really want to know your stuff - rather than take advice from a nobody -read this - look for article 'Flying Pen Press.'
http://sixquestionsfor.blogspot.com/

stephen

There's no way e-books are going to catch on regardless of what year we're in. Reading from a screen causes strain to eyes and the e-book can only be read when electronics are permitted. Going away for a week or two in a caravan makes the e-book far too much hassle when a simple paperback can be taken instead. Book stores may be in decline but paperback sales are still at an high. People now refer to the internet when buying books. Stephen if your writing is bad you wouldn't be offered a contract, e-book or not. There is no drop in standards with e-book contracts to those expected by normal book contracts Weens I would agree with you. Before signing any contract for an e-book I would press for a paperback contract

My heart is with Weens on this. But my head says I'd be a fool to turn down a proper publishing contract for my first work (a travel book), especially if it was a good one with a good publisher. I've done a huge amount of background work and know my target market very well. Most have laptops already and they are highly likely purchasers of iPads, Kindles, etc. Well before the eBook boom, I'd written a full brief for how the travel book could have online support with links to useful travel sites, maps, photos and much more. The eBook is almost a natural choice for it.

Having said that, how I would love to see it in rBook(!) form in the hands of readers whose default choice is currently a dated work that is out of touch with what they want, and that they don't enjoy.

Obviously both is good, but if offered an E-book contract I would happily take it (although, yes, I would prefer to have rBook as well). I guess the main reason for this is that online is where I've been writing for the past five years, and it's cool. In fact I've found several techniques available online that would be hard to translate into paperback.

Babblefish - you are right on the money.
Killphil, sorry but I do not agree (apart from new writers) - please read my link for industry explanation. Stieg Larsson has sold 1million e-books - yet many critics revile his books as being nonsensical. Add graphic descriptions of women being sexually abused, mutilated and ... without adding anything to the story - and you got a best-seller. It is all about reader base. If you can sell, publishers will publish - and to hell with your writing ability.

Welcome to 2010.
stephen

Good question EmmaD.

I would say Yes, but depending on the terms of the contract.

I would love to see writers wrestle back some power from greedy publishers. How does a writer, having spent years working on their masterpiece, come to terms with a publisher's view that they have only contributed 5% to the value of the book? If eBooks help to cut out the middle man, and reconnect writers with readers, that is a good thing. But will they?

Yes, the e-book could make more marginal books economically possible - as, indeed, twenty years ago the advent of desktop publishing and OCR scanning made many academic and technical books possible which hadn't been, because it hugely reduced production costs. If my books fell into that category, so it was that or nothing, like Weens I'd sign an e-book contract

The direct-to-readers thing is interesting. But most readers, for most things, will go on relying on some intermediary they trust - the publisher + bookseller combination being the usual one. Most readers don't have time to knock on the doors of ten farms to buy the ingredients for dinner; it takes too long, and we can't really know whether the chicken and veg will be fresh, healthy, tasty etc. until we get home and cook it and find out it isn't. We rely on Tesco to do that bit for us, except perhaps if a friend has a farm - or a farm shop. And we'll go on relying on the booky equivalent of Tesco too, except when a friend recommends something. And that Tesco equivalent will be a mixture of publishers and booksellers, moving ever-more online, for a long time to come. What publishers have vastly more experience of than writers do is of how to reach readers, and you can't connect with readers if you can't reach them... Even Amazon admit that browsing just doesn't work online the way it does in a shop, or a library, on a friend's shelves.

I suspect the Andrew Wylie model - of keeping e-book rights out of his big-name authors' contracts with their publishers, and doing it themselves - only works for big-name authors, where people will go searching for the author-as-brand, and not rely on Waterstones-as-brand to do their preliminary searching for them.

"How does a writer, having spent years working on their masterpiece, come to terms with a publisher's view that they have only contributed 5% to the value of the book?"

Well, that isn't really how the maths works. For trade books, hardback royalty is still 10%, pb 7½%, (or 4/5ths of those if the book's sold to the bookseller at high discount) and they gamble by giving us what they reckon is most of that money up front. Of the cover price, the bookseller takes between 40% and 55%, typesetting, design and general production takes about 15%, warehousing and distribution takes 10% or more, which leaves the publisher only about 25% of the cover-price to pay all marketing, sales, promotion and publicity, editorial (huge amounts of time and freelance costs), overhead and interest on the costs which are up-front (the biggest of which is probably your advance). It's hardly surprising that 90% of books don't make much or any money, looking at it that way. Since a lot of those costs are fixed, it's hardly surprising either that having a few books which sell tons is immensely more profitable than having lots of books which sell few each.

Talking of which, e-books aren't cost-free by any means. All the editorial, design (for several platforms, remember) typesetting, marketing and publicity costs are exactly the same. Only printing (which is by no means all the cost of production) and warehousing are eliminated - and the holding and distribution of data isn't a negligible cost either, again, specially with so many different e-book platforms.

Mind you, a recent survey found that 60% of people didn't know what an e-book IS! So the print book is here for a while yet, and always will be for books that people want to keep and enjoy as objects (you're only renting an e-book, don't forget. Digital rights management ensures that whoever produced and distributed it has the whip hand over what you can do with what isn't your property.).

There's in interesting parallel with digital photography. When it first came along, the two ends of the market to buy into it were people who wanted a fun, throwaway snap-your-friends-at-parties camera, where the convenience outweighs the crap quality, and the high-end photojournalists and avant-garde artists, where the speed and potential for creativity outweighed the very huge costs, very huge cameras, and the difficult software (anyone remember early PhotoShop?). The last photographers to go digital have been the serious amateurs, who don't have the money or the professional imperatives, but do care hugely about quality.

Similarly, the two things which will go most e-booky fastest will be the beach read you leave behind on the plane, and the academic and avant-garde literary books which really exploit the digital possiblities (and can't these days get published in print because they're so expensive to do and sell in small numbers). Us in the middle - the writers who are still basically writing narratives, but narratives to be savoured and enjoyed, in a form which we love (and which you can read in the bath) - will the the last to go e-book. If ever.

Judging by this, the costs/profits of e-book and traditional publishing are much the same for everyone, except the retailer.

Bear in mind, though, that this is US figures, where publishers aren't (in theory) allowed to offer different discounts to different booksellers. How different from here...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/shane-snow/e-books-vs-traditional-bo_b_673356.html

Emma

Thanks Emma,

So according to those figures, authors in the US seem to get about 15% royalty for real books, whereas here you think authors only get about 7.5%. Why do you think that is?

Also, according to those figures, the profit made by publishers on eBooks seems to shoot up from 15% for real books to nearly 50% for eBooks. Have I done my sums right? If so, I suppose that's the figure that illustrates the level of exploitation that writers are suffering due to publishers' power. Perhaps we will one day have the literary equivalent of FairTrade?

Emma, thanks for the detailed post. Loads of facts, figures and insight all in one place. Slightly off topic, do you have any idea of the numbers of published writers out there at the moment, and the number of unpublished writers having a serious punt (approaching agents & publishers)?

If these numbers aren't available anywhere, I've been thinking of a rudimentary model for calculating based on the average number of submissions agents/publishers read each year (about 1-2 thousand), estimating how many submissions of different works published and unpublished writers make, and perhaps building in Writers' & Artists' Yearbook and Writers' Handbook sales as a cross-check.

Most of the interest in Victorian periodicals comes from the academic sphere. i borrowed four of these academic books from the British Library through the public library service. To buy these books would have been rather expensive -£60 each. I am presuming these books are print-on-demand so they are not necessarily cheap.

Steve, I've heard anecdotally that there are a million manuscripts in circulation looking for a publisher at any one time - which would include mss by the previously published as well as the unpublished writer. No idea how true that is. But in a sense it's not the point, of course, because it isn't a numbers game. If you write a book which is that magical combination of very good and very saleable, (although the proportion of good and saleable will vary depending on whether you're Hilary Mantel or Katie Price) you'll get published. If you don't, or can't, you won't...

Ron, yes, that royalty figure looks a bit odd doesn't it. In my experience US royalties are the same as UK, or even a bit lower. The academic presses routinely give 5%, on the true ground that the books are expensive (5% of a £50 monograph is a lot more than 7½% of a £7.99 paperback sold at 40% discount) but then they also have academics over a barrel, because they have to publish. The difference in the publisher's profit is relative, though, not absolute, given that the e-book in that example is not much more than half the price of the hardback book: I suspect in absolute terms it comes out as about the same amount. What interests me is the huge difference in the retailer's profit - and even huger on a hardback if you take the difference in price into account. Fair enough, perhaps - high street bricks and mortar take vast amounts of money to run, relative to a tin barn in the middle of nowhere with a data connection; as one book trade commentator puts it, every inch of every shelf and table in a bookshop is real estate, and must earn its keep.

If you want to get your knife into someone for explointing authors, then it's actually the big booksellers you should be going for, not the publishers, because they have the whip hand when it comes to range, discounts, covers, and paid-for promotions, and it's that whip that makes publishers Sales departments have so much sway: Tesco, Asda, a certain large online seller who had better be nameless: http://www.thebookseller.com/news/59533-hachette-clashes-with-amazon.html That dispute was resolved, but it took months, and all Hachette authors (which included me) were caught in the crossfire, and lost sales. Having said that, the same large online seller is the absolute saviour of small and indie presses, in being the way they can reach customers easily, and it's kept a lot of 'long tail' books in print for the same reason, by supplying a steady trickle of sales which would have long ago dried up once the bookshops weren't stocking it any more.

In terms of revenue, it's actually remarkable that publishers continue to soak up the huge variations in discount without (except for the 4/5ths rule) passing it on to the authors: we get the same royalty per copy regardless of how much the publisher got for it. One of the things which makes the e-book future so uncertain for us is that pricing is so uncertain - the world is used to getting things for free or incredibly cheap online - that the royalty model is based on net receipts (i.e. how much money the publisher actually gets when selling the book on). Then we share the pain of a book which was £7.99 in hardback being sold for £1.99 as an e-book. Which you could say is fair, were it not for the fact that we have no control over whether it is sold for that/

Emma

Hi EmmaD,

(quote) "If you want to get your knife into someone for explointing authors..."

I'm not a violent person, Emma. I'm just trying to understand why the authors get so little credit. Do you feel you only contribute 5 or 10% to the value of the books you write? If so, then don't you have a cheek putting your name on the front? It should be the name of the retailer in big letters, with the publishers name in a medium-sized font, followed by the marketing executives, editor, etc.

(quote) "then it's actually the big booksellers you should be going for,"

Judging by those figures you pointed us to, it does seem like that for real books. But for eBooks the publishers seems to receive a disproportionate share, though you seem keen to defend them from any perceived knife attacks.

Ultimately, of course, the power lies with the book consumer. I wonder if your average reader cares how much has gone to the author? If they do, then some sort of FairTrade-like system might be worth considering - a symbol that tells them - "This author will receive 50% of the retail price of the book." It worked for coffee beans why not books?

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Emma - I know how frustrating that is. It usually seems to happen when you've written quite a bit, too. Now I normally select and copy everything before I hit reply or post.

Thanks for your previous post - a million manuscripts in circulation is even more than I anticipated, but I certainly agree with your point. It doesn't matter if it's a million or ten thousand, if your work is good enough it will shine through.

That is a shame, Emma. I am left on tenterhooks as to whether you think a FairTrade-like organisation might help to bring fairness to the book selling industry. Personally, I would guess that most readers would wish the author to get the lion's share of the credit for writing the book, and might support such a push.

It all came down to me saying that I don't think financial share and credit are tidily equable. But I'll re-create it sometime, just not now!

The stupid thing is I did copy it before I previewed, because the preview doesn't work properly. But by the time I realised it hadn't posted, my clipboard had acquired something else - hence the HTML crap above...

How much would the cheque be??? lol... But seriously? No way! You cant sniff an old e-book and let the dust fill your lungs with memories & your mind with excitement. Plus, when you fall asleep in the bath & accidentally let the corner of your book dip in the water for the inciest of wincy moments of time, your wife doesn't rip off one of your nuts & wear it like a pendant, 'cos a book only costs a few quid & anyway you can always just hang it over the towel rail for a while & get that awesome crinkly-because-once-i-was-wet-and-there's-a-funny-story-behind-that feel to the book... Vote Book!

Sure all those are true. But would you sign such a contract if it was the only publication contract on offer?

Emma, do you know anything about copy protection on ebooks? I don't know any home users of Microsoft Office who actually paid for it, in fact the public expectation is that off-the shelf software is free. What is there to stop people circulating ebook files freely around their friends?

The digital rights management programmes are pretty fierce for these and digital audio books: you'll find that you can only hold it on a certain number of machines, for example. But DRM systems are expensive, so smaller e-publishers may not want or be able to invest in them.

Having said that, many publishers are finding that distributing e-books actually increases the sales of the physical books, precisely because e-books are such a pain to use. The grand old Teach Yourself crew have found that many people who download - say - Teach Yourself Car Maintenance - for free do so basically as a tester, and then buy the physical book because that doesn't matter if it gets covered with oil, and it can be read even if the sun's shining while you're trying to work out how to change a carburettor. I don't know if that translates directly into fiction, but I wouldn't be altogether surprised.

I must admit - and I'm going to sound horribly self-righteous here - I refuse to pirate anything. As someone who lives by her copyrights, I don't think I can insist on my intellectual property if I don't respect other people's. Besides, if you have an academic affiliation of some sort you can get the full set of Office Professional (not just Student Edition) for £120 and have a clear conscience. Or use Open Office, which is free. It is perfectly possible to live with only the music, books, softward and pictures you can actually afford to buy.