Thoughts on the “ebook only” option

[erastes]

I’m thoroughly convinced that ebooks will be around to stay—they will change formats I dare say in the same way that music has. Eventually they’ll go straight into the brain or something!  But I appreciate the convenience for people who can afford the tech.

However, although I’ll always try and make sure that my publishers offer a dual option—paper AND ebook at the very minimum (ideally spoken book too)—I don’t know if, after this year, I’ll go for any more “ebook only.”

It’s just the sales are so hugely disappointing in comparison with print. Now I’m not pointing the finger as to WHY this is, but if the ebook is really the phenomenon it hypes itself to be I’m just surprised that my books have sold so badly in ebook form, when they sell so very very well in print.

Perhaps historical readers prefer print? Or is it only the big boys like Elloras Cave who sell in large numbers? Thoughts?

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Comments

[alex-beecroft.livejournal.com]

I agree. I think an awful lot of people - the majority of people, in fact, are still buying print as a matter of course. And most of those people don't even know you're there, as an author, if you're not out in print.

The number of people I've heard from who believe that False Colors is my only book convinces me that there are vast amounts of people who only shop for books in bookshops, and who - even if they love the author's work - don't have time or inclination to go on the internet to find out if they have anything else out in other formats.

[jenniferkoliver.livejournal.com]

It may also have something to do with ebooks being available for download on free file sharing websites. It's astounding how fast people make copies of books and post them to torrent sites (I've seen a lot of authors posting about this recently, and I think this will be around for as long as ebooks are around).

[ejab62.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Believe it or not, I've discussed this with friends when one bought her first ebook and we all came to the same conclusion. We *love* the feeling of holding a book, smelling the paper (yes, go and laugh if you must ;)) and not being depending on batteries or what have you not. It's tiring to the eyes to read from a screen for a long period of time.
Curling up with a book is not the same feeling as curling up to read an ebook.
What can I say? We're old fashioned?

[josephine-myles.livejournal.com]

I do love the presence of physical books - an ebook will never have the same appeal (although they are fantastic if your shelf space is limited!)

I suspect the price of the ereaders has been holding off many people. Maybe as they get cheaper and people start seeing them around more, there will be a surge in sales...

For me: I buy m/m ebooks rather than print much of the time, because they are cheaper and the download is instantaneous. Also, a fair few of the books I want to read are only available in that format, or the paperbacks have to be shipped internationally at great cost.

[byrne.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I make a great deal more money on e-books than I do in print. Without looking at my spreadsheets, I'd say thousands of dollars more, if not tens of thousands over the course of seven years.

[lexin.livejournal.com]

or the paperbacks have to be shipped internationally at great cost.

This is the reason why I go to ebooks for my m/m "fix" most of the time. And the fact that I already own 3000 books and really don't have room for any more.

[aishabintjamil.livejournal.com]

I can't say as an author which sells better, having no print books to compare yet. As a reader, I'm still very much attached to print books. However, part of that attachment is the fact that I can pick up a print book at a used book dealer when I don't want to invest $10 in it new. That would make me effectively invisible in terms of sales.

I think we will see growing sales as more people get e-readers, or devices which you can read books on. I hear a lot of people say they read on the i-phone, for example. The e-reader technology isn't really mature yet, and the pricing is still prohibitive in my opinion. When it drops to the range of low-end music players, I think you'll see e-books grow in popularity. Also as paper book prices continue to rise, the e-books become more tempting, even to a determined reader of dead trees like myself.

There's a significant price barrier to starting with e-books in the fact that you have to buy the reader. I heard at a convention last week from Cecilia Tan at Circlet that Amazon saw a big spike in e-book sales in January, which no one expected. It's being attributed to the fact that many people got e-readers for Christmas, and once they had the thing, they needed to go buy books for it.

That gives me hope for the e-book market, because once someone is hooked, and has bought a bunch of books, even when that first device dies or becomes obsolete, they'll go replace it, in order not to lose their existing library investment.

[angelabenedetti.livejournal.com]

if the ebook is really the phenomenon it hypes itself to be

What's being hyped is the fact that the electronic side of the industry is the only one that's seen significant growth in the last couple of years. But if you look at the actual numbers, two or three hundred percent growth on what was only one and a half percent or so to start still doesn't end up as anything significant. We all know that. (Well, those of us who can do arithmetic know that. [shoulderglance])

The vast majority of readers still prefer paper books. And a lot of people don't like reading on their desktop or laptop (which is what I do), and don't want to pay $$$ for an e-reader that might be obsolete in a year or two. I refuse to buy any proprietary-format e-books because of that; until the formats shake out, committing $$$ or $$$$ to any one specialty format is, IMO, kinda stupid.

But all the m/m books I've ever seen in paperback were in trade paperback, rather than mass market. That means that a paperback m/m book costs about between two and three times what the same novel costs as an e-book. That's a huge difference, at least to me; I get a few paperback m/m books, usually by favorite authors. Most of my m/m I buy in e-book format, though, even if paper books are available, because it makes my book money go a lot farther.

It'd be interesting to see a comparison of trade paperback and e-book formats of the same book for a large number of authors. I've always had the impression that the paperbacks don't sell as well as the e-books. Josh Lanyon mentioned something along those lines recently too, in a guest post on Jessewave's blog. I'd love to have a paperback edition of Hidden Magic, but I'll admit it's mostly for the perceived prestige of having a paper book, and being able to autograph one and give it to my mom. [wry smile] Sales-wise, I've always assumed I'd make more money on the e-book.

Angie

[eroticjames.livejournal.com]

Well I haven't made tens of thousands, but I'd say I make 3-5x on eBook sales what I do with print. even with the god-awful torrent sites.

[byrne.livejournal.com]

(I say tens, but it would be very small single digits of tens, and seven years is a long time. LOL)

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

My ebooks outsell my paperbacks by ridiculous amounts. Then again, all my sales are fairly minuscle.

Shell-Shocked has sold over 400 as an e-book, and 8 as a paperback. (pink Petal)

Ellora's cavemen has sold 82 paper and 345 e. (Ellora)
Curse of the Pharaoh's Manicurists: 142 e, 7 paper (Amber Quill)
Alive on the Inside: 89 e, 4 paper (Amber Quill)

Only Taboo Treats (Ellora), at 355, has come close to selling the ebook numbers of 405

[angrboda]

I hope to all deities that I can think of that the traditional paper-book won't become extinct in my lifetime! It's not so much nostalgia as it's the fact that paperbooks I can read without needing the text to be HUGE or alternatively read with one eye closed so I don't start seeing double.

I think it's a big reason of why I've lost a lot of patience with reading fanfiction too, and why despite really wanting to I can't seem to get back into it. It's too unpleasant reading from the screen for that long at a time.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that, Angelia, that's interesting. My sales are pretty much the same, but the other way around - where I sell 300 copies of a print book, I'll sell 10 copies of an ebook.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

It makes me laugh that after thousands of years of written books people naturally assume that one format is going to do away with all that. What happens if computers are obselete? People will always want printed books.

[erastes.livejournal.com]

What it needs is the big boys to get involved as Running Press m/m books were mass market and priced accordingly £7.99 over here which is the mass market price. However "sales have been disappointing" say Running Press. (not for me, as sales in the thousands is not disappointing at all! They were just expecting more. LOL.

Yes, I make more money per ebook, but i'd rather make 10% of 4000 copies than 40% of ten copies.

Perhaps it is just an historical thing - seems to be the other historical writers sell more print than ebooks.

Chiarosucuro - which has been out for 3 years now - has earned me $80 in total. Hardly worth opening the laptop for that kind of money. It will be interesting to see what happens when I rewrite it a bit, and put it out in paperback!

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Oh I'm sure that's the case - I didn't like to say that in the post, because I'm always jumped on by rabid pro-ebookers when I suggest that the 1000's of copies of books I lose through pirating directly affects my royalties!

[clarelondon.livejournal.com]

It's interesting, isn't it? I also make much more in both units sold and $$ royalty with ebooks. It's also been very empowering for shorter length works.

But I've never thought of an either/or situation - I think there'll always be a place for both print and ebooks. People buy for different reasons, and in different situations.

[jenniferkoliver.livejournal.com]

Buh, you mean people don't believe it's happening? Or do they not want to admit it's happening? It happens with everything - books, music, films, lectures; anything electronic.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's distribution too. My books are mostly PoD and bookstores don't stock them

[erastes.livejournal.com]

Can't be that - mine are the same (i'm not counting Transgressions in this equation) POD and generally only available on the net.

[angelabenedetti.livejournal.com]

Right, and for more of the bookstore managers to find their balls and shelve the darned things in the romance section where they were meant to. :/ I'm sure that had a lot to do with the disappointing sales. [sigh]

Chiarosucuro - which has been out for 3 years now - has earned me $80 in total.

Really? O_O That's surprising. That's a novella, right? I've made almost that much (each) on three of my short stories, and more than twice that on a novelette. And I'd say with absolutely no false modesty that you're a much better-known writer than I am. :/ It must be the historical subgenre; that's the only significant difference I can think of. That's too bad. And yes, it'll be interesting to see if it does better in paperback. I'll keep a set of virtual fingers crossed for you.

Angie

[angelabenedetti.livejournal.com]

Oh, and the Running Press books I've gotten were all trade paperback. The one within arm's reach right now was $13.95. Maybe they were only mass market in England?

Angie

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Chiaroscuro is the victim of a hideous cover. When your rights come back, find a publisher who hires a real artist. For a cover for that story, I'd find some lush, gorgeous, out-of-copyright Renaissance portrait of a handsome gentleman... and add tiny little fangs. I'll bet it would sell more in the first 6 months than it has in the past 3 years.

I think ebook sales depend largely on the publisher. A few ebook publishers, especially those that started out as ebook/POD, have a good marketing and distribution system. Most don't. Most leave all or most of the promo to the writers; I didn't realize what an impact Linden Bay's general advertising had on my own sales until I wound up with a publisher who doesn't seem to advertise much.

Many e-pubs don't last more than a few years because in this format it's very easy to call oneself a "publisher," but the skills required to get a book up online are not the same as those needed for running a business. I cannot believe that some e-publishers don't sell from their own websites... that's an up-front question to ask before signing a contract, btw: Do you sell direct from your site? Because anyone who doesn't is cutting your royalties (and their own profits, wtf?) in half.

I've bought some ebooks--mostly m/m--because they're usually cheaper, and unless I know an author's work I'm not likely to buy in print--there are too many read-once stories out there. But the books I want to keep, I want to keep in print. And you can resell a print book.

The pirates... These thieves are putting books up online the day they're published. And the gormless little "sharers" figure that hey, everybody does it, it must be okay... I think we should start cursing the pirates, I really do.

But I think publshers who charge the same for an e-book that can't be resold are a big part of the problem. That's just greedy--and from all I've heard, DRM only irritates honest people who've bought the book and can't get into it, not the pirates and their hacker buddies.

Formats change. I think that in 50 years--barring the total collapse of what we optimistically call civilization--there will be more people reading e-books than print books, and I suspect most music collections will exist only on hard drives or in online music banks. More and more kids will never even own what we think of as books. But I think POD will go on for a long time, catering to us hard-core print dinosaurs.

And who knows, maybe in the long run recycled paper and non-tree print material will prove to have a certain value... You can't read an e-book with a dead battery.

[copperbeech.livejournal.com]

I really support technology and progressive media. I'm an IT geek at heart. As an artist, I just don't think we've found a good delivery method, and for that reason I'm suspicious of ebook only publishers. I won't submit to one. This trend that artists should give their work up for free, whether in blogs or emedia is abysmal and sadly, reflects a deeper psychological wave that reinforces a lack of valuing art or that a person who has bills to pay is attached to it.

J. Konrath blogs some great insights on how eprinting has given him not just an income but pays monthly bills, and rather quickly. He's managed to make something work for him (assuming he's being honest) that Stephen King couldn't. I think it's partly because he knows how to really work the technology and because his writing is very mainstream.

I'm clarifying where I want to go on such issues, as well. I'm just tired of the elitist crap of big houses and the pool of self-publishing that has relatively no checks or balances. Something in the middle has to work.
Thanks for bringing this up.
Hope you are well.

A note from an e-reader

[harley-earl.livejournal.com]

I can contribute one thing about ebooks vs paper books. With a paper book, you have the luxury of flipping through the pages (before buying) to see if you like the author's style, subject matter, etc. With an e-book, it's all or nothing. You can't glance through the book before buying. This could make many ebook readers more hesitant to spring on a book by a (to them at least) unknown author. None of us, paper or ebook reader, want to spend our tiny amounts of spare cash to purchase a book by an author who doesn't deliver.

Personally I like to buy my ebooks from amazon - you can get a free sample chapter which, while not indicative of how good (or bad) the entire book will be, at least gives you some idea of how much you'll like the author's style.

Re: A note from an e-reader

[erastes.livejournal.com]

I can relate to that, definitely. It's a tactile experience - everyone picks up books, flips through them etc!