Which genres work in self publishing and which don't?

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Not to mention that if you publish with a large press, you simply don't have that option anymore - your work will go into ebooks, or they won't buy it from you.

Where on Earth did you get this idea?

It's not accurate. All sorts of things are on the table when you negotiate with a publisher, especially if you have an agent in your corner.
 

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I answered that last time you asked, but maybe you missed it; 29.5% based on February AAP reports; which although not perfect *is* considered the best-bet numbers in the industry for tracking sales. It's also conservative on ebooks, because they only tracked a small number of publisher's sales - so the $90.3m they tracked in sales for Feb didn't count any sales by most publishers, although it did track 16 of the biggest.

Anyway, link here: http://www.publishers.org/press/30/

Thanks, Kevin, I didn't see that last time.

Figures like that can't really track all publishers' sales: but so long as they track the same sample of both print and e-book sales, they should be pretty representative.

I've had a quick read of the page you linked to and can't find the point where it says that e-books accounted for 29.5% of total sales; and I've played around with the figures a bit and get all sorts of answers, depending on what I do with the numbers. For example, do you include downloaded audiobooks as e-books, as they seem to do in the summary? Or do you count that as a usual trade format, which is what I'd do?
 

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(Figures from AAP press release here)


E-book sales = $90.3m

Adult Trade combined (Hardback, Paperback and Mass Market) = $156.8m

Children's/YA combined (Hardback, Paperback and Mass Market) = $58.5m

$90.3m + $156.8m + $58.5m = $305.6m

E-book sales ($90.3m) is 29.5% of $305.6m

***

Audiobooks are separate, and have also shown a huge boom - up 36.7%

Print was down 34.4% overall, hardback almost halved.

This could still be a post-Christmas boom, and could plateau (and no doubt Borders was a factor affecting print here). Next month will be interesting.
 
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@OldHack: What dgaughran said. That's the math. It's admittedly NOT precise - but it's the best guess anyone has right now. Also, it's a snapshot and we might see really different numbers from March if print bounced back some and ebooks slumped a little. It's the trend tracking that I think is most important there.

Where on Earth did you get this idea?

It's not accurate. All sorts of things are on the table when you negotiate with a publisher, especially if you have an agent in your corner.

Go ahead. Go find someone who is *not* a 'guaranteed bestseller' writer who is able to sell print rights to a large press without selling digital rights. Seriously.

You can't. You won't be able to. Publishers know most books they buy this month won't be in stores for about 18-24 months (less for some, more for others, but that's a pretty typical range). And it's already looking like ebooks are the biggest format. In 24 months, it's distinctly possible - even likely - that ebook sales nationwide will exceed all print sales combined.

If you're one of the tiny handful of biggest writing names in the world, you might be able to wrangle a print only deal. But even for mainstream regular bestsellers, it's not happening. Publishers have to treat digital as the primary rights on any book they buy right now, because by the time the book comes out, print will be a subsidiary media.
 

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Go ahead. Go find someone who is *not* a 'guaranteed bestseller' writer who is able to sell print rights to a large press without selling digital rights. Seriously.

Me. For this book.

And this book.

For the two Lanham books, the author wanted me to produce the electronic versions; I did. The publisher distributes them, and RAL owns the electronic rights. We negotiated a distribution deal with the two publishers; this is much easier with scholarly books and university publishers, but I've had success with others as well. RAL gets a royalty; I performed work for hire, paid by RAL.

Often mass market fiction is just as negotiable for e-rights as well. There's frequently an agreement to share royalties if the publisher provides the file for ebook production. Many authors go this route because they want to produce enhanced ebooks and not all publishers are set up to do that.

Currently I'm negotiating with a publisher for DRMless ebooks.

It helps that I'm fairly well known in terms of ebook production, but I don't think it's impossible for anyone. The thing is, you can't expect the publisher to give up something without getting something, any more than a publisher can expect an author to give up something without getting something.
 
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Sheryl Nantus

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Maybe it's just me, but I understand why a pubisher would want ebook rights...

I sell my book to XXX publisher and keep the ebook rights. I don't get the benefit of their editing or cover art and instead put out the book under my own label.

As a consumer I'm getting two different books. The edited, commercial version may be MILES different from the freelance edited version out in ebook form. The cover art will not be the same and a reviewer will have to clarify if it's the ebook version being reviewed or the print version. Frankly, it's too much work for the publisher to take on if you're going to try and compete with the e-version of your book. If you undercut the print version (not hard to do) with your self-pub version, why on earth would a publisher want to put out a print copy?

Not to mention confusing the consumer to death. I see XXX book out by this author but it's not the same as the print version I bought at the store. Different cover art, different editing and all that. What am I buying? Why is it this way?

I realize that some of the self-pub gurus scream blue murder about letting this right go, but there's actual common sense behind it. As a publisher why would I want YOU to compete with ME with the same book?
 
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1991 and 1995? Ebooks basically didn't exist at that point. Even in 2009 they were fairly small, and publishers thought they had until 2015 to reach where they are *today*.

I said "able to sell", as in today, this month, last month. Right now. Not two decades ago, sheesh. ;)

Edit: I could be wrong, but I didn't think the U of Chi and U of Cali presses are considered "large press"? We're talking about contracting rights to a book to one of the major publishers out there, not to a small press (where things can definitely still vary, because a lot of folks are still struggling to understand where the industry is going).
 
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Deleted member 42

1991 and 1995? Ebooks basically didn't exist at that point. Even in 2009 they were fairly small, and publishers thought they had until 2015 to reach where they are *today*.

Dude, you are so wrong. Also? You have an interesting habit of shifting goal posts.

The arrival of the Kindle and Amazon's push absolutely made ebooks a bigger part of the market, but they were thriving quite nicely before then.

This is part of the problem with some of the stuff I'm seeing in these threads--ya'll have no idea that ebooks are better than twenty years old as consumer commercial products.

I worked for the Voyager company; we invented ebooks--right down to the common UI elements. I also worked for Calliope and Night Kitchen.

I was a member of the Open Ebooks Standards committee; I helped create the ePub file format as well as TEI standards. I consulted for Apple on ePub standards for non-Roman languages and for adaptive tech support.

I've produced well over a hundred ebooks, by authors like Walter Mosley, Douglas Adams, Crichton, and many titles from Random House's Modern Library.

I'm currently working to help main stream presses streamline their conversion processes--and create visually appealing ebooks, instead of text dumps.

I said "able to sell", as in today, this month, last month. Right now. Not two decades ago, sheesh. ;)

I'm still collecting royalties darlin' on the ebooks and the codex books are still in print. We're mulling over doing new editions, to take advantage of better opportunities for "enhanced" ebooks.

Edit: I could be wrong, but I didn't think the U of Chi and U of Cali presses are considered "large press"? We're talking about contracting rights to a book to one of the major publishers out there, not to a small press (where things can definitely still vary, because a lot of folks are still struggling to understand where the industry is going).

Actually, yes, they are both considered fairly heavy weight presses, University of California more than University of Chicago.

How about Random House ? How about Peachpit? Have you actually talked to authors of mainstream books?

Part of the problem with enthusiastic but naive writers--and I'm looking at you--is that you think ebook production is new.

It isn't.

A lot more is on the table when you negotiate than you seem to realize; publishers realize that enhanced ebooks have added value--but they're not set up to create them in house. So there's opportunity to negotiate--to provide recompense to the publisher for their editing and production on the pre-press file, but keep the e-rights.

You can't have what you don't ask for--and it doesn't hurt to ask.
 

HapiSofi

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Y'know, Kevin, the only way you're going to win this argument is by knowing more about ebooks than Digital Medievalist. I'm not sure that's an option.
 

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I think you'll see a lot of romance successes because the romance market has been e-friendly for about ten years now. There have been lots of smaller e-presses so the audience is conditioned that e-books are not necessarily 'bad'. So romance does well, yes.
It's not a matter of the audience being conditioned to think ebooks are good or bad; what matters is that there's an audience of romance readers who've already been taught to use ebooks to get the stories they want. Bookmama got this one right: "target audience + way to reach them = good sales." Romance has tiny subcategories that have devoted fans, so they're your target audience. The existence of ebook sales channels romance readers are already familiar with are your way to reach them.
I think horror does really well also, mostly because the market lends itself well to a shorter work and frankly, no one in NYC seems to buy horror anymore. The fans are just as rabid as they ever were.
Nope. Horror has never regained the mass audience it had before the genre collapsed in the late 1980s. Some fans are as enthusiastic as ever, but there aren't nearly as many of them as there used to be. The reason the NYC market is still not buying horror is because it still tanks.

Horror has become like the romance subcategories: a genre with a small, well-defined audience that knows what it wants and where to look for it.
As for not making money, well, I made my rent payment last month with my e-published money. That's something! It's not ridiculous money, but it's nice to pad the income. :)
Congratulations. Making the rent is a nontrivial achievement.
 
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Dude, you are so wrong. Also? You have an interesting habit of shifting goal posts.

The arrival of the Kindle and Amazon's push absolutely made ebooks a bigger part of the market, but they were thriving quite nicely before then.

This is part of the problem with some of the stuff I'm seeing in these threads--ya'll have no idea that ebooks are better than twenty years old as consumer commercial products.

Yes, but represented under 1% of the market in January 2009. So tell me, what percent of the market did they represent in 1991?

It's a different world today. Different, really, than even two years ago, let alone fifteen or twenty. Fifteen years ago there were ebooks (actually, ezines, too; I edited and was briefly producer for an intl trade zine that did an e-edition back in the mid nineties). But they were small potatoes, in terms of sales. So small that publishers bought the rights as an afterthought, sometimes (and often didn't at all - which is why there's lawsuits pending regarding some large publishers now claiming they have ebook rights to older works and writers contesting that).

Push it forward to 2008. Ebooks are growing again. This time, it might really happen. The Kindle was released in Nov 2007, and 2008 saw early adopters buying Kindles and buying ebooks in greater quantities than ever before. Publishers got together, cranked some numbers, and figured that by 2015, ebooks might actually be pushing a billion dollars a year. That's about 1/16th of the US consumer publishing industry right now.

Fast forward to 2010, and things start changing fast. Kindle 3 and Amazon's huge push, plus iPad, plus the availability of good quality ebooks and good quality reading software for cell phones, and some other factors = a big surge. Ebooks rise from maybe 2-3% in January to 8% in December, based on conservative estimates.

Around Dec/Jan, B&N announces they've already hit their sales targets for 2014.

In April, the AAP announces that Feb numbers show ebooks outselling MMP.

That means ebooks if not right now very soon will be the primary publishing format - the format where the most sales are made, the most revenue won. And the result of that is pretty easy to anticipate: publishers are demanding digital rights. In fact, newer contracts are also demanding "interactive multimedia" rights, because *those* rights probably (untested in courts so far, but likely from what I've been told) include most forms of enhanced ebooks.

I don't know if some folks are negotiating to keep the interactive multimedia or not; I'd have to ask around. But what I am hearing with *extreme* consistency from every writer I talk to is that no "big publishing" corporation is buying just print rights anymore. No digital means no contract. They'd be fools to do otherwise; by the time any book bought today comes out, digital will be their bread and butter, and they know it.

I get you have a background here. I'm not a total neophyte myself, and I do know most of the history involved here, although it sounds like I lack your depth of experience on this. I respect that. But I can only tell you what I am hearing - with complete consistency - from writers, and that is that they cannot sell print rights without digital anymore. If anyone has recent personal experience to the contrary, I would love to hear it.
 

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You're basing this on anecdotal information from writers? You really don't see a problem with that?

===

Ebook sales are showing a respectable rate of increase, but the reason they've outstripped mass market paperbacks is because the mass market distribution system is collapsing. That's a dysfunctional market, not an indication that people no longer want hardcopy books; and it certainly doesn't amount to proof that ebooks will "very soon will be the primary publishing format." When you say things like that, you've crossed over into wishful thinking.
 
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(Figures from AAP press release here)

...

Audiobooks are separate, and have also shown a huge boom - up 36.7%

Print was down 34.4% overall, hardback almost halved.

This could still be a post-Christmas boom, and could plateau (and no doubt Borders was a factor affecting print here). Next month will be interesting.

Thanks for that. What I find interesting is how malleable those statistics are, and how with very little trouble I can make them "prove" that e-books took 40% of the market if I want to, or 22% (I think that's what I got to yesterday--I don't have my workings to hand right now).


Go ahead. Go find someone who is *not* a 'guaranteed bestseller' writer who is able to sell print rights to a large press without selling digital rights. Seriously.

You can't. You won't be able to.

Ah, but I can. A good friend of mine who is unpublished was recently taken on by an agent, and within three weeks of signing up with that agent she's got a huge deal with a major UK publisher, a good deal with a European publisher and an auction still ongoing in another European territory, with half a dozen publishers involved.

This is for hard copy only: her agent hasn't sold e-book rights and is working on those now.

Maybe it's just me, but I understand why a pubisher would want ebook rights...

I sell my book to XXX publisher and keep the ebook rights. I don't get the benefit of their editing or cover art and instead put out the book under my own label.

As a consumer I'm getting two different books. The edited, commercial version may be MILES different from the freelance edited version out in ebook form.

This shouldn't happen. A good contract makes sure that the author retains copyright on the work in all its forms so although the original publisher edited it, the author retains copyright to that edited version and can use it however they want to, so long as it doesn't impinge on the original publisher's rights. Meaning that if the original publisher doesn't own e-rights you should be able to use that edited version as your e-book without any comeback.
 

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. . . the mass market distribution system is collapsing. . . . .
Really? Hard to tell from the racks and racks of mass market books I see in bookstores, grocery stores, drug stores, and of course the equivalent on amazon.com, bn.com, etc., etc., etc. (And stacks of trade books in bookstores -- bricks & mortar and online-- and in book club emails and websites (History Book Club, Scientific American Book Club . . .).

Dunno about you, but I now buy the large majority of my books as Kindle downloads for convenience (books arrive in one minute, don't have to leave my living room to order and receive, don't have to add more to my piles of books or figure out how to unload the ones I've read and can bear to part with, and I can carry hundreds of books with me, including my current reading books, anywhere, all at onece) and (usually) price savings. My book-buying habits changed on a dime the day my Kindle arrived last September. I doubt that I am the only one.

--Ken
 

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As a lit fic writer, I hope to never see my own recent work available in an ereader format. . . . .
Ah, yes . . . reminded me to buy literary novelist Bill Pieper's latest (What You Wish For, Nov. 2010) as a Kindle download. I ordered it before typing the last sentence. It arrived before I finished typing it.

--Ken
 

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Thanks for that. What I find interesting is how malleable those statistics are, and how with very little trouble I can make them "prove" that e-books took 40% of the market if I want to, or 22% (I think that's what I got to yesterday--I don't have my workings to hand right now).

I think 29.5% is a fair read though - assuming that the e-book figures only represent all trade e-books, then it's fair to calculate the portion of the market they hold of Adult Trade Print + Children's/YA Trade Print + E-books.

But it is only one category. All trade e-book vs all trade print is $90.3m vs $215.3m - that's over 70% of the market for print.

And, as has been pointed out elsewhere, these figures do come with health warnings.

First, it's only one month (although trends are obvious).

Second, we only have 16 houses reporting e-book sales and only 84 reporting print sales. While that could lead you to think that e-book market share could be even higher, that is a tenuous conclusion for all sorts of reasons.

Third, no-one was shipping to Borders.

Fourth, we could still be seeing a temporary post-Christmas e-book purchasing boom (although in every year from 2005 'til this AAP figures showed a drop in e-book market share from Jan to Feb, but that doesn't mean much either).

Full figures for Feb are (I believe) out in May, so we may have a better picture then. Also, we should have the preliminary March figures in a couple of weeks, and we can see if various trends continue.
 
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Irysangel

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Really? Hard to tell from the racks and racks of mass market books I see in bookstores, grocery stores, drug stores, and of course the equivalent on amazon.com, bn.com, etc., etc., etc. (And stacks of trade books in bookstores -- bricks & mortar and online-- and in book club emails and websites (History Book Club, Scientific American Book Club . . .).

MMPB fiction performs best with sheer volume. Also, you're mixing two comparisons - trade books aren't what was mentioned - mass market was. Those are the paperbacks that you see in Wal-mart and drug stores, etc. Except you can ask any romance author - Wal-Mart has cut their buys by a third. That means if they used to order 60k of your paperback, now they're wanting 20k. Grocery stores are cutting back. Borders is going belly up, and B&N is cutting back shelf-space in favor of games and toys. Oh, and B&N is buying less as well. Why buy more? They can just reorder if you sell through. Except that's part of the problem.

So you used to be able to do well with MMPB on sheer volume alone. Except now the volume has been neatly sliced down to nothing, and paperbacks don't have that margin of profitability they used to.

Anyhow, the distribution chain is all effed up right now, and I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of new authors debuting in TPB rather than MMPB because it's not cost-smart to debut in MMPB anymore.
 

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Horror has never regained the mass audience it had before the genre collapsed in the late 1980s. Some fans are as enthusiastic as ever, but there aren't nearly as many of them as there used to be. The reason the NYC market is still not buying horror is because it still tanks.

I'm not entirely convinced of that; I've bought far more horror novels as ebooks this year than paper horror novels in the last five years. I didn't stop buying because I lost interest in horror -- I've probably bought a hundred horror movie DVDs in that time -- but because I would rather read about sneak up and rip your throat out vampires than sparkly ones. Last time I went to a bookstore I looked at the horror section and there simply wasn't a single book that appealed to me, they all either seemed to be parodies or Twilight ripoffs.

In addition, I suspect one reason why horror was so big in the 70s to early 80s was because the whole world seemed to be going to hell; people in general aren't so interested in horror stories when everything seems to be happy and fluffy. If that's the case, then there should be plenty of demand out there right now.
 

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I think nonfiction works out well - I just bought a book on writing by James Scott Bell who has plenty of professional credits and it's a faboo read!

Depends on the author and what you're looking for...

Jimbo's a good friend of mine, Sheryl; I'll pass on your kind words to him! :)
 
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I think it's premature to say that the print distribution system "is collapsing".

But it does look like we're at or past that 20-25% ebook margin where Shatzkin predicted that the current print publishing system would enter a phase of catastrophic upheaval. If he's correct, then past that point publishers would not longer have the economy of scale to keep print book prices as low as they are. Print prices would go up. As print prices go up, that feeds more people buying cheaper ebooks, which feeds less economy of scale and higher print prices.

We're also looking at Walmart and other big chains cutting back on purchases; Borders in bankruptcy - and my bet is they end up in liquidation; B&N closing a net of 52 stores last year and hundreds more planned for the next year or two (they intend to close most stores where they don't own the physical footprint).

Things are definitely changing, and that change is continuing to accelerate. Predicting where things will end up is pretty tough right now, though. ;)
 

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Just to be clear, there are two very different distribution systems being discussed here: mass market and trade. It is the mass market system that's getting shaky, not the trade system.

And, as detailed elsewhere, Borders tanked because it was mismanaged -- not because of any lack of books or distributors.
 
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Meaning exactly what? I see the usual assortment of mass market paperbacks in all the usual places (online and physical stores of various kinds). What's shaking?

--Ken

Sales in MMP are plummeting like rocks, and have been for some time now. This year so far has been especially bad, based on those AAP numbers, but the trend has been downward through much of 2010. Borders issues are not helping; B&N store closures ditto. But the theory is that ebook sales are grabbing a chunk of the money which formerly went into MMP purchases.
 
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