Brown University bookstore
Showing posts with label Hugh C. Howey. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hugh C. Howey. Show all posts
Friday, July 26, 2013
Monday, May 20, 2013
The Battle of the Books redux, eBooks vs pBooks and The Author's (Only True) Home is in the Brick and Mortar Bookstore (Part III)
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| Shelf space |
The great serialized novelists of the 19th Century were like rock stars or movie stars. The printing press and the apparatus of publishing had given these creators a means to bypass traditional arbiters and gatekeepers of culture and connect directly to a mass audience. And the economics worked out such that they didn't need to land a commission or find a patron in order to put bread on the table. The creators of those novels were therefore able to have a connection with a mass audience and a livelihood fundamentally different from other types of artists. - Neal Stephenson in Some Remarks: Essays and Other Writing... and then a little snippet from the Dean of St. Patrick's:
By this expedient, the public peace of libraries might certainly have been preserved if a new species of controversial books had not arisen of late years, instinct with a more malignant spirit, from the war above mentioned between the learned about the higher summit of Parnassus. - Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books
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| ... esp. lithographs |
I don't mean to single out Miller, as she is just one of many who go on at length to denigrate positive changes in the publishing and world of books with dubious facts and a misty-eyed view of one of the most cutthroat and un-business-like business this side of the music industry.
The piece focuses on a number of recent sensations (E.L. James, Hugh Howey [minor quibble, she mis-spell's Howey's name as "Howie"], Amanda Hocking) have moved on from ghetto of self-publishing to the Big 5.5. And though she does asterisk that with the move is often for good reasons (seven figure advances!) she never hits home the point that it is nearly always on the authors' terms (such as keeping all e-rights - see Hugh Howey in the Huffington Post on that topic). Miller's piece itself was a response to "Book Publishers Scramble to Rewrite Their Future" by Evan Hughes (in a 19 March 2013 article in WIRED).
So, let's unpack Miller's title a bit. First off, she doesn't really mean "books" aren't dead, she means PRINT books aren't dead. Print is, of course, a little bit vague of a term, encompassing as it does hardcover, paperback, mass-market paperback, etc., and yes, she is correct, PRINT books are not dead, and, because of the varied nature of "print" it will probably be hard to find that point in them when anyone can say "He's dead Jim."
Digging further into the title, Miller's says "big" authors want to be in print and in bookstores. Big is relevant too (as my Aussie friends would say, "about as long as a piece of string") and, true, of course, any author would want to be in a bookstore (or probably any place where they could find a reader, preferably a paying reader) for their hard work.
Let's look a little closer at these two topics: eBooks vs pBbooks and The Author's (Only True) Home is in the Brick and Mortar Bookstore.
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| Enduring Works |
With just a little looseness with facts. Miller notes that "ebooks are 25% of market." The American Association of Publishers (AAP) -- which is hardly the cold, laser-eyed robotic proponent of all things "e" or "i" (see for instance their stance on the FASTR legislation) has the relevant statistics on that. In the most recent stats from the AAP (2012), adult fiction and non-fiction e-books are 28.5% of the total book market in that category. Feh, you say, she's just rounding down a bit. But if you do the math (not hard math), that's a mis-stating error of 12.28% -- that's not rounding, that's just wrong. (FYI the statistics from AAP report has been summarized by Galleycat here).
Moreover, in the same AAP report, the 28.5% is an increase over 2011 (when the share was 22.84%) of 36%. A market growth of 36% also calls into question Millers assertion that:
"But the early-adapter boom is showing signs of flagging and the growth of the e-book market appears to be leveling out. E-books are definitely here to stay, but it seems that many, many readers — a threefold majority, in fact — still prefer print."My hunch is that this "flagging" is based on the flattening curve of dedicated ereaders. The explosion in tablet sales (iPad, iPad Mini, Nexus and all their kindred Kindle Fires and Nooks) is where those ebooks are being read. So, yes, very roughly, three quarters of the book market are not ebooks, but that is a 24.78% increase in one year.
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| Bye bye Borders |
THE AUTHOR'S (ONLY TRUE) HOME IS IN THE BRICK AND MORTAR BOOKSTORE (and we don't mean that nasty Barnes and Noble!)
"Furthermore," Miller continues, "to switch to Amazon-style self-publishing would mean getting shut out of bookstores -- not a big deal for an author whose books weren't there to begin with, but a major loss for the likes of, say, Stephen King, who has always made his love of and gratitude toward booksellers well-known. Bookstores are where fans meet popular authors and get their books signed, cementing their devotion."
Well, yeah yeah yeah, Stephen King does love book stores, who doesn't? But how many of King's books are sold in the small and indie bookstore (which we do need more of, but with a radical refactoring) in those locations?
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| Dan Brown's Inferno @ Target |
This provides anecdotal back up to more figures from the AAP report, namely that hardcover sales are now 26.28% of the market (down 1.53% since 2011); and more significantly, mass-market paperbacks are now down to a touch over 9% (a decrease of 16%!). I should also note that the AAP report also counts audiobook downloads, which, in 2012 represented 2.43% of the market, not a format that makes the print book lovers dewy-eyed I'm guessing.
Note that all of the above is, again, adult fiction/non-fiction. To really get an idea of where the trend (which, again Miller says is "flagging") is to look at children and young adult (YA) books.
Ebooks are only 16.17% of the YA market now, but that number represents a 177% increase over 2011. 177%, that increase is coming from future book buyers. I might also add, that unlike in the adult books, the ebook growth didn't come from cannibalizing other formats (the only category that dropped in the C/YA stats was board books, down 6.61%, I'm not sure what to make of that number).
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| eBooks for K-12 |
Miller hides behind the "book sniffer" argument that the only true book is a print book; that the only place to buy a book is the quaint indie bookstore (in an swipe at Barnes & Noble, an example - the only remaining one perhaps -- of the "relatively impersonal chain stores"); that the only true publisher is a multi-national corporation that will strictly dictate who gets published, how they get published, when they get published, author and readers be damned.
Authors and readers are rebooting their relationship. Amazon, SmashWords, and a few others are fostering this new relationship. As Gershwin could have said, "Writers gotta write, readers gotta read, I'm gonna love one book til I die ..." and yes, I mean the book, the perhaps Platonic notion of the book, be it print, pixels on a screen, or the wonder of e-ink.
See the earlier parts of this series:
- Part I: Some thoughts on trade publishing: @HughHowey, and the virtuous circle
- Part II: Some thoughts on trade publishing: Kelly Hand (@khwriter), and the virtuous circle
- Part III: The Battle of the Books redux, eBooks vs pBooks and The Author's (Only True) Home is in the Brick and Mortar Bookstore
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| 20 - 30% Off |
Monday, March 11, 2013
Some thoughts on trade publishing: @HughHowey, and the virtuous circle (part I)
I have to insist that you all read Hugh Howey's "How WOOL Got A Unique Publishing Deal" on the HuffPost. This article neatly ties up a couple of threads in this post.
A few weeks ago, I read article in the United Airlines Hemispheres magazine (January 2013) about author James Patterson. He's not someone on my radar screen, but it was a fascinating article that highlighted so much of what's wrong with publishing (writ large). Now, I have nothing against James Patterson, and in fact, see that he's taken honest advantage of many of the larger failures of the industry.
Some facts from the article:
- 1 in every 17 hardcover books sold in the US is by Patterson (or written in conjunction with his team of partners)
- current publishing contract is for 3 years, $150 million, and calls for 17 books
What I wonder is how much work the publishers but into those books. The Patterson brand has a huge (obviously) built in audience; his team of collaborators are most likely top-notch and don't need to avail themselves of what the Big 5.5 (I'm at 5.5 since I don't think that the Penguin/Random House merger has been mutually digested) call "editing". One thing they offer, I would guess is access to the markets where hardcovers are sold, namely, Walmart, Target, grocery stores and other brick and mortar non-book stores. Also, outlets for paperbacks (including all the previous, plus airports, the dwindling number of small chain bookstores, independent bookstores, Barnes & Noble (online and brick and mortar), and, of course, Amazon.
I'd like to contrast Patterson's story with that of the authors of a couple of books I recently read.
The first may be known to many of you. Hugh C. Howey is the author of a number of books, adult fiction and young adult. Most prominently, he is the creator of the Wool series of science fiction novels. The first, Wool: Knitting, was self-published as a short story/novella. The response from readers -- for this fairly unknown author -- was so strong and positive that he created four more installments in the Wool series (gathered together as the Wool: Omnibus Edition) as well as a trilogy of prequels (The Shift series) and to be completed with the Dust series which is just getting underway).
I myself discovered the series when my ever-cool colleague @Bathlander tweeted about Howey and Wool. For a small investment, $.99 on Amazon, I picked up the first installment, was quickly hooked and purchased the omnibus edition. Finishing up the prequel series (with the first volume of the third series to be in the next few months), I was stunned by Howey's inventive creation of an entire world (short view: sometime in the future, humanity seems to be reduced to a small population living underground in a 150 story silo -- or are they?).Howey's command of language and characterization raises his work beyond the potboiler style many feel pigeonholes SciFi as a lesser genre. In all aspects, Howey and the Wool volumes are as literary and inventive a world and show as strong a command of the possibilities of language as an acknowledged "literary master" such as Margaret Atwood shows in her speculative fiction (for example, The Handmaid's Tale or the sublime Oryx and Crake) or the "big three" of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Robert Heinlein or the brilliant, but sometimes dated/period work of Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick.
So, as a self-published author Howey has not only achieved success in the world of ebooks, but the Wool series has been picked up by Simon & Shuster for print distribution and thus he joins the small, but growing world of authors who have created their own success and then had that success validated by the publishing establishment.
A particularly interesting aspect of Howey's work is that the world he has created has inspired a cadre of "fan fiction" building on his work. "FanFic" can be a mixed bag (for anyone who's read it) ranging from good to awful. Howey encourages (as all smart and unthreatened writers should) his readers in this pursuit. Howey however, has taken it to a new level. On a recent blog post, Howey recounts how on encountering "The Runner" by WJ Davies, he not only encouraged the Davies in his work, but, convinced of the quality, implored him to actually sell the work. I picked up "The Runner" also (while waiting for the third volume of the Shift series to appear) and I would concur with Howey's take on the quality of the work (but also note that it is not up to that of Howey's).
Now here is a truly virtuous circle that is an exemplum for the publishing industry for the 21st century. Author, reader, reader/author all benefiting both creatively, and, in this case (which is of course not typical), financially.
END PART I
Continued it:
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