On February 24, Adam Bolander commented on my blog post about self-publishing. His comment (presented in full below) caused me to put down in words some additional thoughts I've been mulling on self-publishing since the "My Quarrel with Self-Publishing" piece was first written years ago.
The book publishing industry is populated by intelligent, hard-working people, many of whom are delighted to have the opportunity to turn their passion - the printed word - into a paying job.
One of my favorite stories about writers concerns John O'Hara, who long ago wrote the book for the musical Pal Joey, based on his own novel. When the play was making a big run on Broadway, two friends of O'Hara's bumped into him on the streets of New York. "Oh John," they cooed, "We just saw Pal Joey again, and we enjoyed it even more than the first time!" O'Hara snarled, "What the hell was wrong with it the first time?"
Despite technological petting zoos, QR codes on shelf-talkers linked to bookstores' Web sites, and in-store displays of physical books with signage reminding readers that they can also buy e-editions, only a handful of independents are making more than about $100 or so on e-book sales a month. To help, some indie publishers, including Algonquin and Sourcebooks, have begun, or are about to begin, programs directed toward helping independent bookstores build a following among e-book fans. (See sidebar on facing page.) At the same time, booksellers are asking whether they need a reader of their own to crack the e-book market in a meaningful way.
The new novel "Chopsticks" tells the story of a troubled young piano prodigy--using family photos, letters, documents, instant messages and YouTube videos. It's a love story, a mystery and a parable about creativity and madness.
The internet is full of ironies. I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things. I've been on an End of Books reading tour since August and it turns out that what the internet gurus say about consumers being more willing to pay for events, speeches and gigs, rather than buying cultural objects, is now becoming true.
While the launch of Apple's iBooks 2, its new multimedia textbook format, and iBooks Author, the free authoring tool Apple has produced to create them, may indeed "reinvent the textbook," there are a lot of questions to be answered before it does. That doesn't mean that Apple didn't put on quite a show last week. In addition to debuting its own digital textbook format as well as an easy-to-use authoring tool, Apple also seemed to be ratcheting up the appeal of the iBookstore as a self-publishing platform. And iBooks 2 textbooks (or whatever else is produced using iBooks Author) will be priced at $14.99 or less.
2011 was a busy and eventful year in book publishing--but 2012 promises to be even more so, as various issues that started bubbling up in '11 shift and mature. Here are three predictions.
The cannibalization of print by digital accelerated in 2011, with unit sales in the outlets tracked by Nielsen BookScan falling 8.9% with one week to go in the year. The drop in print sales was double that of 2010, when units fell 4.5%. The decline from 2010 to 2011 sped up in all major categories and formats, and the categories where digital sales are having the greatest impact on the sale of print books didn't change--adult fiction and mass market paperback.
In the December 2010 inaugural issue of PW Select, the heads of different self-publishing companies talked about the way e-books were becoming a bigger part of their business. That trend accelerated in 2011, helping to keep the number of titles produced at the major e-book vendors soaring.
In anticipation of January's Digital Book World, where one panel was entitled "Skills Sets Publishers Don't Have: How Do We Get Them or Deal with It?", Publishing Trends sent a survey to a range of publishers, agents and industry insiders, asking them about this increasingly urgent issue.Of the respondents to our survey, 60% work for a book publisher and 20% are agents, followed closely by the self-employed; just over 5% are searching for jobs.
