The electronic revolution

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne and Jack Steel)

Almost every time you open up a newspaper or magazine aimed at writers, agents or publishers, the topic which is sure to dominate is the rise of electronic publishing, normally backed up by figures which are either reassuring or alarming, depending upon exactly where you stand and which part of the market is likely to affect you.

One of the problems with reports of any kind is deciding how accurate the figures actually are, and in the case of book sales, with the huge variety of outlets and discounts and methods of purchasing, it is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to sort out exactly what is going on. Typical of this is a recent report by the Association of American Publishers and the Book Industry Study Group, which came up with the following data about publishing in the United States:

·                     Book publishing revenue fell by 2.5% in 2011, with total sales of $27.2 billion

·                     In contrast, the total number of books sold rose by just under 3.5%, to 2.77 billion books, the implication being that lower revenue on increased sales was caused by people buying more lower-priced ebooks

·                     388 million ebooks were sold in 2011, an increase of 210% over 2010, and ebook revenue doubled to $2.074 billion

·                     Most books are still sold through physical shops, but in 2011 sales declined by just over 12.5% to $8.59 billion, a loss primarily blamed on the closure of over 500 Borders’ book stores

·                     Online retail sales grew by 35% to $5.04 billion, this figure representing approximately 18% of total book revenue, and the biggest growing sector of the market was for books aimed at children and young adults, which saw a rise in revenue of 12%

In contrast, another recent report stated that in the last quarter of 2011, almost 30% of all book sales in the fiction category were ebooks, and 16% of all non-fiction sales as well, showing a marked increase over the same period in the previous year, when the respective percentages were 12% and 5%. These represent gains of approximately 250% and 300% respectively in these two categories, which proves – as if anybody still had any doubts about the reality of the situation – that ebooks are here to stay. Sales of juvenile ebook fiction tripled last year as well. The report concluded with a forecast that similar growth figures to these would probably be recorded over the next couple of years, after which growth in ebook sales would be likely to taper off slightly, but would still be very significant.

            A corresponding report, but looking at physical book sales, and drawing its data primarily from Nielsen Bookscan, stated that print sales were down significantly, with mass-market paperbacks selling over 25% less than last year, paperbacks 12% down and with hardcover books the least affected and showing a reduction sales of about 9%. Perhaps predictably, there was almost no reduction in sales of books intended for toddlers and very young children.

            The twin leaders of the ebook revolution are of course Amazon, both the world’s biggest online bookstore and the world’s largest electronic retailer, and the hugely successful Kindle ereader. However, not everything in Amazon’s garden is rosy. The company has seen a jump in sales this year, reporting gross revenue up by 29% to $12.8 billion dollars in the second quarter, and a hike in the share price on Wall Street to $223. The other side of the coin is that profits decreased by a massive 96% in the second quarter of 2012 compared to the previous year, and the company’s profit was a mere $7 million, a remarkably small amount of money considering the gross revenue.

            One reason for the greatly reduced profits is, oddly enough, the Kindle, but the Kindle Fire, which is selling in much smaller numbers than had been expected. I’ve mentioned this device before in this blog, and I’m by no means convinced that it’s a good idea, mainly because of the enormously reduced battery life it has – Amazon is only claiming about 11 hours, which probably means 8 or 9 would be more realistic – compared to the original Kindle, which you can use for weeks at a time without recharging it. The culprit, of course, is also the selling point: the colour screen which requires a constant power feed. And by launching the Kindle Fire, Amazon has to some extent stepped outside of its comfort zone and entered a world already occupied by tablet computers of one sort or another, a world dominated – for reasons I have yet to understand – by the grossly overpriced and barely adequate iPad.

            It remains to be seen if Amazon can exert the same level of dominance in this market as it has achieved in the world of electronic books and online retailing.

You can contact me at:

www.James-Becker.com

Twitter:          @pss_author

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Blogs:              The Curzon Group

Brit Writers

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Should we burn books, or just ban them?

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne and Jack Steel)

One of the blogs I read had an entry a short while ago about banning books in America. In fact, it was referring to an annual programme called Banned Books Week, intended to call attention to threats to the First Amendment of the United States’ Constitution, a programme which has been running for 30 years. Believe it or not, books still get banned in America, about 400 incidents being reported in the last year, and the programme is trying to get Americans to support the idea that all books, regardless of content, should be disseminated.

            This banning is not the work of the government – unlike certain books published in Britain which have incurred official displeasure and been forcibly removed from the shelves, everything from Lady Chatterley’s Lover to Spycatcher – but imposed by libraries and bookstores. Two of the most surprising, or perhaps predictable, depending on your point of view, classic novels to suffer this fate in America this year were To Kill a Mockingbird and Catcher in the Rye, but in the past a huge number of other volumes have been banned in the States and elsewhere. These range from incomprehensible choices like Black Beauty and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to the virtually unreadable Ulysses and almost equally unreadable The da Vinci Code.

            All of which raises the obvious question: how free is free speech? Are there some books which are so bad, for whatever reason, that it is better for the public not to be able to see the text under any circumstances? Perhaps it would be better to look at the matter from the other side, as it were. What kind of damage would be caused to a reader’s psyche or moral outlook if they were exposed to, for example, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone? And, yes, it was banned. Are they immediately going to race out and buy magic wands and learn the words of various spells? And if they do, does that really matter?

            The argument against that book was that it promoted witchcraft. Well, I read it, and it didn’t seem to me that it was doing that: I just thought it was a good story. But even if that was what somebody read into it, was that necessarily a bad thing? It’s perfectly possible to argue that every religion in the world is simply a form of superstition, because by definition it is impossible to prove a single fact about what is claimed by its adherents to be the truth. In this respect, witchcraft is no less viable a religious concept than Christianity, so why shouldn’t it be promoted?

            So should there be limits at all? Should a book which promotes the idea of murdering police officers be banned? Or one that espouses paedophilia, or racial hatred, or serial killing?

            The reality, of course, is that today, with the rise of the electronic book and the Internet, it is effectively impossible to ban anything. Anyone, no matter what their agenda, can publish whatever they like. On the Internet, you can read the kind of books that no commercial publisher would ever consider publishing, in even their wildest and most deranged of dreams.

            Until about two months ago, I would have happily stood up in any forum and defended the right of any author to write whatever book he or she wanted, no matter what its contents, and no matter who would be offended by it. I genuinely believed that the right to free speech transcends all other issues. And, in fact, I still believe this to be the case with regard to novels.

            And then I had the misfortune to read a book by a man named Ken Ham called The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved, and my views concerning non-fiction books changed almost overnight. This book, without the slightest shadow of doubt, deserves to be banned, simply because some people who read it might actually believe that there is some truth in the collection of rabid nonsense he has produced as a theory. Basically, this man believes that dinosaurs didn’t live over 65 million years ago but a mere 6000 years ago, despite the utterly overwhelming and completely undisputed scientific evidence to the contrary, evidence from almost every scientific discipline from geology to meteorology, as well as palaeontology.

He’s promoting creationism, obviously, which as a theory is just as valid as my own personal ‘Theory that Fairies live at the bottom of my Garden’, and makes no sense whatsoever. Everybody, of course, is entitled to their own point of view, but I firmly believe that a book purporting to be non-fiction should at least fulfil certain basic criteria, the most obvious of which is that it should be based on fact. If he was writing a novel, it wouldn’t bother me, but this man is advancing this as a serious proposition, and to me that seems very dangerous.

            In fact, this isn’t a book that should be banned. This really is a book that should be burnt.

You can contact me at:

www.James-Becker.com

Twitter:          @pss_author

Facebook:      Peter Stuart Smith

Blogs:              The Curzon Group

Brit Writers

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The real Jack the Ripper?

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne and Jack Steel)

Yesterday Simon & Schuster published my latest book – The Ripper Secret – and the initial marketing push looks as if it’s been quite successful, with the novel being available in all the major supermarket chains and the high street retailers. As well as the usual kinds of promotions, the publishing house is also broadcasting a podcast I recorded on its website and featuring a short article I wrote about Victorian detection methods in the ‘Dark Pages’ section.

            It looks as if the timing has been quite providential as well, with the second of a two-part BBC documentary being broadcast last night, the same day as the book’s publication, and with the level of interest in this most notorious of all serial killers still being remarkably high. When I input the search term ‘Jack the Ripper’ into Amazon, it came up with just under 3,400 items, an astonishing number of books and films bearing in mind that his killing spree took place almost a century and a half ago. Doing the same thing on Google produced almost ten million hits.

            The BBC documentary was interesting, though the conclusions it came to were somewhat predictable and – like a lot of the things the BBC produces – very selective. Their principal suspects were Montague John Druitt and a Polish Jew named Aaron Kosminski, though no believable evidence was advanced to indicate that either man could have been Jack the Ripper. And it’s worth pointing out that in all over 200 different suspects have been suggested over the years, and some 30 of these have been seriously considered, ranging from the sublime (Prince Albert Victor with or without the assistance of Queen Victoria’s Physician-In-Ordinary Sir William Gull) to the ridiculous (‘Jill the Ripper’ or the ‘mad midwife’).

            The documentary also provided reconstructions of some of the events, and these were not always as accurate as they certainly should have been. For example, when Israel Schwartz witnessed an altercation between a man and a woman who might have been Elizabeth Stride, he also described another man on the opposite side of the street, a man who then began following him. In the BBC’s version, this man didn’t appear at all, and the scene showed Schwartz passing very close by the arguing couple and getting an excellent look at the man involved, which certainly wasn’t the case according to his testimony.

            They also were highly selective when considering the medical evidence. With a single exception, every doctor who examined any of the victims of the Ripper concluded that the killer had to have had at least some medical knowledge. The single exception was Dr Thomas Bond, who stated that he didn’t believe the murderer had any surgical ability, but conspicuously failed to explain how the Ripper had managed to remove Catherine Eddowes’s left kidney without damaging any of the surrounding organs in complete darkness in Mitre Square in under 15 minutes, a difficult and complex surgical procedure even on a corpse.

            With regard to the killing of Annie Chapman, the divisional police surgeon Dr George Bagster Phillips stated that if he had performed the mutilations to her body, even in the well-lit and ordered surroundings of an operating theatre, the procedure would have taken him at least an hour. His views were echoed by the other doctors involved in examining the victims.

            Probably unsurprisingly, the BBC ignored all the evidence recorded by every other doctor at the time, and simply took Bond’s statement as gospel, claiming that the killings showed no medical knowledge or ability whatsoever, presumably so that they could offer Druitt and Kosminski – neither of whom had medical training – as believable suspects.

            Personally, I believe that it is undeniable the Jack the Ripper – whoever he was – at the very least had some medical and surgical training, and that of course would narrow the field of suspects very considerably and also, incidentally, eliminate at a stroke the most popular contenders.

            The man who was Jack the Ripper in my novel, on the other hand, is a far better fit than most. Records from this period are notoriously patchy and incomplete, but there is evidence to suggest that this man was living in London at the time of the killings, had trained and then worked as a surgeon, and had a history of violence against women, with quite probably at least one murder behind him before he arrived in the city. He is also one of the least known of all the Ripper suspects.

            The Ripper Secret is of course a novel, but the story is tightly woven around the killings which are described as accurately as possible after such a passage of time. I’ve taken considerable care to make sure that the facts are right, and in my opinion the story does work as a possible explanation for the murders. In particular, it provides logical answers to six questions which almost no non-fiction writer has ever managed resolved satisfactorily:

·         Why did the murders start?

·         Why did the mutilations get progressively more severe?

·         Why were there two murders on one night?

·         Why did the murders stop?

·         Why did Sir Charles Warren resign simultaneously with the final killing?

·         What was the significance of the geographical locations of the murders?

If you read the book, let me know what you think.

You can contact me at:

www.James-Becker.com

Twitter:          @pss_author

Facebook:      Peter Stuart Smith

Blogs:              The Curzon Group

Brit Writers

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Only a fool doesn’t write for money

By Peter Stuart Smith (AKA Max Adams, James Barrington, James Becker, Tom Kasey, Thomas Payne and Jack Steel)

Obviously I’m not the first person to make a statement like the title of this blog post, but a recent article in another blog site caught my eye and emphasised very clearly just how little money most authors of ebooks actually make as a result of all their hard work.

            The article referred to a report by Bowker which stated that the average price of commercially published ebooks in the United States fell by about 8% from 2010 to 2011, for fiction from around $5.69 to $5.24, with non-fiction dropping even more dramatically from over $9 per book down to around $6.47, a drop of about 25% in price. It’s worth mentioning that non-fiction ebooks were still costing about 20% more than novels in 2011, but the year before the price difference was 65%, so the gap between the two types of book is narrowing, and it’s also clear that prices across all genres are falling steadily.

            And it’s worth emphasising that these prices are for commercially-produced ebooks, not self-published novels, which are typically selling for substantially lower prices, often between 50 pence and £2.99 (roughly 75 cents to $4.50).

            In fact, the blog article pointed out, some ebooks are selling for less than the cost of a monthly magazine, and it suggested that one reason for the uncertain state of the world of publishing was not a lack of good books and decent writers, but simply the huge reduction in profits because ebooks are now so cheap. And all this at a time when hardback coffee-table books are surging in price, some now costing around £50/$75 each.

            Perhaps the most dramatic figure the article came up with was that the ebook price of an average novel of about 100,000 words meant that the author was actually earning about 1 cent for every 200 words written, and that the only recourse for the publishing industry was to immediately and dramatically increase the price charged for every ebook they sell.

            Most of which I completely disagree with, because he’s missing several important points. In fact, I think most people in the industry are missing these same points.

            There is a fundamental difference between an electronic book and a physical book which reports of this kind consistently fail to acknowledge. To produce a hardback or paperback novel requires a conspicuous consumption of resources – paper, card, ink and so on – plus warehouse space to store it, and the inevitable transport costs to distribute it, all overlaid by the staff costs at the publishing house and the company used for typesetting and printing. For a typical novel with a first print run of around 25,000 copies, the total cost is likely to be well in excess of £20,000/$30,000. The royalty paid to the author will be around 7% of the selling price – not the cover price – of the book.

To produce an electronic book, once the manuscript has been prepared, costs almost nothing – certainly well under £500/$750 even if a professional cover is designed – and the finished product can be sold as often and as quickly as the market demands. The author’s royalty will be around 20% of the selling price from a commercial publisher, or 40% or 70% if the book is self-published. Although the content of the two items is identical in terms of the text, in all other respects they are entirely different in every way. Trying to compare one with the other is pointless.

            You cannot assess the earnings of any author on the basis of revenue received per words written. This only works for short stories and magazine articles where the writer is paid a flat sum for his contribution, irrespective of the subsequent sales of the publication. In fact, there’s a very valid argument that ebooks are still far too expensive – not far too cheap – simply because each sale costs the publisher virtually nothing and the reading public knows that.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I genuinely believe that the market will only really take off when the price of a commercially produced ebook drops to the level at which it becomes a genuine impulse purchase, and I normally assess that as the cost of a cup of coffee – certainly under £3/$4.50 – and ideally less than that.

            There’s an old story concerning the invention of the ballpoint pen, which I believe to be true. An English company began marketing the pen at the highest possible price they thought the market could bear, and about the same time an American company started selling the new pen as cheaply as they possibly could. The English company went bankrupt, and the success of the American firm is reflected in the fact that almost everybody these days calls a ballpoint pen a ‘biro’, in most cases without having the slightest idea where the name came from.

            I believe that the most successful publishers of ebooks will be those companies which embrace the ‘pile them high and sell them cheap’ marketing concept which has worked so consistently in the past, and those that go to the wall will be the ones who cling onto old concepts of the value of the written word.

            As always, time will tell.

You can contact me at:

www.James-Becker.com

Twitter:          @pss_author

Facebook:      Peter Stuart Smith

Blogs:              The Curzon Group

Brit Writers

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