Friday 25 January 2013

The rise of the ebook (continued)


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


Free ebook this weekend only! This Saturday and Sunday you'll find my ebook Falklands: Voyage to War available for free on Amazon.

Some figures released by the Association of American Publishers for 2011 make interesting reading. In that year ebooks became ‘the dominant single format’ in the adult fiction category, accounting for 30% of publishers’ sales and more than doubling the 13% recorded the previous year. The revenue from adult fiction ebooks amounted to $1.27 billion, an increase of 117%. Also in 2011, the number of self-published books increased dramatically to 211,269 over the 133,936 released in 2010, not quite twice as many, and roughly 45% of these were fiction. New writers were discovering that, for the first time, they didn’t actually need publishers in order to get published.

And it’s still clear that mainstream commercial publishers have little or no idea how to take advantage of the new medium. One example: the author Eric van Lustbader, who wrote more than 25 bestsellers, suddenly discovered that many of his most successful novels weren’t available as ebooks. As his publisher was apparently unable or unwilling to release his work in this format, the author has reclaimed all the relevant rights to these novels and is in the process of releasing them as ebooks himself, without the assistance of any publishing house.

It’s worth bearing in mind another factor which has characterized the ebook revolution: not only can unknown writers publish anything they want, but professional authors can release books that no mainstream publisher would even consider. This is particularly the case with short stories. Very few authors have had short stories published in book form, and those that have managed this have usually seen these only as collections, released after the author has already become established as a bestselling novelist. Some magazines take short stories, but for most writers this is an ephemeral and unsatisfactory method of getting their work out to their readers. But the rise of the ebook has changed everything, because the length of the work is now virtually irrelevant.

I have had two short non-fiction books and a collection of ghost stories published by The Endeavour Press that I could never have hoped to see released by any commercial publishing house because the length of all three works was simply wrong. But as ebooks, they are selling well, and the low asking price reflects the fact that they aren’t full-length works.

Stephen Leather is a well-established and popular novelist, and he, too, is exploiting the short story medium with his ‘Inspector Zhang’ series. Reportedly, he sells roughly 6,000 of each every year, usually for under £1, and in 2012 he claimed to have sold about half a million ebooks in all, the majority being short stories.

This didn’t go down well when he spoke at the Crime Writers Association conference in Harrogate last July, and he was booed and hissed by the audience, apparently for having the temerity to properly embrace the new technology which is available. Clearly the people who listened to him speak objected very strongly to the entire concept of the ebook, and in particular the idea of cheap ones.

Personally, I think he’s quite right. The fact of the matter – as I hope I’ve shown in this blog post, if it wasn’t already perfectly apparent to everybody – is that the ebook is here and it’s here to stay, and there’s absolutely no point in not taking advantage of it and the opportunities it offers. We are never going to return to a time when a handful of publishing houses were able to decide what was – and what was not – suitable material for the reading public, and the sooner everybody realises that the better.

You can contact me at:
Twitter:          @pss_author
Facebook:      Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs:              The Curzon Group
Website link:  Brit Writers

Friday 18 January 2013

Porn – sort of

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

Many apologies for the long delay since my last blog post here. It was a combination of circumstances, including the inevitable Christmas and New Year celebrations when nobody really feels like doing very much, and a month on a cruise ship sailing down to the Caribbean and then returning to Portsmouth just before Christmas. That, I hasten to add, wasn’t a holiday, but work, because one of my secondary duties, if you like, is lecturing on such vessels, which usually means I stand up on my hind legs in front of a largely disinterested audience every other day and for about 40 minutes or so I bore them into submission.
            The talks I give vary from the sublime – Cold War espionage in Berlin – to the ridiculous – the secrets of the Bermuda Triangle – but my bread and butter is destination lecturing, talking about the next port the ship will be visiting. Of course, when I’m not standing up in the theatre or wherever my time is my own, so although it is work it really isn’t desperately hard work and I can usually get quite a lot of writing done, at least when the ship’s at sea. When it’s alongside in Barbados or Tortola, it’s very difficult to think of a really good reason to stay on board and work.
The early part of this year is going to be fairly hectic as well, because I have to do two cruises in fairly quick succession. For the first, they’re flying me out to Hong Kong to join the Queen Mary 2, returning from Sydney, and a couple of weeks after I get back I’m off again, this time to Bangkok to join the Aurora, and then flying back from Dubai.
            But that’s enough about my troubles. What I really want to talk about this week is porn. Mummy porn, to be precise.
            The somewhat startling news was released this week that the Fifty Shades of Grey series has sold 35 million copies in America and a further 35 million copies in the rest of the world. However you slice it, 70 million sales for three books that even their staunchest fans have to admit are barely average is pretty impressive. These books have now outsold the entire Harry Potter series and turned the author into a multimillionaire, all in just two years. According to one industry insider, at the height of their popularity in Britain the trilogy was selling around 1 million copies a week in paperback and 2 million as electronic downloads, meaning that the author was banking almost £1 million a week.
            In the good old days of traditional publishing, novels would be released first as hard covers then, after a decent interval, as paperbacks and, if there was sufficient interest, the publishers might later consider audiobooks or something of that sort. But the American publishers of the Grey series are doing it all backwards, and the next version of the books that will appear will be hardbacks, and on the Valentine’s Day to boot, which has to be sending some kind of a mixed message. Romance is dead – pass me those handcuffs? Or maybe ‘Say it with whips’?
            And in these days of spin-offs and derivatives it’s probably only a matter of time before we see the influence of this kind of mild mummy porn on the small screen. How about a brand-new series called Weird Sex in the City?

You can contact me at:
Twitter:          @pss_author
Facebook:      Peter Stuart Smith
Blogs:              The Curzon Group
Website link:  Brit Writers