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
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