Sci Fi Makes Good Ebooks And Good Marketing For Paper Books
Science Fiction Ebooks
I've been fooling around with ebooks in one form or another since the mid-90's. In fact, my first trade contract came after I published a free ebook version of The Hand-Me-Down PC, after failing to figure out a good way to publish it on paper myself. Ah, the bad old days. I used to look to Amazon for ebook trends, but they dropped most of the commercial ebooks in their catalog in 2006. They never reported whether their reason for dropping all ebooks provided through Lightning Source was due to problems with DRM and customer service, a general change in strategy, or just a logical step after they acquired Mobipocket, the French ebook platform. But they still haven't gotten around to integrating the Mobipocket titles on the Amazon platform (any day now), so I basically stopped following the trends. I lost the over $5,000 a year of ebook sales I used to do through Amazon, but that's another story.
It finally struck me today, as I begin doing some research on the science fiction publishing industry, that Mobipocket bestseller lists would be an interesting place to see if any Sci Fi ebooks were getting through. They were never strong sellers on Amazon. To my surprise, science fiction dominates the Mobipocket bestseller list, currently accounting for one quarter of the top forty books. I made up my own little top 10 list so I can go back and check another day.
|
Rank |
Overall Bestseller |
Title |
Author |
|
1 |
4 |
In The Beginning |
Joe Neubarth |
|
2 |
5 |
Mass Effect: Revelation |
Drew Karpyshyn |
|
3 |
13 |
Time's Eye |
Arthur C. Clarke |
|
4 |
15 |
The Night's Dawn Trilogy |
Peter F. Hamilton |
|
5 |
21 |
Proven Guilty |
Jim Butcher |
|
6 |
23 |
Sunstorm |
Arthur C. Clarke |
|
7 |
29 |
Eldest: Inheritance Book 2 |
Christopher Paolini |
|
8 |
31 |
Manifold: Time |
Steven Baxter |
|
9 |
33 |
Manifold: Space |
Steven Baxter |
|
10 |
36 |
Eragon: Inheritance Book 1 |
Christopher Paolini |
Is it possible that science fiction readers have a predilection to purchase portable ebook readers, are we more likely to enjoy reading on computer screens, are we all cheating and reading sci fi at work? Now that I think about it, I always had a book open on my lap when I was in Jr. High School, so maybe science fiction goes hand and hand with stealing time:-)
The late Jim Baen, who passed away last summer around this time, grew famous, in part, for his success with science fiction ebooks. Baen Books never diddled around with DRM, and has always been generous with free samples. They also offer web subscriptions to science fiction ebooks, which may have helped train Sci Fi readers to accept the ebook format. Corey Doctorow, a former fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is another strong opponent of DRM who writes science fiction novels. I'm still sitting on the DRM fence myself, I've sold ebooks with it and given away ebooks without it, because I don't see either as a one fit solution. Doctorow is also co-editor of Boing Boing, so great Internet creds, but I don't agree with him on copyright issues. I've been repeatedly stung and stressed out by copyright infringement, and since my intellectual property is my sole income, I don't have a sense of humor about it. Oddly, Doctorow's non-fiction publisher is Avalon, who owned the fourwallseightwindows domain before they decided not to renew it and I picked it up at auction.
There's no question that giving away free samples and selling the whole thing is both a successful and traditional business model. It's the main marketing model I advocate for small publishers in "Print-On-Demand Book Publishing." But it should be the publisher's decision what's given away and what's sold, not the whim of consumers who have the ability to simply give away copies of ebooks without DRM. But frankly, I'm not worried about DRM for publishing science fiction ebooks because my interest is in selling print-on-demand anthologies. Giving away ebooks, or individual stories, which would be a nice way to promote print anthologies IF people were interested in the e-versions, may not work for the authors. After all, authors selling me non-exclusive rights to produce an anthology will likely have their own copies of their stories floating around the Internet, creating duplicate content penalties, and besides, they don't need me to give things away for free unless my platform is more compelling than theirs.
Out-of-copyright books and those in the public domain, usually thanks to be produced by the government, have long been an irresistible draw for ebook publishers and POD publishers alike. After all, how can you go wrong selling a product that didn't cost you anything to acquire. Of course, the packaging and promotion costs of out-of-copyright books has wrecked the dreams of many a publishing start-up. Being in the public domain also means that out-of-copyright books can't be copyrighted by the new publisher, so there is no barrier to competition doing exactly the same thing. Some "competition", like Project Guttenberg, may even give the works away for free.
The default standard of the ebook world ended up being the humble PDF format developed by Adobe. I sold PDF versions of my titles for a number of years, had them produced and distributed by Lightning Source, who also prints and distributes my paper books. I went with DRM (Digital Rights Management) because as the publisher of paper books, I had something to lose if the PDF's went into broad circulation and cut into my paper sales. In my view, the point of the DRM was never to prevent illegal cracking and copying, it was there primarily to tell the ebook customers that I did cared. It's not like anybody reads EULA (End User License Agreements) before clicking, but anybody going to the trouble of downloading software to crack the DRM scheme serves knows that they are violating the terms under which they are licensed to use the ebook.
I don't buy the argument that DRM is unfair because it leaves the ebook with no residual (ie, resale) value. In the case of paper books, there's a physical difference between new and used, and there are costs involved in reselling those books in terms of postage and packaging, and even a risk premium (sometimes the Postman never rings). With ebooks, if nothing is done to restrict resale, the publisher and author get paid once, after which the ebook could be resold an infinite number of times with no cost (other than commission) to the seller. While that's a great model for consumers, it doesn't do much to encourage authors and publishers to put an effort into publishing ebooks.
Needs more thought:-)
Posted June 1st, 2007 by Morris