Rumblings (and Ramblings) at Madeline's -- JANUARY 2008

[Teresa Edgerton]

Entry #7 E-BOOKS?!??

I've just learned that A Dark Sacrifice will be coming out in e-book format at the same time it's published on paper. Since that didn't seem to make much sense unless The Hidden Stars was going to be an e-book as well, I checked on that one, and yes, it's listed that way, too. (I heard something, maybe a year ago, to the effect that THS would be an e-book, but nobody ever told me it was an accomplished fact; so maybe I've been an e-book author for a while and didn't even know it.)

But I mention all this because I don't really know how I feel about this. I don't even know how I should feel. So I'm asking for other people's thoughts and opinions.

(Not that it really matters how I feel. It has happened; it will happen; it would ill-become me to go around complaining about it. But just for here and now I'm trying to get a mental and emotional handle on this.)

So for those who write, or who have thought about writing, if this has or will or might happen to something you've written, how did/do/would you feel about it, and why?

My first reaction is that electronic books seem so ephemeral compared to print. Even though the paper in paperbacks deteriorates pretty quickly, it seems to me that it only takes a key-stroke and an e-book is gone. At least if someone gets tired of a printed book they're more likely to hand it on or sell it to a used-book store, where it will still exist, rather than just throw it away. But maybe people keep e-books longer? Maybe they have the capacity to store vast e-book libraries? Or do they clear out the old books to make room for the new? I am very ignorant on these matters.

Can/do people lend e-books to friends, and maybe win the writer new readers? (Good for the writer.) What about the possibility of people making multiple free copies and distributing them to everyone they know? (Bad for the writer.) For years, we all signed away the electronic rights because we were told the clause was non-negotiable, and then nothing happened so it all seemed unimportant. Now that it is happening, what does it mean?

Does an e-book version mean that a writer has a good chance of reaching new readers, or does it just mean that people who would buy the book anyway buy it in a different format? I can see how people overseas who won't pay to ship the book from amazon might take advantage of the opportunity to buy the book without paying postage, when otherwise they wouldn't buy the book at all. But how many people do order foreign books in this way? How many would? Is there an advantage to be published in e-book as well as print? A disadvantage? Or does it all come out even in the end, neither a good thing or a bad thing?

I'm sure that other people can answer all of these questions better than I can. Maybe they even know some of the questions that I don't know enough to ask.

[Giovanna Clairval]

Cory Doctorow's Out and Down in the Magic Kingdom, a SF novel published as an ebook has been downloaded about 700,000 time to date. The novel had been published in paper format already. Its sales went through the roof after the internet release…
This is a bit long, but it answers a few questions.

Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books

Paper for the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference, 2004 - February 12, 2004 San Diego, CACory Doctorow> Copyright-Only Dedication (based on United States law)

For starters, let me try to summarize the lessons and intuitions I've had about ebooks from my release of two novels and most of a short story collection online under a Creative Commons license. A parodist who published a list of alternate titles for the presentations at this event called this talk, "eBooks Suck Right Now," and as funny as that is, I don't think it's true.[…]

1. Ebooks aren't marketing. OK, so ebooks *are* marketing: that is to say that giving away ebooks sells more books. Baen Books, who do a lot of series publishing, have found that giving away electronic editions of the previous installments in their series to coincide with the release of a new volume sells the hell out of the new book -- and the backlist. And the number of people who wrote to me to tell me about how much they dug the ebook and so bought the paper-book far exceeds the number of people who wrote to me and said, "Ha, ha, you hippie, I read your book for free and now I'm not gonna buy it." But ebooks *shouldn't* be just about marketing: ebooks are a goal unto themselves. In the final analysis, more people will read more words off more screens and fewer words off fewer pages and when those two lines cross, ebooks are gonna have to be the way that writers earn their keep, not the way that they promote the dead-tree editions.

2. Ebooks complement paper books. Having an ebook is good. Having a paper book is good. Having both is even better. One reader wrote to me and said that he read half my first novel from the bound book, and printed the other half on scrap-paper to read at the beach. Students write to me to say that it's easier to do their term papers if they can copy and paste their quotations into their word-processors. Baen readers use the electronic editions of their favorite series to build concordances of characters, places and events.

3. Unless you own the ebook, you don't own the book. I take the view that the book is a "practice" -- a collection of social and economic and artistic activities -- and not an "object." Viewing the book as a "practice" instead of an object is a pretty radical notion, and it begs the question: just what the hell is a book? Good question. I write all of my books in a text-editor (BBEdit, from Barebones Software -- as fine a text-editor as I could hope for). From there, I can convert them into a formatted two-column PDF. I can turn them into an HTML file. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten minutes! It's ironic, because one of the frequently cited reasons for preferring paper to ebooks is that paper books confer a sense of ownership of a physical object. Before the dust settles on this ebook thing, owning a paper book is going to feel less like ownership than having an open digital edition of the text.

4. Ebooks are a better deal for writers. The compensation for writers is pretty thin on the ground. *Amazing Stories,* Hugo Gernsback's original science fiction magazine, paid a couple cents a word. Today, science fiction magazines pay...a couple cents a word. The sums involved are so minuscule, they're not even insulting: they're *quaint* and *historical*, like the WHISKEY 5 CENTS sign over the bar at a pioneer village. Some writers do make it big, but they're *rounding errors* as compared to the total population of sf writers earning some of their living at the trade. Almost all of us could be making more money elsewhere (though we may dream of earning a stephenkingload of money, and of course, no one would play the lotto if there were no winners).

The primary incentive for writing has to be artistic satisfaction, egoboo, and a desire for posterity. Ebooks get you that. Ebooks become a part of the corpus of human knowledge because they get indexed by search engines and replicated by the hundreds, thousands or millions. They can be googled. Even better: they level the playing field between writers and trolls.

When Amazon kicked off, many writers got their knickers in a tight and powerful knot at the idea that axe-grinding yahoos were filling the Amazon message-boards with ill-considered slams at their work -- for, if a personal recommendation is the best way to sell a book, then certainly a personal condemnation is the best way to *not* sell a book.

Today, the trolls are still with us, but now, the readers get to decide for themselves. Here's a bit of a review of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom that was recently posted to Amazon by "A reader from Redwood City, CA":

[QUOTED TEXT]> I am really not sure what kind of drugs critics are> smoking, or what kind of payola may be involved. But, regardless of what Entertainment Weekly says, whatever> this newspaper or that magazine says, you shouldn't waste your money. Download it for free from Corey's (sic) site, read the first page, and look away in> disgust -- this book is for people who think Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code is great writing.

Back in the old days, this kind of thing would have really pissed me off. Axe-grinding, mouth-breathing yahoos, defaming my good name! My stars and mittens! But take a closer look at that damning passage:

Download it for free from Corey's site, read the first page

You see that? Hell, this guy is *working for me*! Someone accuses a writer I'm thinking of reading of paying off Entertainment Weekly to say nice things about his novel, "a surprisingly bad writer," no less, whose writing is "stiff, amateurish, and uninspired!" I wanna check that writer out. And I can. In one click.

And then I can make up my own mind.You don't get far in the arts without healthy doses of both ego and insecurity, and the downside of being able to google up all the things that people are saying about your book is that it can play right into your insecurities -- "all these people will have it in their minds not to bother with my book because they've read the negative interweb reviews!"

But the flipside of that is the ego: "If only they'd give it a shot, they'd see how good it is." And the more scathing the review is, the more likely they are to give it a shot. Any press is good press, so long as they spell your URL right (and even if they spell your name wrong!).

5. Ebooks need to embrace their nature. The distinctive value of ebooks is orthagonal to the value of paper books, and it revolves around the mix-ability and send-ability of electronic text.
The more you constrain an ebook's distinctive value propositions -- that is, the more you restrict a reader's ability to copy, transport or transform an ebook -- the more it has to be valued on the same axes as a paper-book. Ebooks *fail* on those axes.

Ebooks don't beat paper-books for sophisticated typography, they can't match them for quality of paper or the smell of the glue. But just try sending a paper book to a friend in Brazil, for free, in less than a second. Or loading a thousand paper books into a little stick of flash-memory dangling from your keychain. Or searching a paper book for every instance of a character's name to find a beloved passage. Hell, try clipping a pithy passage out of a paper book and pasting it into your sig-file.


6. Ebooks demand a different attention span (but not a shorter one). Artists are always disappointed by their audience's attention-spans. Go back far enough and you'll find cuneiform etchings bemoaning the current Sumerian go-go lifestyle with its insistence on myths with plotlines and characters and action, not like we had in the old days.

As artists, it would be a hell of a lot easier if our audiences were more tolerant of our penchant for boring them. We'd get to explore a lot more ideas without worrying about tarting them up with easy-to-swallow chocolate coatings of entertainment. We like to think of shortened attention spans as a product of the information age, but check this out:

[Nietzsche quote]
To be sure one thing necessary above all: if one is to practice reading as an *art* in this way, something needs to be un-learned most thoroughly in these days.

In other words, if my book is too boring, it's because you're not paying enough attention. Writers say this stuff all the time, but this quote isn't from this century or the last. It's from the preface to Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals," published in *1887.*Yeah, our attention-spans are *different* today, but they aren't necessarily *shorter*.

Warren Ellis's fans managed to hold the storyline for Transmetropolitan in their minds for *five years* while the story trickled out in monthly funnybook installments. JK Rowlings's installments on the Harry Potter series get fatter and fatter with each new volume. Entire forests are sacrificed to long-running series fiction like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books, each of which is approximately 20,000 pages long (I may be off by an order of magnitude one way or another here). Sure, presidential debates are conducted in soundbites today and not the days-long oratory extravaganzas of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, but people manage to pay attention to the 24-month-long presidential campaigns from start to finish.


7. We need *all* the ebooks. The vast majority of the words ever penned are lost to posterity. No one library collects all the still-extant books ever written and no one person could hope to make a dent in that corpus of written work. None of us will ever read more than the tiniest sliver of human literature. But that doesn't mean that we can stick with just the most popular texts and get a proper ebook revolution. […]


8. Ebooks are like paper books. To round out this talk, I'd like to go over the ways that ebooks are more like paper books than you'd expect. […]

There's a temptation to view downloading a book as comparable to bringing it home from the store, but that's the wrong metaphor. Some of the time, maybe most of the time, downloading the text of the book is like taking it off the shelf at the store and looking at the cover and reading the blurbs (with the advantage of not having to come into contact with the residual DNA and burger king left behind by everyone else who browsed the book before you).

Some writers are horrified at the idea that three hundred thousand copies of my first novel were downloaded and "only" ten thousand or so were sold so far. If it were the case that for ever copy sold, thirty were taken home from the store, that would be a horrifying outcome, for sure. But look at it another way: if one out of every thirty people who glanced at the cover of my book bought it, I'd be a happy author. And I am. Those downloads cost me no more than glances at the cover in a bookstore, and the sales are healthy.We also like to think of physical books as being inherently *countable* in a way that digital books aren't (an irony, since computers are damned good at counting things!).

This is important, because writers get paid on the basis of the number of copies of their books that sell, so having a good count makes a difference. And indeed, my royalty statements contain precise numbers for copies printed, shipped, returned and sold.But that's a false precision. When the printer does a run of a book, it always runs a few extra at the start and finish of the run to make sure that the setup is right and to account for the occasional rip, drop, or spill. The actual total number of books printed is approximately the number of books ordered, but never exactly -- if you've ever ordered 500 wedding invitations, chances are you received 500-and-a-few back from the printer and that's why.[…]

Copies are stolen. Copies are dropped. Shipping people get the count wrong. Some copies end up in the wrong box and go to a bookstore that didn't order them and isn't invoiced for them and end up on a sale table or in the trash. Some copies are returned as damaged. Some are returned as unsold. Some come back to the store the next morning accompanied by a whack of buyer's remorse. Some go to the place where the spare sock in the dryer ends up.

The numbers on a royalty statement are actuarial, not actual. They represent a kind of best-guess approximation of the copies shipped, sold, returned and so forth. Actuarial accounting works pretty well: well enough to run the juggernaut banking, insurance, and gambling industries on. It's good enough for divvying up the royalties paid by musical rights societies for radio airplay and live performance.

And it's good enough for counting how many copies of a book are distributed online or off. Counts of paper books are differently precise from counts of electronic books, sure: but neither one is inherently countable.And finally, of course, there's the matter of selling books. However an author earns her living from her words, printed or encoded, she has as her first and hardest task to find her audience. There are more competitors for our attention than we can possibly reconcile, prioritize or make sense of. Getting a book under the right person's nose, with the right pitch, is the hardest and most important task any writer faces. [...]

http://conferences.oreillynet.com/pr...4/doctorow.txt

[DMatusik]

I understand this sentiment completely. An E-book can seem like a non-entity in the world of publishing; your finely crafted words thrown to the winds of fortune not unlike Steve Buscemi's character's ashes in "The Big Lebowski."

The technology has progressed such that reading an e-book can comparable to reading on paper. E-readers and their data formats are starting to standardize to the point where it makes sense for authors to expend some effort to make (at the very least) their back-catalog available in e-book formats.

E-book probably makes the most sense in terms of new authors who haven't developed enough recognition among fans of the genre. It's tough to take a risk on a $15 book, but a $3-$4 download isn't so bad.

Personally, I prefer the look and feel of a book. There are no batteries to worry about, file compatibility or display issues to worry about. I especially like a well-crafted volume (which is why I'll splurge for the Easton Press edition of a favorite story). Pulp paperbacks have always been throwaways to me - good for one or two readings and of no intrinsic physical value. Trade paperback is another story, but I'd stack the value of an E-book against a pulp paperback any day.

That said, I think it makes the most sense to release your physical book first (being sure to have buzz built-up prior to release) capture 5-6 months of physical sales and then release the edition in an e-book format. This way, you avoid cannibalizing sales of the physical book and give it a chance to get established. The e-book can then only serve to bring in new non-committal readers who may become fans hungry for your next release.
That's my theory at least - I'm trying out 3rd party e-book distribution now and we'll see how it goes ...

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

Entry #7 E-BOOKS?!??

But I mention all this because I don't really know how I feel about this. I don't even know how I should feel. So I'm asking for other people's thoughts and opinions.

My first reaction is that electronic books seem so ephemeral compared to print. Even though the paper in paperbacks deteriorates pretty quickly, it seems to me that it only takes a key-stroke and an e-book is gone. At least if someone gets tired of a printed book they're more likely to hand it on or sell it to a used-book store, where it will still exist, rather than just throw it away. But maybe people keep e-books longer? Maybe they have the capacity to store vast e-book libraries? Or do they clear out the old books to make room for the new? I am very ignorant on these matters.

Can/do people lend e-books to friends, and maybe win the writer new readers? (Good for the writer.) What about the possibility of people making multiple free copies and distributing them to everyone they know? (Bad for the writer.) For years, we all signed away the electronic rights because we were told the clause was non-negotiable, and then nothing happened so it all seemed unimportant. Now that it is happening, what does it mean?

Does an e-book version mean that a writer has a good chance of reaching new readers, or does it just mean that people who would buy the book anyway buy it in a different format? I can see how people overseas who won't pay to ship the book from amazon might take advantage of the opportunity to buy the book without paying postage, when otherwise they wouldn't buy the book at all. But how many people do order foreign books in this way? How many would? Is there an advantage to be published in e-book as well as print? A disadvantage? Or does it all come out even in the end, neither a good thing or a bad thing?

I'm sure that other people can answer all of these questions better than I can. Maybe they even know some of the questions that I don't know enough to ask.

[Teresa Edgerton]

Thank you both very much; you've given me a great deal to think about. (Although Cory Doctorow seems a bit too much like a true-believer for me to trust all of his conclusions.)

That's a very good point about the backlist. Some publishers don't support the backlist, but with e-books perhaps they'll be more inclined to do so.

[DMatusik]

Ars technica has a nice review of the latest Sony e-book reader. It's a good read if you'd like to know the current state of the industry:
Down with paper: A review of the Sony Reader: Page 1

[Teresa Edgerton]

Entry # 8

Publication Day!

Today is the day that A Dark Sacrifice is officially for sale. It should be available in major bookstores throughout the US -- unless it's still sitting in a box somewhere in the stockroom -- and is listed as in stock at amazon.com.

(amazon.co.uk and amazon.ca have been listing used copies for a few days now, but since the book is just out now, I suspect the sellers are offering uncorrected proofs and pretending to be selling the real thing.)

And even though I know from experience that nothing actually happens on the day a book comes out -- no reporters and photographers knocking on my door, no celestial music or descending angels -- still, it has been a while between books, and I'm excited for that reason alone.

So, a round of virtual champagne for the house.


Additionally, I have started a thread here:

Maps and some other things you won't see in A DARK SACRIFICE

I know it's a bit premature, as no one has had the opportunity to read the book yet, but I did promise some people that I would post these things here, and better to do it before I forget.

[DMatusik]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

Entry # 8

Publication Day!

Today is the day that A Dark Sacrifice is officially for sale. It should be available in major bookstores throughout the US -- unless it's still sitting in a box somewhere in the stockroom -- and is listed as in stock at amazon.com.

(amazon.co.uk and amazon.ca have been listing used copies for a few days now, but since the book is just out now, I suspect the sellers are offering uncorrected proofs and pretending to be selling the real thing.)

And even though I know from experience that nothing actually happens on the day a book comes out -- no reporters and photographers knocking on my door, no celestial music or descending angels -- still, it has been a while between books, and I'm excited for that reason alone.

So, a round of virtual champagne for the house.


Additionally, I have started a thread here:

Maps and some other things you won't see in A DARK SACRIFICE

I know it's a bit premature, as no one has had the opportunity to read the book yet, but I did promise some people that I would post these things here, and better to do it before I forget.

Congrats!! I wish you the absolute best! Enjoy your well-deserved celebration and subsequent break

[Wiglaf]

Congrats on publication day!

Looking at my available shelf space, e-books may serve some purpose; a computer is cheaper than a personal library. I have books everywhere. Soon, I could fill a standard 20 ft container.
The 8-9 dollars you're book costs at Borders (atleast thats what THS cost) is a small mater; the cost of renting storage for all my current and future books is going to require another raise.

[Giovanna Clairval]

Congratulations, Teresa!

*turns to Amazon, wants to know what happens in volume II*

But, Teresa, C. Doctorow has a (historic) e-book success-story in his pocket; he's not speaking theoretically or out of sheer faith. And, given that you are already familiar with negative views on e-publishing, I thought I would provide ideas coming from another persuasion...

And I am in the same predicament, Wiglaf. Sometimes I think that my personal universe will be overrun by books (they are every-everywhere).

[Strife]

I wouldn't mind reading the second book on screen, Teresa.

i read all i can on my computer (so i guess other young people think like me)

[Teresa Edgerton]

Thanks, DMatusik. The break doesn't actually come yet. I have to write the last book in the series first, then I'll be able to either relax for a while or take on some of the other projects I have in mind.

I know Cory Doctorow has been fabulously successful with his e-books, Giovanna. But the thing is, I haven't heard of anyone being that successful at it since. Sometimes being one of the first gives you an advantage, because you establish yourself before the market is flooded with competition. It's certainly fascinating to see what he has to say on the subject -- he brings up points I never would have thought of -- and I thank you very much for posting it. But then there is something like point #3, which shows that he's very much in love with the technology, switching it back and forth from format to format. It makes me want to say, stop playing with the darn thing; it's a book, not a computer game.

But this is probably me being an old fogey. (In line with which, Strife, reading things on the computer can be very uncomfortable when you're my age, but I will keep in my mind that the ebook might be advantageous in terms of attracting younger readers.)

And for the being-one-of-the-first aspect, it turns out that my books are among the first 9,000 to be offered in amazon's new Kindle format. It will be interesting to see how that works out. Maybe it will make a believer out of me.

Wiglaf, I like being surrounded by thousands of books. On the other hand, I live in a house that has room for them (now that we've cleared out all the offspring) and my husband is very good at building bookshelves. He should be; he's had plenty of practice. Most of them are built-in, though, so he'll have much of it to do over again when we move.

[Teresa Edgerton]

It turns out that, wherever I read that amazon/Kindle was offering 9,000 ebooks to begin with, it was a typo. The real number is 90,000. Which makes my current ranking there a lot more encouraging ... or it would, if I had any idea how well books in this new format were selling as a whole.

And not that I should be looking at amazon rankings anyway. They fluctuate so wildly and are so impenetrable, it makes so sense to pay attention to them at all.

But somehow one can't help peeking. Somebody ought to do a study of obsessive/compulsive disorder among writers.

[scalem X]

Somebody ought to do a study of obsessive/compulsive disorder among writers.

Yeah the stress of sales might be one of the reasons why a lot of them are bordering an alcohol addiction.
I'm sure you needn't worry.

note: I ordered my copy of ADS through a bookshop last week. I find it the cheapest to get books to Belgium. Just order them through a giant bookstore, they never pay shipping rights, they just put the book in one of their boxes.

[Strife]

here imported books cost much more--in any bookshops (even the large ones).

Amazon is the best choice, then


(buying ADS tomorrow and i'll buy the e-book)

[scalem X]

But do you have poor people in Monaco? (I'm joking, you know what I mean)

I guess it does depend on bookshops. But for some reason they can't be bothered to add additional prices to the books that are ordered and don't charge extra for anything. Even if they'd order it through amazon for me, I'd still have a copy at amazon price and don't pay anything extra for shipping.