The other week there was the announcement from the Publishers Association that ‘Hey, we’re not like the music industry: the rise of the e-book has only increased everyone’s love of reading, and guess what? Publishers’ profits are better than ever.’
The following day I had lunch with a mystified publisher. ‘It doesn’t chime with our experience,’ she said. ‘Cheap e-books are making things horrendously difficult. They’re selling Life of Pi for 20p for Christ’s sake. Why publishers are okaying these sorts of promotions, I don’t know. It hurts us all.’
I’m working with an author at the moment who’s been earning very good money from his 80 cent self-published thrillers. Judging from his Amazon reviews, there are a lot of readers out there that read enormous numbers of these super-cheap books, very much with a ‘bulk buyer’ mindset. ‘It may not be War and Peace, mate, but not bad for 80 cents.’
This doesn't mean that publishers should follow suit, chasing volume at extraordinarily low margins. Amazon is like some great gobbler fish. Give stuff away, and they’ll just want more and more for nothing. It's all very well for self-published authors to sell their books super-cheap, but publishers have a responsibility to sustain their industry, their employees and their authors, as well as helping to keep high street booksellers in business.
Wanda Whiteley, former Publishing Director at HarperCollins, is Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Manuscriptdoctor.co.uk, a literary consultancy
The supermarket problem is an interesting one. I looked into what it would cost to produce a copy of my book and what I could possibly sell it to a supermarket for and there was almost no profit in it at all. By the same token, selling at a higher price to independent bookshops with a far smaller volume of stock sold is equally unprofitable. At this time self-publishing paperbacks is basically pointless.
Only when traditional publishing is able to force a higher price for a sought-after title is any real money made. (With the possible exception of Fifty Shades which was mass produced so cheaply you could be forgiven for thinking it was printed on Izal paper.)
E-books are the medium offering the most opportunity... to all. I think traditional publishing has the opportunity to set a gold standard in e-book publishing to guarantee quality but has been slow off the mark. There will always be those happy to pay 80 cents for a quick something to read, but there are also plenty of readers out there who would like to take advantage of the lower prices digital publishing offers without devaluing their favourite authors. That should be the growth market at this point, but it's up to publishers to make it happen. And it won't if they keep slashing prices. There has to be a clear divide between something professionally produced and something uploaded by the author in their jimjams at 2.30 in the morning a few weeks after Nanowrimo. There currently isn't.
I agree with you, Wanda.
I am, as yet, an unpublished want-to-be author.
I have heard of Publishers bulk selling novels to supermarkets at a loss, or well below the jacket price. I would like to know how that affects the authors royalties.
Chasing volume at extremely low margins concerns me. How is an author to trust a publisher not to sell him or her short.
I believe it is established authors with a backlog of books and an existing readership that benefit from cheap ebook sales.
I don't know how want-to-be authors can expect to be rewarded for their efforts, if their books sell for pennies. It will deter many from aspiring to becoming an author.