e-book-in-a-bath

It has a certain ring to it – a catchy ‘e-book-in-a-bath’. A bit like soap on a rope. So here it is – you saw it from TRP first…

See - no soggy pages

But my new marketing strategy aside – how has our first 6 months with e-books been? Where now? What’s the real low-down?

Well in the blue corner, still, are the digital revolutionaries. Lots of people convinced that some major paradigm shift either has or is about to take place. There is now a novel being published entirely by Twitter and there are a lot of people future-predicting a whole new age of freedom for writers and readers. Print-on-demand and self-publishing be damned – that was just the start of freedom. Now we can go direct from the writer to their reader(s) – your new novel downloaded to an i-phone. Lots of hand-waving in the direction of the music industry – who have apprently handled or mishandled the digital transition with breathtaking stupifidty or admirable wisdom (sorry, I can’t work out from the blogosphere which it is – maybe both). Something about ‘performance is the new royalty cheque’.

Ach, that’s all getting a bit exciting for a plain country-boy like me.   My experience of the digital revolution has been very pleasant but a little less cosmic. We have made and sold some e-books. We’ve sold a handful and had some repeat custom so they obviously work and are, to some readers, a pleasant way to read. Over time we’ll convert more of the list and I expect our sales will creep up and maybe even match the printed versions for some titles. The book is cheaper for the customer and I don’t have to stuff it into an envelope and drive it to the Post Office (or pay someone else to do so).

But the simple fact is that 95% of the process of publishing and marketing an e-book is just exactly the same as for a print book. Nothing much fundamental has changed. If you want national distribution there are people who make a living by selling you the facility. If you want to tell people about the book you either have to get it reviewed or advertised – or you try to get it out through your network of contacts/friends/colleagues. If you want it to look good and want it to be an ergonomic pleasure to read your edition of the work  – then you have to put a lot of graft into typesetting it properly.

Sure, if you want to get your book ‘out there’ without a publisher you can do it with an e-book. But incidentally, even after you’ve typeset it, you’ll find it will currently cost you more to convert your MS to an e-book than it would to print about 200 copies with a reputable printer. Of course you could always just PDF it and send the file around. But there’s nothing new in that. You always could.

Ah, but now there’s Facebook and Twitter. Now I can not only produce my own book without a publisher but I can market it myself in an afternoon. I can bang out a short video clip of me reading an enticing opening chapter. Beam it direct to ‘dear reader’. No need for those pesky reviewers and arbitrary arbiters of good taste. Certainly no need for PR consultants.  Maybe. Despite my scepticism I think you really might be able to set a chain reaction going this way. If the content is very good. But what do you do then? At the risk of sounding very uncouth – where does the money come from? (More general hand-waving in the direction of the music industry?) Chances are that you could approach a conventional publisher – armed with a your storm of internet-based public interest. But that is the end of the revolution.

Sometimes a technological or intellectual advance breaks a log-jam – solves an apparently intractable problem. Everyone sees the problems with literature and the publishing industry – and it would be really great if the e-books and other digital advances could somehow change the rules overnight. But in my opinion the rules remain almost unchanged - you need excellent writing to start with then you need to fight your way past all the other good writing (as well as an overburden of rubbish writing) to the limited attention span of the people who will eventually part with a few quid for your work. Nothing digital is going to change that. You may get a short-term edge on the competition by innovative use of technology – but only one man can write the first novel published on Twitter. I don’t see the media falling over themselves to do a feature on the third twitter novel.