The Evolution/Revolution in Publishing, part 4

PRINT-ON-DEMAND

Producing a book used to be an expensive proposition. In order to make the final product affordable to the average reader, you had to manufacture it in mass quantities--and that meant a large publishing house, willing to risk a significant amount of money to print many thousands of copies to keep the per-unit price low. These high production costs were well beyond the range of the typical writer. But technology has changed that with two important innovations.

The first is print-on-demand (POD) technology. No longer do you have to typeset metal plates. Computerized typesetting and high-speed printing and binding techniques now make it possible to produce a single copy of a book--and the typesetting can be stored electronically until the next time a copy of that book is needed. It's still somewhat more expensive to produce a single book this way than tens of thouands at a time at a commercial printing house--but I'm confident that will change in the next few years.

One disadvantage right now is that the books have to be ordered in advance. There isn't the spontaneity of walking into a bookstore, discovering a book, and taking it home that instant to read immediately.  There's an inevitable delay between the time you order a book online and when it's delivered. But even that may change. For years I've been hearing tales of POD presses small enough to keep in bookstores, so you can walk in, order your book, and have it ready to go quickly--just like a pizza.

Brick-and-mortar bookstores are dying left and right because of competition with internet outlets like Amazon. This sort of development might save them from extinction. The bookstore woouldn't have to store all those paper copies--just one sample for looking at, and then the sale copy would be printed to order. The stores wouldn't necessarily get smaller; they'd just be able to fit a much vaster selection into the same volume.

Print-on-demand publishing will eventually free the industry from the shackles of one of its greatest inefficiencies--the problem of returns. For decades, bookstore owners have been telling publishers that they must be able to return unsold books for full credit--otherwise, why should they bother stocking books by authors they've never heard of? Just order the known bestsellers, and beginning authors would never have a chance.

Because of returns, publishers must print far more books than they know they're going to sell, and the unsold ones get returned or pulped. A book that sells better than 50% of its print run is considered a marvelous hit. The result is an industry built on inefficiency and incredible waste. POD means that books won't be printed until they're actually bought. With less waste, the price of books may actually go down (or, more likely, just won't go up as fast any more).

Revised edition of Polly! now available

I’m excited and proud to announce the reissue of my recently expanded satirical novel, Polly!. In one sense, it’s a simple boy-meets-girl story—except, of course, it isn’t.

Herodotus Shapiro has had an unbelievably bad week. His wife left him. The IRS is after him for thousands of dollars. His home/bookstore burned down. On his way to take refuge at his brother's place, he got a speeding ticket. And now his car has broken down in the middle of the desert in front of a large mansion. What more can go wrong?

But now his world takes a turn for the weird. The mansion has a snowman on the front lawn--in the desert, in July. The house, which is bigger on the inside than on the outside, is owned by Polly, the most preternaturally beautiful young woman he's ever met. Polly is an acrobat, a gourmet chef, a psychologist, an international financial consultant, a physicist and a woman of who-knows how many other incredible talents. She has an unbelievable library, an art collection of all the world's great masterpieces, and a print of a previously unknown Marx Brothers film. Her toilet paper is actually silk.

And she seems to have some mysterious plans for him....

One GoodReds member has called the book “blasphemous ... highly offensive.” Several others, have given it 5-star ratings. Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Spider Robinson has said this:

All hands on Decalogue! A protagonist readers will find it easy to identify and empathize with, a classic journey story told with wit, wisdom and deceptive ease, and the most interesting guest star ever--what's not to like, here? Perhaps writers who attempt a book like Polly! wanna crack or two across the face for their audacity (to parrot conventional wisdom)--but not if they can manage to pull it off this entertainingly.

So ... ya pays yer money and ya takes yer choice.

The book is available in both paperback and multiple ebook formats. There’s a special holiday weekend deal on the ebook version. Buy the book from the Smashwords page and enter coupon code AV74C (not case-sensitive) and you’ll get it at half price. But hurry; the coupon expires Sunday, Dec. 26. Whichever edition you prefer, I hope you’ll give the book a try.

Happy holidays, and pleasant reading!

The Evolution/Revolution in Publishing, part 3

Okay, so in the early 70s, the publishers held all the power. What changed? I can tell you in one word: Technology.

The publishers' power rested on a tripod whose three legs were:

1. Production. Books had to be edited, printed, bound. None of these processes was particularly secret. There are printing houses in every major city in the world that could do the job. But printing a book in any quantity takes money that's usually beyond the means of the average writer. Plus, as with many other manufacturing processes, doing things in bulk makes everything cheaper. A writer contracting with a printer to manufacture a one-time order of hundreds of copies of a single title will pay a fairly steep price per copy. A publisher who regularly publishes tens of thousands of copies of dozens of titles every month benefits from an economy of scale the independent writer could never dream of. Yes, a writer could do it for himself, and many did, but he could scarcely be competitive.
   
2. Distribution. Once the books are manufactured, they have to be placed where customers can buy them--bookstores, supermarkets and the like. This is a task well beyond the skills of most writers. The major distributor companies who worked with big publishers didn't want to touch self-published writers (often with great justification). There were distribution networks for small press publishers, but they tended to be spotty and, in some cases, just as hard to break into as the major distributors.
   
3. Promotion. Even getting the books onto store shelves wasn't enough to guarantee sales. People are leery of buying a product they've never heard of. There's all sorts of competition for the consumer's dollar; readers have to be given a reason to buy one title instead of another. Publishers maintained marketing and advertising departments to get their books noticed. Individual writers would find themselves staring at the face of a steep cliff called apathy

The indie or self-published author simply couldn't compete with the the mammoth companies who held such strong advantages. But recently, thanks to technology, this has begun to change ... and that's what this blog will be looking into when it continues.

The Evolution/Revolution in Publishing, part 2

When I started selling my writing with some regularity in the late 60s/early 70s, the science fiction scene was much different than it is today. Simpler in some ways, harder in others.

Simpler: For short fiction, there were 6 regular markets, the major genre magazines--Analog, Galaxy, If, F&SF, Amazing, and Fantastic. No original anthologies to speak of; anthologies were the domain of reprint stories. (And don't throw Dangerous Visions in my face; that was a special project, not a regular ongoing market.) The was one major hardcover publisher of sf, Doubleday, and it existed largely to support its other arm, the Science Fiction Book Club; other hardcover houses published sf too, of course, but not on anything approaching a regular, consistent basis. For original paperback novels, the reliable markets were Ballantine, Ace, Berkley, the fledgling DAW, and some lesser lights.

Simpler, because you had fewer choices and they were very well defined. Things went into specific slots, or they didn't go at all.

Harder: for the same reason. Fewer choices, fewer markets. Fewer slots to fill, so only a comparatively limited number of people could fill them. And if you weren't one of them, you were left out in the cold.

The recognized markets controlled what went into the marketplace, so if you were one of the anointed ones, people learned about your work. Otherwise, they didn't.

If you could fill one of the acceptable slots, you could make a name for yourself. You could sell books if you sold short stories, because the editors recognized your name. Agents helped you negotiate better deals, but they weren't essential to making any deal at all. The publishers had first-readers, and were on the lookout for new talent.

Oh, and agents routinely got only 10% commissions for domestic sales; it was higher only if another agent was involved for subsidiary rights, like foreign sales or movie deals.

Self-publishing? You were a pariah if you tried it. Print-on-demand? Way too costly to even consider. It was prohibitively expensive to make one book at a time. Electronic publishing? Well, maybe someday in the far future, like a century from now. Audiobooks? Well, there were recorded books for the blind, but they were few in number and generally only for bestsellers. Certainly blind people weren't interested in that science fiction stuff.

Distribution was tightly controlled, funneled through a small number of sources--and in many cases, mafia controlled. You followed a narrow set of rules, or your work never got out in front of the reading public.

Are things better now? Well, they're certainly different. As we shall see....

A Third Free Ebook

And the good news just keeps on coming. Hot on the heels of The Djinn Garden and But As A Soldier, For His Country, a third free ebook emerges from my collection.

For a limited time only, Tsar Wars (Book 1 of the Agents of ISIS series) is now free in its ebook edition. If you enjoy space opera adventure, this is the perfect chance to sample the first great space opera dacalogy of the twenty-first century and find out what it's all about.

I've also taken this opportunity to change the covers on the ebook editions. I think the new ones are way cooler than the last set.

More exciting news coming up in the next few weeks. Stay tuned. 

Two Free Ebooks

I've just made two of my ebooks permanently free:

The Djinn Garden is a self-contained novelette excerpt from my 4-volume Arabian Nights-style Parsina Saga. The excerpt is available in multiple electronic formats, including PDF for anyone who doesn't have an ereader device. The books themselves are available as both paperbacks and ebooks. This should give you a taste of the series, to help you determine whether you might want to invest yourself in the complete story.

But As A Soldier, For His Country is a short story that was the springboard for my classic science fiction novel of future war, The Eternity Brigade.

Enjoy them both with my compliments. All feedback will be welcome.

The Evolution/Revolution in Publishing

This begins a series of articles about the evolution/revolution in the publishing world, with particular emphasis on the science fiction/fantasy field. I make no claim that these articles are at all authoritative. They'll just be some personal observations, based on my own experience. Take that for what it's worth. All disagreements respectfully welcomed. I'll use the term "science fiction" in the broadest sense, to include fantasy and all forms of speculative fiction.

The science fiction field as a commercial genre started almost exclusively as a short fiction medium. There were a large number of pulp magazines devoted to the new genre, but no lines of books as we know the term today--just a few specialty small presses, and they mostly reprinted novel-length serials from the magazines. Everything else was short stories.

The rise of science fiction books went hand-in-hand with the rise of paperback books in general, and paralleled the decline of the pulp magazines (which declined with the rise of printing costs and postage). A small number of star writers appeared in hardcover, because they'd already built themselves a readership following from the magazines. Science fiction became a staple of cheap paperbacks, just as they'd been a staple of pulp magazines.

As all genres became more successful in the paperback market, the hardcover houses started taking more of an interest--because they knew they could sell reprint rights to paperback houses. Soon the tail was wagging the dog. The hardcover publishers began publishing books, not to make money selling copies, but because they could make money selling the reprint rights in paperback. Paperback publishers developed "lines" of product, with multiple titles in each genre each month. The hardcover houses found themselves more as tributaries to the rushing river of paperback publishing.

Next: The publishing field as I found it when I started selling my own works.