Saturday, August 06, 2011
Books for a song
William Skidelsky writes of his surprise that hardbacks cost very little more to produce than paperbacks, since, it turns out according to a new book by American author Robert Levine, the biggest cost to a publisher in publishing a book is often the fee paid to an author and the marketing expense, that of letting the world know about it - a cost which shouldn't differ according to the format, whether hardback, paperback or ebook. Yet, he points out, Amazon, cushioned by ownership of the Kindle, have driven down the price of e-books to the extent that all publishers have had to accept that ebooks should now be cheaper than traditional formats. As someone pointed out recently - I'm afraid I don't remember where - at this rate authors will soon be writing for nothing, if they're not already doing so!
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5 comments:
This is quite a scary look into the future for writers, isn't it? Thank you (I think!) for bringing this to our attention. Jane Gray
The internet is a wonderful thing, but it is rapidly and scarily encroaching on the incomes of creative artists everywhere. Musicians have been hammered for years and writers are feeling the icy breath of internet commerce or lack of breathing down their necks.
I think it was on the Guardian books blog, Liz, and I commented thus:
Word of mouth will always sell. Did Harry Potter or The Da Vinci Code sell millions because of good marketing strategies? No. They became fads because people recommended them to each other. Nothing is going to change that. In fact, when it finally sinks in that all these Kindle productions are no better than porn made in someone's bedroom there will be a return to the search for quality
Thanks for that, MN.
That's just my forecast, which I hope will turn out to be the case.
However I think we should all keep in mind that it's never been easy to write stories for a living, and certainly no-one who sets off on an intended career in writing has any guarantee they'll be successful.
What it boils down to, I think, is that first and foremost you should write because you enjoy it. Financial considerations should always be secondary
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