What is the future role for traditional publishers?

I came across an interesting blog post recently, that talked about the mistakes publishers are making in the digital age, in particular, the use of the ipad.

And in the Amanda Hocking era of self-publishing success without having a book contract with a publisher, do the publishers have a role? What is it? Can they be profitable?

In this pdf, J.A. Konrath and Barry Eisler discuss the success of ebooks and the rejection by Eisler of a 500k book deal.

If this is the sign of the times, it makes fiscal sense for well-known authors to self-publish ebooks since they can get a 70% royalty of what they sell. In fact, why WOULD a Dean Koontz or Dan Brown continue with regular publishers when their loyal readers will pay for ebooks that could largely go into the authors pocket, FASTER than the slow process of the traditional route?

The number one answer is an unnatural attachment to the paper form. Eventually, these people will die out, and like in the above pdf, the analogy given is with candles. "Originally, candlemakers were in the lighting business; today, they're in the candlelight business." In other words, publishers will publish paper books, but the main business of selling books will be digital. (for the record, I still love paper books, and right now, a paperback is still a superior mode of reading at the beach where I would hesitate to bring my ipad)

Number two reason: You want to make a movie based on your book. Some ebooks have been optioned, and that market is growing. However, getting a book deal legitimizes you, and activates the "trollers" who look for books that would make great movies. Most authors make a living, not on book sales, but on movie options on their books. I think that movie producers will look for ebooks with high sales, and still use publishers as a guide for quality work. In other words, unless you are Amanda Hocking, you won't get your ebook noticed for a movie deal, you will need to go the traditional route.

If you are a popular author who isn't attached to a professionally published book, and doesn't care about the movie business, it makes sense to self-publish by ebooking. (yes, I made that term up)

So, if I extrapolate logical behavior of popular authors, then in five years 80% of the well-known authors will self-publish some or all of their work in ebook format. Who will be left for publishers? What will their role be?

Publishers will need to keep popular authors by giving added value. This can include editing, marketing, and a superior quality printed book, plus a MUCH larger cut of digital sales. If publishers carefully vet their authors and put out high quality books, consumers will recognize a traditional publisher as one worth "the risk" of a purchase. And if self-pub ebooks are on average $2/book price, traditional publishers could charge twice that and justify it.

As mentioned by Dr. Brenner, they don't charge twice that. They charge five or ten times that. Which is ridiculous.

If, hypothetically, 80% of popular authors go rogue, then the role of traditional publishers will be to find rising stars. Would a reader risk reading a new book by an unknown author that has no track record? If they have a large online presence, possibly. Otherwise, the publisher throwing their weight around could likely inspire confidence and thus, a purchase.

Would this mean publishers would lose so much money as to not be viable? Unlikely. If the model is mostly digital, then the costs to publish are nearly nothing. With low cost books, more people can and will buy them, increasing the market size. And clever publishers could create added value in these digital books by association with their "name."

In other words, if publishers adapt, they will survive and flourish, admittedly with a slightly different role as they serve now. If they don't adapt, they will die. And quickly.

HTML Hell

While my book Marriage of Deceit sits on the desks of publishers (for over one year), I've decided to go all Amanda Hocking and sell some ebooks. Okay ebook. Singular. I do have many books, but they're in different genres and my agent has advised me to have a different identity for each genre.

So I experimented with the Kindle and iPad search engines and discovered the Kindle is much more search friendly. I love apple products. Between my husband and me we have every type of "i" product out there. I have many generations of apple computers. I am completely PC free, and the only microsoft product I use is microsoft office - which I don't like but tolerate.

Where apple loses is in its searching prowess. When I want to look for a book, I can search an author or title, best sellers that are free or paid, but not by keywords. Let's just say I want to find a thriller: I can search the category "mysteries and thrillers," but that only brings me the top authors in alphabetical order, for the paid/free books. That means if you are not already selling a lot of books, and your name is not already well known, it is not possible to discover someone new and up-and-coming. As a buyer and a seller I am frustrated with the iBookstore searching ability.

Luckily, there is the Kindle. I'm not sure why Steve Jobs is allowing their competition to have a free bookstore alongside their own, but I'm glad. The Kindle app is superior in its searchability. If I want to find a thriller, I click on the category "mystery and thrillers" and then the subcategory "thrillers." What makes it user friendly is the "sort by" feature. I can sort by ratings, price low to high, high to low, best selling, and publication date.

Thus, I decided to first publish on the Kindle format. This allows me to use it on the Kindle and iPad platform. Of course, this meant getting the product ready for upload, and my word document did not translate well. I was forced to slog through the HTML and CSS in order to get an acceptable appearing document.

I am not a programmer. When I was a kid I learned BASIC, but never evolved into a hacker. A few years back I taught myself rudimentary HTML with the hopes of designing my own website. Only I realized that the time commitment was not worth it. And I scrapped that idea and simply went with a blog that allowed me extra tabs to include other pages. In other words a website blog. Blogspot.com allowed me to do all of this AND it has the "edit HTML" feature to make me think I can play around with the programming if I choose. Usually I don't.

I re-taught myself HTML and added on a quicky version of CSS to interpret the microsoft word generated HTML and clean it up. I did this painstaking process, and think I came up with a pretty good document. I have since uploaded it all to kindle and in a few days, I should have an actual app to buy. Then, I'll see how it looks in real time, and if it is okay, command people to buy it.

Of course, my neighbor can't wait to read it, but only on her Nook. It took me 30minutes to even locate the part of the barnesandnoble.com website where you can even consider adding an ebook. They accept HTML so I did the upload and...well...it did NOT look pretty like on the kindle. The word file itself needed some help, but looked better than the HTML version. In the next week or so I'll pretty-up the word doc and upload a Nook version.

And soon, I'll post some material from my book.

Signing off,
Bayla

PS I know I'm not gonna sell like Hocking, but I would like to move my book forward. Mostly I'd like to take some control over a system that moves so slowly it is amazing ANYTHING gets published.