The Future of Genre Fiction (an interview by Marc Marion) Part 2

Continued from Part One, which appeared on this blog Monday, May 10.

3. E-readers are becoming more prevalent, and now with the iPad there’s sure to be another wave of readers transferring from print to digital. What influences are these devices having on producers and consumers of speculative fiction?

THEA

Oh, digital is here to change everything. Long live the new flesh! As we’ve seen with the recent Amazon-Macmillan faceoff, the iPad looks to be the new hot kid on the block and, provided that Apple figures out a price point that is actually affordable for customers, it could mean a mass surge in e-book sales and availability. On the producer end of genre fiction, it probably means that genre publishers with smaller shares of the trade market (like Pyr, Orbit, Nightshade, very specific imprints like Baen and HarperCollins’ Angry Robot) and independent publishers will thrive. Big publishing in the US isn’t really taking advantage of the future that digital books have to offer – and if these smaller publishers can figure out how to price e-books at an affordable rate, push out solid titles, and market effectively for different reader platforms, they have an incredible opportunity to flourish as e-readers become more accessible to consumers.

MARK

I don’t think they are having that much of an effect at the moment – the readers are simply too expensive for the masses to buy. While I do read ebooks, sitting at a computer is one of the worst ways to read because it’s uncomfortable and the screen is not designed to be read off of for prolonged periods. If Apple do go ahead with an ebook store it could have a good effect on the digital medium, but until that cheap e-reader is released I can’t see good old paper books disappearing quite yet

JOHN

If they are anything like me, they will probably try to hold out against the wave of eBooks for as long as possible. There is just something about the feel of a book in one’s hand that no eReader can match. That being said, I think that in twenty years, my type of reader will be considered something of a Luddite. Currently eBook readers are an expensive investment, not matter which one you buy, and you better be sure you are willing to read books in a digital format if you are going to buy one. As they get cheaper and easier to use, more and more people are likely to turn to them, especially if the book producers can find a way to make them cheaper. I already have friends and family who use eBooks as a preferred method of reading, people whom I never thought would ever become eBook readers.

Are print books going to disappear entirely? Not likely. Even my eBook reading friends still buy and read print books, sometimes because they aren’t available as eBooks and sometime because they want to hold the book in their hands as they read. We are going to see a strange marriage of eBook reading coupled with print book reading for some time. It will take a new generation raised on eBook reading for fiction and textbooks (something schools are moving toward in order to cut costs) before readers like me will truly be Luddites. Will print die? Probably not, but it will soon become only a part of the reading experience, rather than the sum total of it.

4. Special features are being widely used to entice readers to try the digital medium with things like behind the scenes interviews, videos, and even deleted scenes. Do you think that readers are interested in this bonus content?

ANA

I love being able to read more about the authors I love and I just think it gives us more of an insight on their work, and that can only mean good things. As to how it might affect genre fiction – as it might affect all fiction: by bringing more readers? By making readers more attuned with the process of writing and publishing?

We have done quite a few interactive Q&A sessions with authors at our blogs and the questions about writing were pretty amazing and the authors were so open to answer them – it was all very interesting. That can only mean good things – even if inspiring new writers – who knows?

MARK

I think that things like book trailers and video promotion are great, it certainly raises the awareness of what’s coming out, but how successful they are is debatable. The bonus content, such as extracts from the next book, interviews, and deleted scenes are also worthwhile and they give that little bit extra to the reader. With the internet making everything easily accessible there is no reason why this sort of thing couldn’t be a positive step forward, it certainly couldn’t harm the genre.

JOHN

Many readers might be, but I find that I am not. It is always the story that grabs my attention, and if I’m not interested in the story, then no amount of extra material will entice me. These other things are nice to someone like me, but not necessary. On the other hand, the DVD industry has been doing something similar for movies for some time, and has had a modicum of success with it. People are curious and like to know about what goes on in the background, and I think that many readers would like having the “extra features”.

THEA

Yep, I think readers like bonus features and definitely like having these multimedia tools at their fingertips. Being able to preview up to 80 pages of a book online (as with, for example, Harper Collins’ “Browse Inside” feature), book trailers, virtual Q&A sessions with authors, blogs, interactive widgets, etc are fantastic. I’m a junkie for this sort of stuff (I’m the consumer that buys collectors editions of DVDs and watches every second of the bonus content) – and in my experience on The Book Smugglers, our readers love it too. It’s amazing that we readers and consumers can converse with authors, editors, publicists, and bloggers, and I think this means great things for genre fiction.

5. The dispute between Amazon and Macmillan over pricing definitely caught the industry’s attention. What should the price of a genre e-book be in your mind? What would make you pay more or less for it?

MARK

I actually wrote a blog post on this a while back and came to the conclusion that around £5 would be a fair price if it was available in paperback, while £10 to £15 for brand new releases would be about right if they had a hardback or trade paperback release. I really wouldn’t pay the same for an ebook as I would for a paper book, regardless of what it came with.

JOHN

As a consumer, I would want eBooks to be really cheap. Dirt cheap. Almost free. But I also understand that books need to be paid for, and there is a lot of behind the scenes work going on at the publisher that has a price. I think eBooks should be cheaper than print books, but not so cheap that they are not valued by the consumer.

As to paying more or less for an eBook, the more popular an author, the less I think a publisher should charge as they will make up for in quantity what they lose in selling for less. Publishers should not gouge readers on books they are likely to buy anyway. Of course, lesser known authors should also be kept at a reasonable price; else no one would ever read them.

THEA – warning, long response ahead

Oh, you want my “back of the envelope” calculations (so sneered upon by Scott Westerfeld in his recounting of the Amazon-Macmillan debacle), do you? Since you asked, here’s my opinion – and please keep in mind I am not an author, publisher or professional. I was an economics major, however, and I am simply using common sense. (Please note, these calculations are EXTREMELY basic. Yes, I know there are a few more factors that go into the creation of a book. This example is simplified, for simplicity’s sake)

As with the aforementioned Scott Westerfeld, author Tobias Buckell did give his own very clear, concise breakdown of how a book is priced in the wake of the Amazon-Macmillan showdown. His argument is as follows:

A book comprises of the following production investments. Just like a pill requires research to bring to market, or a jacket requires artists, designers and invention, professionally published books that look slick and readable use the services of a number of different people.

What are those costs? […]

In this article by K.T. Bradford, Jeremy Lassen, who runs a lean, focused, smaller press, says those initial investments for a book run from $7,000 to $20,000.

If you were making an eBook only, to make a professional, slick, proofread and well edited project, let’s take that lower number. Let’s say you farm this all out and pay an up and coming artist $3000 for a painting, a proofreader $1,000 to go over and copy edit, and then later proof the manuscript, a designer $1,000 to design the book’s look and feel all throughout, and a freelance editor to help throughout all this. I have no idea what an editor costs who’s freelance, but let’s lowball this and say that person makes $2,000 a book, like the copy editor (this would mean, for an NYC based editor, that they’d edit 24 books a year to make a freelance living. A lot of hustle). That’s a $7,000 initial investment.
So you can see, even without printing the book, there are upfront ‘development’ costs in good books.

So what price point do you need to cover your costs?

Well, how many eBooks do you think you can sell? See, the question becomes one of volume. In order to cover this back on only eBook sales you have some choices.

At 99 cents it takes 7070 sales to break even.

At $9.99, it takes 701 sales to break even.

At $15 it takes 467 sales.

That’s if you’re selling direct. Amazon takes a cut, so we actually probably need to multiply these by 30% to make them real world.

That looks impressive. Only 467 sales to cover back the initial outlay. The problem is, volume. Can you guarantee 700 sales vs 300, 7070 at 99 cents?

(Emphasis my own)

Tobias Buckell makes a good point. Volume is an issue. But, there’s one underlying assumption that bothers me with this example: that a publisher is ONLY making e-books. In the case of publishing as we know it right now, big titles are available in print AND in e-format. If you’re making an e-version of a print book, you don’t have to duplicate ANY of the costs Mr. Bucknell outlines (editor, typesetter, designer, artist, copy editor, proof reader); they are already sunk in the creation of the book.

So, effectively, using Mr. Buckell’s numbers, a publisher is spending $7000 for a print run. The publisher can still have a hardcover priced at $25 for the print edition goal at:

$7000/$25 = 280 target books a publisher needs to sell to break even

But why wouldn’t you, as a publisher, make e-books available during the same window? I’ll accept that it may cost some additional money to create the electronic version of a book (although from the quality of e-books I’ve read, it seems all that’s done is a hi-res scan of the printed version), but even at that it’s got to cost less than the storage/shipping/printing/returns costs of a physical book. Let’s pretend that e-books are available during a print book’s first run, for the $10 price mark that Amazon was trying to keep Macmillan at. In this scenario, the publisher would see:

$7000/$25 = 280 target hardcovers PLUS $10x(however many ebooks are sold)

Look at that! E-book versions of print books can give publishers an additional profit. With e-books, I think publishers are capturing a new consumer. The interested fans that dislike digital books, or those hardcore fans of an author will be spending the $25 on a hardcover no matter what. Someone a little more tentative will probably wait a few months until the book is available in its mass market run. BUT there’s a third class of reader out there – the ones who, like me, like e-books and are not quite willing to pay the HC price, but don’t want to wait months for the MMPB. If the book is available now, this group of readers will pay somewhere in between the HC and MMPB price in order to read the book sooner.

(For more detailed, accurate math on the costs and pricing of e-books versus print books, check out the “Making the Case for iPad E-Book Prices” from the NY Times)

Also, on a final note regarding e-book pricing, Cory Doctorow makes a great point that readers aren’t stupid. Publishers cannot charge the same price for an e-book as they do for a print book – on the most basic level there are costs that go into the production of physical books (printing, binding, shipping, warehousing, returns) that do not exist for e-books. Intuitively, readers know this.

ANA

Really, what could I possibly add to that?

6.. There has been a lot of debate around publication dates and just what is the right model for releasing digital books. As a reader, when do you think an e-book should be released within the publishing model?

JOHN

I think eBooks should be available at the same time as the book’s initial release date. Denying a growing subset of your readership access to a book is bad business. Trying to fit eBooks into the publishing schedule of print media denies the fact that eBooks are in a different medium, and as such, should be viewed like audiobooks – more supplemental than a true replacement – instead of a step along the way of print. Releasing eBooks later than a print book only angers readers who feel that “big business” is belittling them. Simultaneous release is a publisher’s best bet for increasing readership and maintaining customer loyalty.

THEA

Again, I think it really depends on who the publisher is. In the case of the big houses, see above. Releasing a book at the same time as its HC run (or heck, even before the HC run) is ideal in my opinion. I think Baen’s flexible model – $15 e-ARCs, webscription bundles of books (essential and wallet-saving for any genre fiction fan that is addicted to long, multi-volume series’), and it’s an amazing free library – is really, really cool and should be examined by other aspiring e-Publishers (especially Big Pub houses).

E-books should be available at least at the same time of a book’s print run, and should stay available for a long time, decreasing in price. And, contrary to Macmillan’s new Pricing/Agency Model, e-books should NEVER be the same price or more expensive than their print counterparts. Over time, e-books should be getting cheaper too, moreso than their print brothers and sisters. Inherently, there isn’t ANY such thing as an “e-book Hardcover” and an “e-book Paperback.” Consumers know this.

MARK

Ebooks should be released at the same time as their paper counterparts. I don’t see this as a problem and by delaying the release of an ebook publishers are saying that that percentage of the readership aren’t as important to them. Publishers should also ensure that prices run in line with the paper publishing model – keep it at a price suited to a hardback/trade paperback release, but when the paperback comes out they should drop the price accordingly.

Please return to this blog for Part 3 of this interview on May 14.

Related posts:

1. The Future of Genre Fiction (an interview by Marc Marion) Part 3
2. The Future of Genre Fiction (an interview by Marc Marion) Part 1
3. Guest Post: What is Your Favorite Speculative Fiction Genre?
4. Interview: Nick Mamatas on Japanese Speculative Fiction and SF Translation
5. Science Fiction Is About Predicting the Future