Such interesting news in the last week or so.
Last week, mass-market romance publisher Dorchester Publishing announced that it was dropping its mass-market print program in favor of eBooks and Print on Demand (POD). Naturally, economics drove this decision: drastically falling sales for the last two years, as well as difficulty in getting space for moderately priced mass-market format in brick-and-mortar bookstores, which results in, yeah, fewer sales. Even so, eBook sales accounted for 12% of Dorchester’s revenue prior to the decision, though Dorchester’s President John Prebich predicts the better margins for eBooks will make the change worthwhile. He also predicts a doubling of the market share for eBooks in the next year. From his lips…
Seems to me that Dorchester has, by necessity, gotten on the road that those of us in independent ePublishing have been traveling for better than a decade. And the recognized unsustainability of the current print publishing model—printing slews of books that can be returned or stripped and dumped, or as Rowena Cherry told us recently, sold to a paper recycler—must drive other publishers to the same decision in time.
[UPDATE: Dorchester editorial director Leah Hultenschmidt told Publishers Weekly on 11 August that the plan to go all e was "only for the next six months." http://bit.ly/blZovp.]
An excellent article in the New York Times on August 11, 2010 outlined the changes in the publishing world with the growth of eBooks. According to the article, compared to the same period last year, the market share for eBooks nearly tripled, now 8.5% of the total for trade book sales. Awesome!
An interesting intro to the article was a reminder of the movie, “You’ve Got Mail,” where a mega-bookstore owner was driving a small, independent bookstore owner out of business. That movie came out 12 years ago, about the same time that EPIC was getting started. Hmmm. Back then the question was, when would the mega-stores drive the small booksellers out of business? (Notice that it wasn’t “if” this would happen.) Turns out they didn’t. The small booksellers who survived are doing fine, as they are the ones who recognized their strength: serving a loyal customer base, catering to their customers’ reading preferences and offering trusted advice on a new author or book. Now, the big boys are seeing their store traffic dwindle, as more and more readers buy their books on-line, both print and e. And since people are often motivated by instant gratification, that instant download is a great incentive to go e.
In the same way that indie booksellers have survived, I’m pretty confident that the big publishers who are dipping their toes into the eBook pool won’t run the independent eBook publishers out of business. At least not as long as the indie publishers remember who they are and what they offer their customers: great customer service and well-priced books that push the envelope, tell great stories in a compelling way, and are presented professionally.
From where I sit, the future looks pretty bright. I don’t know if any of us will become independently wealthy from the ePublishing business, but I do know the numbers are on our side to at least be able to make a living at it. EPIC welcomes Dorchester authors, editors, and officers to join us on this wild ride.
With the goal of “making a living” in mind, what can EPIC do to fulfill our mission of promoting ePublishing and excellence in the industry? How do we help our members gain new readers who come to the indies directly or through trusted distributors to buy our books? What efforts are needed to build the market, especially for independently published eBooks?
Feel free to comment here or email me privately with your ideas: president@epicauthors.com.
Read the PW article on Dorchester: http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/publisher-news/article/44085-dorchester-drops-mass-market-publishing-for-e-book-pod-model.html).
To read the entire NYT article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/12/business/media/12bookstore.html?_r=2&src=busln
