Yes, it’s true, The Heroes is today’s Amazon.com daily deal which means that FOR TODAY (14th November) ONLY lucky Americans can swoop upon the Kindle edition for the cutting-my-own throat daylight robbery price of $1.99. No, that’s not a misprint. One dollar ninety-nine cents. That gives you … let me see … thirty-two violent deaths per cent.
It shouldn’t be legal. But it is. Only for today…
Thanks to Chris Wooding for bringing my attention to an excellent and carefully researched article by Lloyd Shepherd over at The Guardian, written in response to the endless doomsaying about the imminent demise of publishing, which pretty much reflects my own much less carefully researched feelings.
Namely that – despite the big trouble in the area of dedicated Brick and Mortar stores that have left Waterstones as pretty much the only big player in the UK and Barnes and Noble in a similar position in the US – there are still a lot more paper books being sold than you might think. That – despite understandable but in my humble opinion overstated fears of piracy – as e-readers become mainstream the legitimate e-book market continues to rapidly expand. That – despite the fact advances are trending downwards overall and it’s never been easy to make big bucks from writing – there’s still, and probably always will be, a good living to be made from good fiction – or even my fiction – and that edgy fantasy ain’t a bad place to be right at the moment, as it happens.
Business is probably going to get tougher. Margins will get tighter. Certainly in retail I suspect there will be blood and perhaps some serious redistribution in the medium term. But I think paper books will be with us as a significant part of the market for some time to come. And if publishers can learn the lessons of the music industry and see e-books as an opportunity rather than a threat (which many are well on the way to doing), sort out the pricing and the frustrating rights issues, offer products that make use of the unique advantages of e-readers rather than simply emulating the paper versions, and ensure that the majority of readers are willing to pay a fair price for their e-books, the future don’t look so bad to me.
Cheer up. It might never happen…
As a related addendum, I get a lot of emails these days from folks complaining that they want to give me money but can’t, since they live in Australia, or Dubai, or somewhere else that isn’t the UK or US and therefore are blocked from legitimately paying for and downloading an ebook of mine. Which seems insane to them. And kind of is. I feel your pain, believe me. I’d really much rather you were paying for that ebook as well, and I continue to agitate as strongly as possible for my books to be available in every language, format, size, scent and colour imaginable. However, the gears of publishing law grind with excruciating slowness, and ebook rights are still inextricably bound up with paper rights with publishers fiercely guarding territorial borders that should mean nothing to the frontier-less internet. So it may be a while before all this gets sorted to everyone’s satisfaction. I remain confident it will be. Until then, might I suggest you order a hardcover, and get it helicoptered out to you in the jungles of Borneo, or wherever it is you may be?
You ever had one of those weeks? I daresay we all have. I was geared up to give a nice little optimistic progress report, then my wife got a bit ill, and before you know it she’s been in hospital for a week with an impacted gall stone. Ouch. Three children under five? With my parenting skills? What were they thinking? So my brother and his wife came down to help. Overnight she started feeling ill, and before you know it, she’s in hospital as well! The veritable bed next door! Ridiculous. Then there’s been a veritable cornucopia of delayed joinery, urgent packages stopped by customs and levies charged, contractual wranglings and other such to distract me. Then two members of my extended family died.
Unbelievable.
Luckily my wife came out of hospital this morning, so hopefully things can return to a normal level of panic. But work somewhat delayed. Perhaps we’ll have an optimistic progress report next week.
ON THE SUBJECT OF ENHANCED EBOOKS – some folks have been asking whatever happened to the enhanced e-book of The Heroes that I announced would be coming in January and … hasn’t. Well, it is coming, but has been delayed by various design and retailer related issues. Hopefully it will be released alongside the trade paperback of The Heroes in the next coupla months. Watch this space.
Yes indeed, my American friends. Thanks to the dark machinations of my sinister overlords at Orbit, for this month only, e-books of Best Served Cold will be available at the scandalous knock-down promotional price of $2.99! Nook! Kindle! Sony readers and many more! Stocks are strictly limited, so act now! Well, that’s not entirely true. Stocks of e-books are infinite, it’s one of the advantages of the medium. Follow this link for details…
So, my enhanced e-book consultation threw up some interesting suggestions. Several were those who said the digital revolution would only happen over their suppurating corpses. No problem, for you there will be various paper-based editions. Several were those who said they would never be interested in extras of any kind. You are more than welcome, for you there will be straightforward text-based kindle and epub (and probably other format) editions. For those of you who might have more than a passing interest in fascinating insights into the development of my writing, and of The Heroes specifically, here’s the package we’ve come up with for an enhanced ebook of The Heroes. Alright, alright here’s the package my editor’s come up with:
Price point is not decided yet, but we’re probably looking somewhere in the region 0f £20-£30, and before the howls of horror and outrage begin, may I point out the audiobook alone retails for £20. For those of you not interested in the audiobook, we may also do a considerably cheaper version without it. I’m interested in the idea some raised of a bookmark that can keep your place between audiobook and ebook, we’ll look into that one. The possibility of optional hyperlinks to a dramatis personae is also one I’ll bring up. It may be that the amount of work required to do some of those things would be too great given that this will probably be something of relatively limited appeal. But it’s an experiment. We’ll see if there are any takers, and if there’s a market at all we’ll no doubt begin to experiment with pricing and content and refine the concept to make it more attractive. If it works, enhanced ebooks of Best Served Cold and The First Law, with a similar range of extras, will probably be put out there. As more sophisticated features become more commonplace, no doubt it’ll become cheaper and easier to incorporate things like interactive maps and glossaries. I hope so. But we shall see…
E-Books! The Future! So bright it blinds me!
Clearly they’re a rapidly growing (and mutating) sector of the market, and publishers and authors are still fumbling their way to a model that makes sense for everyone, as well as trying to find various ways to make new uses of this new technology.
One thing we’d like to experiment with is the possibility of offering, alongside your common-or-garden e-books of The First Law (containing the same text you get when you buy a paper book), enhanced e-books, at a slightly higher price point, containing some manner of additional material. Exactly what this additional material would be is still a subject of some discussion, which is where you, the book-buying public (and, since you’re here, presumably the book-buying public with a more than passing interest in my work) come in.
Questions, therefore - Would you have any interest in such a product, and what styles of additional content would persuade you to part with a little more of your hard-earned and give you the sense you got value for money? Have you ever thought, “man, I wish this e-book included X“.
Incidentally, what you probably won’t get is extra fiction – new chapters and that kind of business. It’s work time for me that I, my publisher, and almost certainly you as well, would rather I devoted to new books and stories. But early drafts, deleted bits and pieces, notes and plans, interviews with me and others involved with the project, that type of stuff might well be possible…
Speak to me, O Market.
I’ve been getting quite a few emails about the absence of kindle editions of late, which I am now very pleased to announce are available via amazon.com:
The Blade Itself
Before They are Hanged
Last Argument of Kings
Best Served Cold
An audiobook of Best Served Cold has also recently come out from Tantor Media, which is available as a download from Audible or in oldskool physical compact disk form , though one should be aware it is unabridged and therefore somewhere around 30 hours, or 22 cds, in length. Wow, that should keep y’all busy. This is an American version, and though I haven’t listened yet myself, I imagine it’s an American reading, which would seem a little strange to me, though probably not if you were American. There are supposed to be some British readings of the First Law appearing at some point, but they’ve been delayed some time due to contractual wranglings of some kind at a level far above me, and at the moment they’re slated on Orion’s website to appear in June this year. So we’ll see…
Following hot on the heels of e-books in the uk, and since a couple of folks were asking about the chances of a Kindle version in response to the other post, it would appear Best Served Cold will be available on Kindle via Orbit in the US at the same time as the US hardcover version (July 29th).
And this one will cost you but 10 bucks, which will almost certainly be cheaper than the hardcover, even heavily discounted. Which seems much more realistic and attractive pricing to me – a lot closer to the business model I’d like to see. I reckon now is the time – while the technology is still in its infancy – to be bringing people into the fold with pricing that seems generous. That way people will buy readers knowing there’ll be a decent amount of books available at a decent price (after all, an e-reader’s only as good as the books you can get on it), and hopefully get into the habit of buying them legitimately. Rather than encouraging folks to pilfer them off the darknet via prohibitive pricing, and making that a more and more widely used and accepted way of doing things. It seems publishers and booksellers are prone to see this as a threat rather than an opportunity. Clearly books and music aren’t quite in the same boat, as a paper book still offers advantages that an e-reader probably won’t for some time to come, while a downloaded song and one played from cd are pretty much identical, but it would be a shame if we were to repeat the mistakes of the music industry…
Pleased to note that Best Served Cold, and the First Law Trilogy, are now available on e-book via Waterstones.com:
The Blade Itself
Before They Are Hanged
Last Argument of Kings
Best Served Cold
The prices are a tad disappointing – £10 and change for Best Served Cold when a hardback is selling at £8.50, and around £6 for the First Law books when mass-market paperbacks are available for a mere £4.
My own feeling about e-piracy and so forth is that it’s virtually impossible to put a stop to – the more popular you are the more torrents will endlessly spring up, and most of them in places where folks don’t respond to a polite email. The only effective way to combat it is to provide people with a higher quality service than pirates do, more easily available and at a price that seems reasonable. Then I think most will be happy to pay.
One problem is that a lot of users somehow think that e-books, since they don’t have to be printed, are pure profit for the publisher and should therefore be virtually free whereas, of course, the great majority of the costs that go into making a paper book (commissioning, editing, artwork, marketing, repping, promoting and, erm, paying the author) still apply with an ebook. Champions of a revolutionary future of free-love filesharing where writers and readers will all be liberated from the shackles of publishers tend to forget the vital role they play as gatekeepers and ensurers of a certain level of quality (you may think some books that are published are rubbish but believe me, until you’ve seen a slush pile you really have no idea).
Even so, selling ebooks at more than the cost of the paper books is going to look just a wee bit like taking the piss to some buyers, I suspect. I’d like to see them retail at most at the same price as the paper equivalents, and ideally somewhat lower. At the moment most publishers and booksellers are still focused on the paper market where heavy discounts are applying more and more widely, making ebooks something of a speciality item and hence relatively more expensive. Hopefully in due course that will change, and I’ll certainly be pressing them to lower the price as soon and as much as possible but, hey, it’s a start.
In other news, I am delighted to relate that Subterranean Press, purveyors of high quality limited and special editions to the world’s bibliophiles, will be publishing a signed limited edition illustrated hardcover of The Blade Itself. If it does well, and let’s all hope it does, they will follow up with the rest of the trilogy. Not sure of the details yet – how many shall be the print run, who shall be the artist, how many and what style of plates shall be involved, but they have a great track record of involving the author closely so you will know when I know. Believe me, these guys make some beautiful books.
And finally, I probably mentioned a little while ago that I was writing a short story for a Sword and Sorcery anthology. Just heard a list of names of some of the other authors who will be contributing, and it’s a strong line-up. VERY strong. Can’t give any names yet, but I think lovers of edgy and interesting fantasy both old and new will get quite excited about this one…
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