The production and sale of ebooks would seem to provide an alternative. Some ebook publishers, who distribute their own books, can and do charge as little as £1.99 for novellas. However, if you wish your ebook formatted for some devices and stores, they can take a large percentage of the book price, leaving the publisher and/or author a smaller income from each sale. When we looked at publishing with the largest online bookstore’s in-house format, they required you to supply complete files, already ebook formatted, including all artwork. They convert to their own format and pay you just over one third of the retail price. This then drives the price of the ebook up, as the publisher or author is forced to ask a higher price to maintain their profit margins and incomes. If the publisher and author expect to realise a very reasonable £3.00 per sale, the retail price would have to be set at £8.57. Whilst ebook sales are dominated by certain readers and/or formats, the only people profiting from the ebook revolution will be the producers and sellers of device restricted formats and the associated readers.

This is a critical period in the future of publishing. The printed word will never and should never become extinct, but the undoubted environmental, practical and functional benefits of e-publishing make electronic books the future for literary mass production. Some big, traditional publishing houses have started dipping their toes into e-publishing, but consumers have a key role to play in directing the future marketplace. If restricted format readers come to dominate, a small number of large companies will control the industry, making it difficult for new authors to get published, stopping small publishers from competing and fixing the retail price to consumers. Alternatively, if consumers choose open format ebook readers, such as epub or pdf, the future could be very different. Large publishing houses would still have the high profile best selling authors on their lists, with their high profile internet shop generating the huge sales. However, small publishers bringing new talent to a worldwide marketplace would have the opportunity to sell competitively. It would remain to be seen whether the large publishing houses would be willing to tolerate this competition.

Bottom line–it does cost money to produce quality fiction–whether that fiction is sold embedded in paper or in electrons/photons. Quality non-fiction probably costs a lot as well although it’s something I don’t deal with. Distributors also have costs, which someone has to pay if they’re going to stay in business. I’m not completely sure that blaming greedy publishers and their authors is especially helpful. Certainly I don’t know very many authors who are overpaid.

Rob Preece
Publisher, http://www.BooksForABuck.com