Yes, my book is on Kindle
Lit Agent Nathan Bransford’s post this morning got me thinking. (Note: I still like Nathan even though he turned down my query in a NY minute.) Nathan’s a smart guy, and if anyone is keeping his finger on the pulse of the pub industry, he is. Today he is talking about the squabble over releasing hard cover books in advance of ebooks, because the fear seems to be that the less expensive electronic editions will hurt sales of paper versions. This is particularly amusing to me, because my small press publisher does just the opposite; ebooks first, paper books only if the e-version does well.
I was glad to see that, for the most part, Nathan and I are on the same proverbial page. I see book purchasing consumers as two very different breeds, at least for the time being. The ebook market is still in the throes of a painfully slow evolution. True, the advent of the Kindle and Sony readers has given the process a good shove, but I still believe that the same people who want those hard backs (I never buy them, myself) aren’t the same folks who will gleefully download the same book instead simply due to cost. Save for a small percentage of enlightened mainstream book buyers, most of those clamoring for ebooks would not likely buy the expensive paper version to begin with. Likewise, paper-only-pundits wouldn’t be caught dead with a USB cable in hand.
What I see are missed opportunities for publishers to mine both camps. Maybe part of the problem is that these big, mainstream publishers don’t really know how to market the digital versions of their new releases. Or, they are so focused on the low price of the ebook, they fail to see how any sale is better than no sale.
I’m no expert–although I’d like to be–and I’m still trying to figure out how best to promote ebooks myself. I see my own readers as divided. Clearly, for me, most of my fan base prefers the trade paperback–and I’ve been touting ebooks for ten years. But I can be patient. Ebooks have come farther in the last year than in the previous five, in my opinion. And I’ll repeat what I’ve said many times before: paper books will not go away; there will be, however, a shift in reading toward their electronic cousins. A market share for both.