E-book Looks Forward, Pushed Four Months Back

If you haven't heard, and maybe you did but didn't care, Simon & Schuster and Hachette publishers are going to delay e-book releases approximately 4 months after the hardcover, before the paperback.

Paul Biba at Teleread thinks it's good news for e-readers, because it shows an actual strategy. Jeffrey Trachtenberg of the WSJ has the whole story, including impassioned defense of building authors traditionally by Hachette's chief executive, and the fearful statement that once you let people think of a book as only worth $10, they'll never go back to wanting to pay $25.

For my part, there's steam coming out of my ears at the obtuseness of the decision. The following rant-y points are out of order, since I'm fighting with Blogger on a different machine, so mentally rearrange them to be better, if you would.

1) The hardcovers AREN'T worth $25-$30 in most cases, which is why they're not selling! This is a classic failure to respond to market information about price sensitivity. And these times, of all times, we're sensitive! In my own experience of purchasing bound fiction, the proofing's gotten worse, binding and paper's worse, and there's been little or no effort (outside of sff) to make the hardcover a value-add collector's item. They could make them special objects with extra value (heck, they could do that with e-books, too), but they haven't. Why, in this age of choosing-files-and-clicking-the-candy-red-button are we not doing more just-in-time printings to reduce returns and actually increase the perceived value of the first edition? Instead of special gilded spines, leatherette, and cool appendices in most hardcover fiction, the object's quality and rarity merely degraded while the price went up. The hardcover blockbuster's are supporting the industry because they represent CONTENT people want, not because of their shipping dimensions.

2) The apparently panic-making rise in e-book sales should be generating reams of useful information about marketing fiction content: how to price it, what people want, what's the right introductory price for a book or author, where does durability matter and not, how long between first title purchase and searches for the author's other titles, how much backlist does it take to "hook" a passionate series reader, does a good, low cost e-title inspire other purchases from that writer (works on me) and are they across all channels or e-formats only? How much delay is there between searching or sampling and purchasing an e-book title- what does that tell us about fiction as an impulse purchase? All good questions to help understand the segments of readership and how to reach them. Instead of generating information and innovation, the development of this market's generating soiled britches. Way to think forward.

3) A small portion of my fiction purchases will be keepers, most will be read and removed or released back into the wild. That matters in the purchasing decision, and as disheartening as it must be to hear it, much of the hardcover fiction isn't worth the lofty list price. You could say that it's only my gutter-taste, but I think the sales numbers bear that out. It's not because people won't pay for entertainment- it's because this equation isn't properly balanced, so the consumer's opting out. The answer is NOT to plant one's flag in the quicksand.

4) BTW, these publishers are objecting largely to the fact that Amazon is pricing e-books as a loss leader to establish the dominance of the Kindle platform. If Amazon wants to take the loss, why do they care? I've told people that my e-reader has caused me to become a bigger consumer of fiction in general, and it has. When I'm choosing between streaming a movie or buying a book that will take me about the same length of time to read, the price and durability matter. I bought the Criterion Collection DVD of Seven Samurai; I'll rent the latest forgettable rom-com off AppleTV. I don't want everything I buy to persist so that I have more stuff to figure out how to store or offload. Some things are for consuming and forgetting- sorry, even the written word- and while there is a magic number at which a few hours of casual, forgettable entertainment makes sense, $30 and a trip to the beloved bookstore every night isn't it.

5) If fiction isn't offered from these huge houses as a consideration for casual Tuesday night entertainment, you will not find consumers weeping and begging to be given another chance. They will move on to whatever IS available and enjoyable that makes more $ense to them. I think that's an awful shame, because I want people to think of fiction right along with their movies and games and television and online surfing and music as yet another, complementary possibility, and big, brittle publishing seems determined to oust decent fiction from mainstream leisure-time consideration for once and all.

6) Let's say publishing took up the challenge to differentiate the formats with additional value. If I'm a big enough fan (and of certain authors and works I am,) I might want to own ALL the versions to get the various goodies scattered therein. However, I won't do the multi-format boogie for all books, and it's downright unlikely I'll be doing that for new authors who'd benefit most from being priced as a Try-Me. (I know, I know, every opus is a jewel of unique perfection, and we can't treat writers as if we expect they'd, you know, keep writing more.) What if publishing houses had dynamic pricing/format structures as if the content and developing the audience for it were more important than that an object of a certain size and page count have a fixed price and profit margin? What if they didn't always have to account for the jaw-dropping fact that in this industry they intend to transit most of these heavy things back and forth or elsewhere for no better reason than fear of redfining a return system that's a garrote around the industry's throat? You don't have to be a rabid greenie to want to see this wasteful practice shelved. What if publishing tried to get as good as say, Wal-Mart or some other iniquitous, lowbrow place like that, at predicting and tracking and managing inventories, instead of not being able to tell you for a year how many total copies were sold in the first month? What if they knew how many books went out and to whom and what they'd be worth?

Disclaimer: I love the physical object of the book, but I bet they know all that stuff with e-books. No heaps of returns, no trucking costs, no questions. Did you know authors get monthly checks from their Kindle sales? What? Not waiting a year and a half? Blasphemy. You can't run an industry like that! I don't know how they believe authors were supposed to live like that. Probably why so many can't. And of course, without better feedback on sales earlier in the release, the author doesn't have much chance to adapt their marketing approach or decide to write the sequel or ditch the series, or any of the other things it might be nice to consider in the same calendar year. Do they worry so much about the e-book sales because these must so tangibly point out the shadowy Lovecraftian horrors that have been allowed to persist in publishing?

7) If there's a debut author's baby-fresh hardback shelved next to the 15th title in the 3rd co-authored series of a mechanized story and signature factory, people don't always want to leap into risk of several hours with that kind of money. Unless lightning strikes--and the big houses do keep hunting those elusive black swans--the hardcover's new author will fail to make stupendous sales due to competition alone. Piles of copies will get returned or scrapped, and the new writer can't sell the next manuscript, and it wasn't because they stunk or even that there wasn't an audience for them, but no one was that busy finding it. And because of that situation, we end up not nurturing the new voices, but subsidizing the 7th series from the established author now writing as a preserved head in a jar. I'm bored with that, like many other readers I talk to, but if I'm not buying new folks I know personally, I need exploration to be friendly and not too costly. Isn't that an area where selectively making e-book launches simultaneous with other formats could be a kickstart to a new author? Why rule it out with a blanket policy?

8) I read about the historic dedication to building authors' careers, and to the extent that's been so, terrific! However, what I think I perceive more is that despite the increasing customization of so many things, there's still a homogenity of approach and attitude when it comes to books, as if we couldn't expland our range of options without burning down every library and pissing on the ashes of the greats. I'm concerned for the wellbeing of fiction in general that it's not being allowed to change, regardless of what we learn, what's happening culturally and technologically, or what consumers demonstrate they value most.

9) It seems as if most hardcover debut authors these days are expected to spend their advances on their own promotion. They may get budgeted 1.5 hours per week of a well-intentioned but overworked staffer's time which will largely consist of transmitting author-developed lists for ARCs or review copies, assessing whether the author personally knows anyone helpful or influential, and informing the staffer what aforementioned new author will be be doing to get out there, bust ass, and make sure this thing's a success. The author will be kindly advised to conceive new approaches to reach readers and get exposure for the title, and above all, when planning and executing the publicity campaign, the author must think outside the box and be creative! Because your hardcover's publisher won't.