What is an Author to
Do?
Put yourself in the way-back machine, all the way back to
the year 1999. Among the things you might do if you could rewind the clock 13
years (worry about Y2K, party like it’s 1999, etc.), imagine yourself having a
conversation with a person who prints books.
At that time, some adventurous souls were reading books on
their Palm Pilots. Previous to that, there was the Sony Discman, which
apparently had books on CDs! Regardless, the audience for eBooks was limited,
and the closest most people got to an eBook was online help or a PDF.
However, if you were to talk to the owner of a book printing
business in 1999, you might find he or she feeling that computerized readers
could one day be a threat to the book printing industry, but that these devices
would not hurt the market for traditional printed books until such time as they
could replicate the experience of reading a paper book: the visual appeal of a
well-designed book, the rustle of the turning page, the pleasure of a lovely
font, the anticipation of returning directly to your bookmarked page.
Well, as we all know, that day has arrived.
Many self-publishers feel that they can “get away” with
producing an eBook only, and save themselves a lot of money by not printing a
pile of books in anticipation of sales that may never materialize. They ask
themselves: “Who wants to buy a printed book when the same content can be
downloaded in an eBook format for half the price?”
They have a point. According to a March 2012 blog post on
the PC World website entitled eReader Sales Down: Way Down, global
sales in 2011 of dedicated eReaders (not to be confused with multi-purpose
tablets) rose 107% over 2010, and yearly global sales should reach 60 million
units by 2015 (what were “down” were sales of “e-ink” readers, those that only
display print in black and not color). But even with sales figures like these,
there are plenty of people who prefer the printed book, and many who continue
to buy printed books for reading at home while purchasing the eBook versions
for travel and commuting.
So with the market divided, what is a self-publisher to do?
The answer is: do both. The cost of producing both an eBook and a printed book
is not as much as one might think. Print-on-demand services allow an author to
print only enough books to fill existing orders, and while it’s a little more
expensive than traditional offset printing, print-on-demand is a good route to
take until demand for the book is established and predictable.
Some authors might hesitate to spend money on book cover
design and interior layout for two versions of the same book. They try to save
money by not hiring a professional book designer for the eBook project; after
all, what is an eBook except for a glorified PDF? The opposite is true, and as
the eReader technology improves over time, good design becomes even more
critical. For example, the demand for color eReaders and multi-purpose tablets
is increasing, placing added pressure on an author to have a fabulous book
design that takes advantage of sophisticated displays.
Many professional designers will work at a reduced rate to reproduce
the cover for the eBook version, lay out the interior pages and code the book
for the eReader, provided they were also hired to design the print version. Authors
must hire a person with eBook expertise to insert the coding that makes the
book usable on popular eReaders. Why not spend that money on good book design
for the print version and then spend a little more to have it prepared for
eBook publication as well?
Authors who choose to produce only a printed book, or only an
eBook, and not both, run the risk of distancing at least part of their potential
audience. By spending just a little bit more to produce both formats, a
self-publishing author can maximize the book’s market.
Michele DeFilippo owns 1106 Design, a
Phoenix-based company that works with authors, publishers, business pros,
coaches, consultants, speakers . . . anyone who wants a beautiful book,
meticulously prepared to industry standards. 1106 Design offers top-quality
cover design, beautifully designed and typeset interiors, manuscript editing,
indexing, title consulting, and expert self-publishing advice. Michele’s first
book, Publish Like the
Pros: A Brief Guide to
Quality Self-Publishing (and an Insider's Look at a Misunderstood Industry) is available on Amazon in
both paperback and Kindle editions!
Good advice. Sometimes I've bought an ebook and later bought a printed version of the same book to give as a gift. It's hard to put a ribbon on an ebook.
ReplyDeleteThis principle, fairly straightforward when applied to physical objects, becomes more complex for "objects" such as MP3 files or e-books that exist only as bits of digital information. In response to file-sharing sites, which attempted to apply the doctrine of first sale to digital content, copyright holders began to assert that content transmitted digitally was licensed rather than sold.
ReplyDeleteDigital Book Printing