Then again, the world looks tasty.

I picked a good week to make the bear's case for e-books.  Amazon just announced a new Kindle.  It's smaller and lighter than ever, and if you are willing to forego the 3G and just get books via wifi, the entry level price is now $139.

And BN is putting huge Nook boutiques in all of its stores.

On the other hand, the falling prices for hardware are indicative of the fact that 1.)  the market for expensive e-readers is exhausted and 2.)  the iPad is cutting into the market for these devices, and the price lever is the only weapon dedicated e-readers have against the all-purpose juggernaut.

  or

3) Instead of subsidizing e-books to make money on hardware, Amazon is now subsidizing hardware to make money on e-books.  Maybe the self-published and Amazon-published titles are looking very lucrative.

10 Reasons E-books Will Not Eat The World (part 2)

The exciting conclusion of yesterday's discussion:

5.  Requiring hardware limits the audience.  Despite apps that make e-book content available on PC or cell-phones, most e-books are sold to people who have e-readers.  The subset of people who have e-readers is a small fraction of the total number of people.  Even if this number grows exponentially in the next few years as devices get better and cheaper, it will still be far smaller than the total number of potential readers.

If e-sales begin taking a big bite out of print sales bookstores become an endangered species.  There's no way publishers can achieve sales growth by focusing on the smaller audience of e-readers if bookstores are closing en-masse.  I think that the relationship between publishers and bookstores is symbiotic, and publishers likely need many people who are becoming e-book buyers to patronize bookstores, to keep the stores solvent to provide a forum to sell to more causal readers who will probably never purchase dedicated reader devices.

"I don't want to go to the mattresses. Tessio wets the bed."

There have already been discussions of delayed e-releases of frontlist titles, and publisher pushback on low e-book pricing. It's possible that e-books will become a genie nobody can stuff back into the bottle, but for now, the growth and spread of these devices is heavily contingent on support from major publishers.  There have been fights between publishers and e-vendors in the past, and there are big new feuds on the horizon.  Uninterrupted geometric sales growth of e-books seems unlikely if publishers push against it, and Amazon may not be as willing to go to the mattresses as the market becomes more segmented and its share of e-book sales shrinks.

4.  Multipurpose devices aren't good for reading books.  An LCD screen like the one on the iPad is back-lit.  It displays an image by shining light through the screen.  A lot of people don't like doing close reading on these kinds of screens for hours at a time.  E-distribution of books has been possible for years, but there was never a market before e-readers came out because people didn't want to read books on their computers. Now many analysts believe e-books will conquer the market by piggybacking on devices like cell phones and iPads.  But these devices use the same kinds of lit screens as laptops (and the screens on smartphones are very small).

These screens can also be difficult to view from certain angles, they're hard to read in sunlight, and they drain batteries pretty quickly.  The experience of reading a book on an iPad is significantly worse than reading on paper.  Even if these devices become ubiquitous, I think most users will continue to buy conventional books.

"Wait.  What happened?"

On the other hand, if you are reading this, you are probably reading on a backlit screen.  And screens have replaced a lot of paper in many office uses; e-mail has displaced a lot of fax printouts and photocopies.

Some people think advancing technology will fix all these problems; Shatzkin predicts an iPad that folds or collapses into an iPhone.  On a long enough timeline, anything is possible, but the magical device that is both LCD and e-ink, and both phone and pad is not coming anytime soon.

3.  E-readers aren't good for anything but books, and are worse than books at being books.  Dedicated reading devices like the Kindle use a screen technology called e-ink that "prints" the page onto a non-lit screen.  These screens come close to simulating the appearance of paper; they look good in direct light and consume very little power.

The screen contrast isn't great; instead of black ink on white paper, you get dark-gray text on a light-gray background.  But the screens are improving, and the delay when a page "turns" and the device draws in a new one is likely to shorten as well.

These devices bring some nice features; you can change the font size, and a text-to-speech robot voice can read books to you.  But you can't flip back and forth as easily as you can with paper.  And it's a technology device.  If you drop it, you break it.  If you sit on it or step on it, you break it.  If you fall asleep in bed with it and roll on top of it, you break it. If it gets wet or if sand gets in its guts at the beach, it probably breaks.  And if you leave it someplace you're out a lot of money.  A book can survive most of these stresses, and if you lose or destroy it, you're out $16 bucks at the high end.

E-distribution of books has some obvious potential business efficiencies, but from an everyday-use perspective, an e-reader is a flawed solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Obvious exceptions to this rule:  literary agents and editors who have to schlep a lot of manuscripts around, and students who have to carry lots of textbooks.  E-readers can make such cumbersome tasks much easier.

2.  Author autographs.  Go ask Cormac McCarthy to sign your iPad and see what happens.

Actually, that would be hilarious.  If I ever meet him, I am going to do that.        

1.  Piracy.  Because books are an analog format, they have a sort of built-in copy protection.  You can't "rip" a book the way you can copy a music CD.  To upload a book for file-sharing, somebody must either scan every page or transcribe the text into a computer file.  Because of this structural difficulty, books have been largely spared the piracy troubles that music has struggled with over the last decade.

However, with e-books, if somebody manages to crack the encryption on one of these e-book file formats, then everyone's content will be available for free in clean, publisher-formated digital versions.  And hacker-types have a history of accomplishing difficult things.

"I've been listening to Ke$ha and reading 'Twilight' for free!"

It seems likely somebody will eventually crack one of these formats.  What will happen when that occurs?  How will publishers and vendors react?  We know Amazon can remove files from Kindles; they've done it before.  Maybe vendors will wipe all the devices to prevent books from getting ripped.  I think that would deal a serious blow to consumer confidence in e-books.  On the other hand if they don't take an extreme response, widespread piracy could quickly devastate legitimate sales.

10 Reasons E-books Will Not Eat The World (part 1)

A lot of experts and analysts believe that the sales of e-readers and e-books will continue to grow exponentially, and that e-books will cannibalize the market for conventional books.  It seems to be conventional wisdom that 50% of books will be in electronic formats within five years.

I don't have all the data that these people have, but I was an early-adopter of the Kindle (I have the first-gen model) and I've read a number of books on the device.  For me, the novelty has worn off, and many people will likely come to this conclusion in the next year or two.  If my experience is common, I think sales will plateau sooner than many analysts expect.

Here's why:

"We need to reschedule your bar mitzvah.  The Torah has a dead battery."

10.  Conventional books can't really be improved on.  A book is text on a page.  You can't make a book better by making it a digital file; there's no way technology can alter or improve the experience of reading text on a page.  A book cannot be remastered in high-definition.  You can't make it faster.  The best an e-book can possibly do is match the experience of reading a conventional book.

  

9.  Switching to e-books doesn't improve your life.  Imagine it's 2002 and you're switching from music on CDs to an iPod.  By adopting this format, you've gained access to a lot of new functionality and a lot of convenient features.  You can now carry all your music with you, which is something people want to do.  You no longer need to have a huge multidisc changer in the trunk of your car, or a multi-disk carousel in your home stereo.  You no longer need to commit to listening to one artist or mixtape when you go for a run, and the physical device you will carry is much smaller than a CD player.  You can construct playlists for various purposes, or you can shuffle all the songs on the device.    

By contrast, consider how your life improves when you switch to the Kindle.  You can carry a bunch of books, but do you really need to?  Most people only read one book at a time.  There's no playlist or shuffle-type features that you can utilize with your book library.  The device is smaller than a hardcover, which is convenient if you're carrying it around in a handbag, but it's about the same size as a trade paperback.  

Instant delivery of e-books is nice, but it's not compelling.  I buy several books at a time, and I rarely run out of stuff to read, so I never need a new book immediately.

E-readers really offer no features that make the format or the device indispensable.  There's no killer app here that makes an e-reader better than a book.  

8.  The price differential is disappearing.  Theoretically, e-books should wipe out conventional books because of efficiency.  A conventional book must be printed and bound and shipped and warehoused and often shelved and sold in a bookstore.  Each of those things costs money.  An e-book is an electronic file and distributing it is as trivial as sending an e-mail.

"Once you get used to location codes, you won't miss page numbers."

When Amazon first started selling e-books, it paid the same wholesale price for an e-book that it paid for a hardcover book, but it sold them at a loss, for $9.99.  Hardcovers were selling for $17 a couple of years ago, so an e-book cost about half as much as a hardcover.  Now, though, publishers have pushed back on Amazon's $9.99 pricing, and many e-books cost more.  Meanwhile, hardcover pricing has been pushed down to about $15.  So an $8 price difference has shrunk to around $2-3.  And for titles published in trade or mass-market paperback, the e-book price is often the same as the conventional-book price.

Some authors will take advantage of the costs cut by e-distribution to make money by selling e-books for very low prices.  But readers aren't indifferent among books.  Assuming that major publishers continue to distribute the content most people are interested in buying, they will probably hold the line on their interpretation of what a book is worth.  This means that you won't save much money buying e-books if you want big publishers' content.  

It's possible that some readers will skip major publishers' titles to buy $3 self-published e-books, but many readers will not be interested in exploring that territory.   I think a lot of people who own e-readers are likely to do what I've done lately; buy conventional books when the price difference is less than a couple of dollars.  This is because...

7.  E-book formats have significant disadvantages.  E-books are distributed on proprietary formats.  You cannot read Apple books on a Kindle.  You cannot read Kindle books on a Nook.  You can read all kinds of books on iPads or PCs or phones, but you need a special app for each format.  If you break your reader or decide to upgrade to a newer device, you must buy a new one from the same vendor or your old books will be incompatible with the new device.  If your vendor goes out of business, your software may no longer be supported.  You cannot sell or lend or give away an e-book when you finish reading it.

These are things people like to do with their books, so, to that extent, e-books are less convenient than conventional books.  This inconvenience is tolerable when the e-book costs half as much as the same title in hardcover, but that may not be true if the difference is only a dollar or two.

6.  Books never run out of batteries.  The iPad lasts ten hours on a battery charge, and, as anyone who uses electronics knows, those batteries degrade over time, so the battery becomes less efficient.  Batteries also tend to lose a charge if the device is left unplugged in standby mode.  Best case scenario: an iPad battery ill last long enough to read a novel and-a-half.  That kind of sucks if you want to take it on a weekend camping trip.  

Dedicated e-readers do a much better job as far as power consumption.  They only use power when they draw a new page on the e-ink screen, so they're off most of the time you are reading.  The batteries can last weeks depending on how much you read.  But there's still a chance you might pick the thing up and find it's out of juice when you want to read without being plugged in.

You never have to remember to charge a conventional book. 

Tomorrow: five more reasons.

My Characters Do What I Tell Them

A lot of writers like to talk about how characters do things that surprise them, or develop in unexpected ways.

I'm of the school of thought that a story is a thing you build, not a thing you discover.  When you write, you should know where you start, where you are going, and, at least roughly, how you are going to get there.  This approach helps you keep the plot tight and it keeps the characters consistent and logical in their behavior.

"So, lately, I've been studying the teachings of the Buddha."  

Characters don't have autonomy, and I think it's a mistake to treat them like they do.  They need to act in realistic and believable ways, and their actions need to be logical and supported by understandable motivations.  But they act in service of your objective, not the other way around.

The ever-helpful James Wood tells us that Nabokov scoffed at the idea of character autonomy; he viewed his characters as chess pieces or serfs to be moved around by the author. This is fundamentally true, but it's also a simple description of a complex process; the great trick of fiction writing is making contrived things appear organic.  Characters do what they do because the author and the plot demand that they do so, but, to the reader, the characters must appear to act for their own reasons.

The characters' arcs should be carefully planned to develop with the narrative and its themes.  If the character isn't who you expected him to be when you hit an important plot point, then the actions you need him to make to move the story forward might not make sense.  And if you're not sure who your characters are when you start writing, it's very hard to outline a plot with that seems character-driven.

That's not to say you shouldn't pay attention to how the characters are working, or shouldn't change them over the course of the writing process. Your characters and plots and themes all develop as you revise your story, and you should constantly be asking yourself if characters' actions are consistent, logical and spring from believable motivation.  

Not to piddle all over form rejection day, but...

You know the call?  That's the call I just got.  Details forthcoming once the deal is finalized.

He's so brooding and full of angst.

Honest Feedback

"Please feel free to query me with future projects."

Today the Rejectionist has invited everyone to blog about form rejections to celebrate the anniversary of her hilarious blog.  I've posted before about what form letters really mean, but many people still wish agents would provide real, personalized feedback.  But have you ever stopped to wonder what that would actually be like?


Probably not as great as you think:

Dear Author:

I very nearly sent you our standard form rejection letter in response to your query about your novel, RAINBOWS AT SUPPERTIME, an entirely odious work you have the temerity to describe as "literary."

The form letter would have said that I am extremely busy with current clients' manuscripts, and could not responsibly take on a new book. It would have said that my editorial contacts were less than ideal for this manuscript, and your work might better be handled by another agent. It would have said that our response indicated nothing negative about your work or its prospects in the marketplace. 

But that would have been a lie, and an irresponsible one. The fact is, even in a world where I had plenty of extra time, in a world where editors were far less selective in the works they were willing to publish, and where readers bought lousy books with indiscriminate abandon, I still would not represent RAINBOWS AT SUPPERTIME. You see, dear Author, I have standards.

In this business, where we must necessarily reject at least 99% of the manuscripts that come before us, it is sometimes difficult to explain exactly what it is we agents are in business to support. But it's not hard to explain what we are against. We are against RAINBOWS AT SUPPERTIME. It is offensive, both aesthetically and morally. The fact that it exists punctures my very faith in humanity.

Unpublished authors claim to like personalized responses to their submissions, and claim to desire helpful feedback. Here is some: stop submitting RAINBOWS AT SUPPERTIME. No honest or reputable agent will ever represent such a work. Offering this up to an editor would instantly destroy an agent's reputation in the publishing industry. Editors, you see, do not like to be insulted, and, frankly, neither do I. So stop wasting everybody's time.

Burn your book, Author. Destroy every copy. Erase it from your disk, format the drive, and smash your computer with a hammer.

And once that vital deed is done, in the name of all that is decent, stop writing. Stop writing at once. We in this profession hold sacred the power of the written word, and you befoul it. On some level, you have to know that RAINBOWS AT SUPPERTIME is awful. On some level, you must have been making some kind of sick joke when you submitted this. Really, Author, you should be ashamed of yourself. 

If this was the form letter, this is where I would invite you to query me with any future projects. But it is my sincere hope that you never write another word, and that I never hear your name again for the rest of my life.       

Best wishes,

Agent

The coming e-pocalypse

After Amazon's triumphal chest-beating earlier this week, prognosticators of the e-pocalypse are riding high.  Salon's Laura Miller imagines the future e-bookstore becoming a nightmare moonscape of noxious slush, as authors rush to e-publish their hideous and misshapen manuscripts on Kindle.  Literary agent Nathan Bransford says this won't be such a bad thing.  But he lives in such a place already.  I agree with Miller; if e-books substantially replace conventional books, things will get a lot worse for authors and for readers.

Social networking tools will help your book find an audience

My concern is not that technology will allow the denizens of the slushpile to disseminate their work.  It's easy for authors to do that through POD and vanity presses, and it's easy for readers to ignore these books.  The Internet is a vast slushpile.  Anyone can publish a blog that nobody will read.  I am doing it right now!

The problem, however, is that e-books could tear down the institutions that identify the gems among the slush; bookstores and publishers and agents. If e-books continue geometric growth in market share, and that growth comes at the expense of traditional book sales, bookstores will not survive. If you cut revenues in half, stores will no longer earn enough to pay staff or rent.  That's true for your favorite local indie store.  It's true for Barnes & Noble.  

If bookstores disappear, publishers cannot continue to exist in anything like their current form. Nationwide bookstore distribution is the key service publishers offer authors that isn't available elsewhere. If the bookstores die, publishers become near obsolete; their sales mechanism isn't structured to work in a marketplace where online vendors are the only accounts.  Unless they can adapt and find a way to differentiate their product from the slush on Amazon, they're not going to survive in an e-book world, just as major record labels have struggled financially as online sales killed off record stores.

In the current structure, authors who do good work differentiate from the slushpile through a very simple mechanism; they submit to agents.  The agents sift out the best stuff, and submit it to publishers, who sift it again.

If that infrastructure collapses, authors who would ordinarily go through traditional channels will be kicked into a world where they have to self-publish their work and try to connect with readers entirely on their own. 

But, unlike agents, media consumers aren't interested in searching for the rare gems among thousands of amateur submissions.  That's not their job, and they don't have time for it.  People defer to expert opinion, whether it's listening to whatever music the radio DJs are playing, or buying the books that are on the front table at Barnes and Noble.

It's likely that, in such an environment, a new tastemaker will emerge, possibly the Amazon "top reviewers." I kind of doubt their reign will be an improvement. 

I suspect, instead of being paid advances in a post-bookstore world, authors will have to pay for freelance editorial, freelance marketing and publicity and freelance cover design. They'll probably have to bribe reviewers under the table, or spend a lot of time working out deals to swap positive reviews to juice their ratings. Then, in most cases, they'll still get no sales.

This situation is not an improvement for anyone except authors who would self-publish anyway.  However, I still think Amazon is using the most favorable metrics to exaggerate its e-book numbers and I'm skeptical about predictions that e-books will eat the world.

Using informal language, accents and slang.

"Yousa racist!"

Informalities and conversational language are important tools in developing a voice.  If you cannot reflect the way people actually speak in your writing, your first person narration and dialog will lack verisimilitude and your third-person narration will feel emotionally distant from the characters and their stories.

At the same time, if you overdo the colloquial language you create a structural barrier between your reader and your story;  they can't understand what the characters are saying and they have no idea what's going on.

It's really not a sacrifice of verisimilitude to avoid excluding readers with confusing speech patterns.  All dialog and narration is essentially adulterated.  Although it sounds conversational in your head when you read it, good written dialog is different from the way people actually talk.  And anything the reader has to stop and read twice pulls them out of the story.  This is true of obscure slang terms, untranslated foreign-language phrases, run-on sentences, big SAT words, and things like references to minor characters that the reader might have to go back and look up

Adding a dialect or accent to a character's speech really doesn't change your goal much; you're still trying to capture speech that feels natural in a way that is clear on the page and doesn't present an obstacle for readers.

You don't want to add foreign language phrases that have to be translated.  You don't want to use a lot of slang when the meaning isn't clear from context.  You certainly don't want to represent somebody's accent by using a bunch of phonetic spelling.  In the same way you don't need to describe every part of a person's face and body to give a reader a sense of the character, you don't need to lay slang and accent too thickly onto your prose to give an impression of how people speak.  You can take a look at things like non-standard verb conjugations, peculiar pronoun use for non-native speakers and a few deliberately chosen foreign or slang words to really elicit a lot of voice without hanging up the reader.

Learning to utilize colloquial speech with a light touch is also useful to suggest the speaking patterns of people from backgrounds different than your own; if you apply a very thick coat of somebody else's accent or slang to a character, readers may find the portrayal offensive, especially if you get it a little bit wrong.

Of course, some writers incorporate unexplained slang and colloquial constructions into their writing with the express intention of excluding certain readers.  It's an expression of identity as a point of pride, and makes no concessions to readers from outside the author's subculture.  The narrative is not intended as an invitation for outsiders to peek into the author's world, so it doesn't matter if some readers don't understand what's going on; nobody invited them anyway.

Analyzing Amazon's Statements About Kindle Book Sales

Amazon announced its sales of e-books have outpaced hardcover book sales, at a ratio of 1.43 paid Kindle books per hardcover sold.

As is usual with information not required in corporate disclosures, this information is a little bit vague.  Apple's iPad sold 3 million units in 80 days, while Kindles sold 3.7 million in the entire year.  But Apple claims only 20% of the e-book market, while Amazon notes that it sells about three quarters of all James Patterson e-books, for whatever that information is worth.

Note that the ratio is calculated in a manner favorable to Amazon's boasts of robust e-book growth; the numbers are in books sold, rather than revenue.  Amazon is also measuring sales for its the entire e-book catalog against hardcovers, instead of comparing sales on a title-by-title basis.

  Hardcovers are prominent titles backed by current marketing pushes, so they sell a lot of copies.  But they're a pretty small proportion of the total number of titles in the bookstore.  Amazon stacked hardcover sales up against e-versions of the same titles, at lower prices, and e-versions of every book originally published in trade or mass market paperback format, and books published only in electronic format, and e-versions of older bestsellers that are no longer selling in hardcover.  Amazon excluded free e-books from the calculation, but 80% of Amazon's e-books are $9.99 or less, while hardcovers tend to cost $15 or more. And paid Kindle books include a lot of titles priced lower than $3 and often as low as $0.99.

If Amazon were to compare overall sales (instead of only its own sales) of bestselling hardcovers to electronic versions of the same titles, the numbers would show that hardcover books are the dominant format and e-books remain a small slice of the pie.

Many analysts believe Apple is poised to crush Kindle, and that e-books will grow by piggybacking on multipurpose technologies.  I'm skeptical of this myself; people buy Kindles to read books on, but they buy iPads for numerous other things, and, unlike dedicated reader devices, the iPad's ergonomics and screen are not designed specifically for book reading.

The reading experience on the iPad is severely adulterated because the screen is backlit, and therefore difficult to look at for long periods; people will not want to read on iPads for the same reasons they don't want to read books on their computer screens.  The iPad, with its powerful processor and backlit LCD only lasts ten hours on a charge, so you can't take it on a camping trip or a beach weekend unless you bring a charger.  The iPad screen is also hard to read in direct sunlight.. Kindle can go weeks on a charge, and traditional books are an astonishing technology that never needs to be plugged in.

Amazon made e-books attractive by paying publishers about $12.50 per e-book license, wholesale and selling them at a loss to customers for $9.99.  But, as the profit margins on reader devices fall, vendor subsidies on book prices will disappear as well, and publisher pushback to Amazon's subsidized prices has brought about the agency pricing model, where publishers set prices and most bestsellers cost $12.99.

E-book sales have grown in an environment where the same content available in hardcover for $17 cost $10 on a Kindle.  But when e-books are $12.99 and hardcover books are around $14,  I think readers will mostly prefer paper, and paper will remain the dominant format for major-publisher releases, although low-priced e-book only releases will create a lot of opportunities for indie and niche titles.