Every once in a while my ePublisher sends out an email giving their thoughts on the state of ebook publishing. The latest one is pretty interesting. In a section titled “Reality Sets In” they talk about the glut of ebooks on the market:
With the filters removed, the market is flooding with dreck. It’s hard to get an exact number, but there are about 4 million ebooks on the market right now with nearly 100,000 new titles added each month. Shockingly, most will never sell a single copy. Of the remainder, only about 2% will sell at any meaningful quantity.
Unfortunately for many, self-publishing was sold as the easy path to notoriety and fortune; simply publish your story and readers will send you mountains of cash! But many found out the hard way that the only thing more demanding than publishers are readers and their unbridled reviews. A few discovered success, while the masses simply found a harsh dose of reality; this business is tough.
With time, this realization will thin the ranks as the hopeful become discouraged and opt for other pursuits.
They point out one way that Amazon (and other vendors) could help thin the ranks:
The available inventory of ebooks needs to be purged. At some point, natural selection will reign and the purge will happen.
We’ve already seen the first waves in the subscription services, and, at some point, resellers will also tire of being loaded down with dreck and will perhaps begin charging to maintain books in their system. Imagine the income Amazon could draw down if they charged $1 per month per title? Once one eRetailer does it, the others will follow. Then, all books that never sold a sustainable number of copies will leave the system and things will normalizefor a while.
It never made much sense to me that Amazon (and other vendors) would just store everyone’s ebooks on their servers for free. Sure, storage is cheap, but it costs Amazon something to store millions of books, from most of which they will never see a penny in revenue. I would certainly pay a storage fee if it would help get rid of the dreck.
My ePublisher’s advice to writers has been constant for a while: quality matters. So does productivity. Series are better than individual titles. Long, complex narratives don’t do as well as simpler narratives. Attention spans aren’t what they used to be. Readers have lots of other ways to entertain themselves–often on the same device on which they’re doing their reading. So get back to work.
Which I will now try to do.
