Andrew Seiple's Blog: Transmissions From the Teslaverse - Posts Tagged "hugh-howey"

Have you read Hugh Howey's blog? No? Well, it's a good read. You can find it over at http://www.hughhowey.com/

Hugh Howey's a very successful self-published author. He wrote a book called Wool, that got snapped up by a publisher, but he was sitting on quite a successful career before he became a published author. His bio's on the site, it's worth a read if you've got a few minutes.

The man's good. He's also had mixed experience with his forays into trade publishing, and has been an outspoken proponent of self-publishing, ever since.

I bring it up because his September 6 blog post is all about the state of Trade Publishing, and it doesn't look too good to him.

http://www.hughhowey.com/a-peek-behin...

Now... he is a hell of a writer, but I'm not sure just how much of a perspective he's got on big publishing. So take his post with a grain of salt.

That said, I find myself in agreement with what he's saying. The big publishing companies, on the whole, seem to be dropping the ball with ebooks. Remember a few years back, when published ebook prices on Amazon rose inexplicably? That was due to a lawsuit put forward by a major publisher.

What was happening, was that Amazon was marking the prices on published ebooks down. "Aha!" you might think. "No wonder the publisher was upset! They were seeing smaller royalties!"

Funny thing was, they weren't. Amazon was cutting prices down, but they were paying publishers the full royalty amount for the uncut price.

Essentially, they were slashing their own profit margins, and taking a loss.

Why?

Simple. Other ebook vendors couldn't match their prices. Amazon gained market share hand over fist. And with more copies sold, publishing houses were making a hell of a lot of money from Amazon as well. Amazon had set up a win-win situation, for everyone but the other ebook vendors.

So... why the lawsuit?

That, my friends, is a very good question. Because what the lawsuit DID, was pretty much destroy the ebook sales for the major publishing houses. Amazon couldn't adjust the price, so the ebook prices rose to the jacked-up sums that publishing houses demand.

Trade publishing doesn't really seem to GET ebooks. With the exception of Baen, mind you, whose free library project has been a breath of awesome air.

The only explanation I can think of as to why trade publishing blew off their own toes, is that they are trying to limit Amazon's influence by any means possible.

But... well, it didn't work.

The first reason that it failed, was that Amazon had already gotten too much market share for a move like this to matter.

The second reason is because of people like ME.

I put out good quality ebooks for prices that are more of a match for the existing market. I'm just one guy, but I can put out a handful of books a year. And there are many, many people like me, or better than me. And now that the big name publishers are abandoning the field, we're filling the void.

The demand's still out there. Kindle Unlimited wouldn't exist if the demand wasn't there. And for now, at least, we're doing good business. And New York's not seeing a cent of it.

I don't share Hugh's certainty that publishing is going to collapse any time soon. But I am pretty certain that it's going to change. Heck, the grudging acceptance that self-publishing has achieved in six or seven short years is a sign of that, people acknowledging reality.

Hopefully the trade publishers can acknowledge reality, before it's too late. Much as I don't like some of their business practices, they're nice to have around. Besides, I haven't entirely given up my dream of being on bookstore shelves some day...