The 'death' of eBooks is greatly exaggerated

After a lot of consideration and evaluation of the facts at hand, I'm thinking that I will probably stop publishing hard copies of novels in the near future.

I know that there are a ton of articles claiming that books are making a comeback and that eBook sales are slumping, but I'm not seeing the proof. My best-selling book is AFTER EVERYONE DIED. It was downloaded over 20,000 times in the past 18 months. That's a pretty staggering amount. I'm humbled by that stat. It is far more than I probably deserve and far more than I ever figured I would get. More than that, this book has helped keep my family afloat in my period of unemployment. It has been extremely important to me.

In that same eighteen month period, it has sold less than 200 hard copies. People do not want hard copies of small-time books.

When you see those articles touting the alleged decline on Ebooks, what they're not telling you is more important than what they're telling you. The two biggest things that hamper eBooks' popularity, as far as I can tell, is this:

--The majority of people who consistently read eBooks do so with a dedicated eReader (such as a Nook or Kindle). Reading on a back-lit tablet does not work. Unfortunately, the majority of eBooks being sold are being bought by people who try to read on tablets (or their phones!). I don't fault anyone for buying a tablet. I have one; they're great. However, when it comes to being a reading device, they are awful. My Nook tablet looks like a book. It reads like a book. The difference between dedicated readers and tablets is night and day. If you're serious about reading, get an eBook reader.

--When big companies price out eBooks, they overprice them. Considering how easy and fast it is to format an eBook, for a company to try to charge $15 or $20 for an e-copy is ridiculous. Many times, if you pick up a hard copy on the day of release, it's already marked down. Add to that the various discounts that people get (such as the Barnes & Noble members club discount), and the hard copy actually becomes cheaper than the eBook. How can you charge more for an eBook than a hard copy?

--Some people talk about the need to charge eBooks, and how that never happens with a real book. You know what does happen with a real book, though? You finish it. And then you have no other books. I have yet to have that happen with my Nook. Both formats have positives and negatives.

There are various other arguments against eBooks, but they boil down to personal preference issues. I was a big "real book" guy until I bought my first Nook. Once I realized I could carry 400 books at once.

When it comes down to it, for small fish like myself, as much as I really enjoy having hard copies of my books, I'm not seeing the return on them that I need to keep producing hard copies. I have no idea how to fix that, so I think eBooks are the only way to go.

I have made friends with many, many authors on Twitter. I read their posts, I see them shilling their novels. I see a microcosm of the world of publishing every single day, and it's staggering. There are so very many books. There are more books than consumers, and that's a fact. The supply and demand portion of the publishing world is heartbreaking. I hear from best-selling authors how hard it is to move paper copies of books. Even best-selling books don't move a ton of paper.

As a writer, as someone who has wanted to be a novelist literally his entire life, there is nothing more life-affirming to me than being able to point to a physical book on a shelf and say, "See that? I did that." It is all I ever wanted, but unless I can build an audience that demands hard copies, the effort to put them out is extreme. So, I think the only path forward now is to concentrate on eBooks. It's a little disheartening to me, but I think that's the only sane course of action.

I will still put out a hard copy of LONG EMPTY ROADS, and I will probably put out hard copies of the LORD BOBBINS novels, if there is demand for it, but for the other things I'm writing, they're probably going to be eBook-only.

Realistically,
--Sean