Notes from The Literary Consultancy's conference 2013 - Writing in a Digital Age: "A Remarkable Year of Change"
One of the comments at The Literary Consultancy's conference this year, was that 2012/13 has been a 'remarkable year of change' for publishing in general.
A panel of publishing professionals gave us their overview of the changes this year and how they are adapting.
Here are a few significant points that were made:
Gordon Wise, a senior literary agent at Curtis Brown talked a bit about how agents are now getting involved with assisted self-publishing for authors. The Amazon "White Glove" service was talked about. I had never heard of that before. Here's an article that explains a bit more about the idea behind it: http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/04/ama...
At the moment it seems to be geared towards helping authors who already have an agent becoming published with the help of the agency. I think the idea is also to help more well-known authors with maybe uploading their back catalogue of books, that many be out-of-print, onto Amazon.
Little is known about the "White Glove" service, but it's something that we may be hearing more about in the future.
***
Dan Franklin, who works at Random House Digital talked a bit about how the growth in self publishing has affected the larger publishing houses.
He said that e-books make up 23% of the publisher's revenue.
He said that authors demand much more from the publisher now because of the changing environment. They are working more towards author transparency, for example in respect of how royalties are paid. They are running social media tutorials for their authors because that is becoming more important for published authors.
Publishers are now obliged to provide more data to authors than before.
He also talked about how there are going to be mergers between publishing companies.
Interestingly, he believes that the words are more important when it comes to e-books and it seems the major publishers are not too concerned about evolution of the e-reading form.
***
Stefan Tobler, of And Other Stories, a small publisher, gave a bit of insight into the way they have met the challenges presented by the digital revolution.
The volume of e-books they sell is 5% of their total sales. They don't do heavy discounting on e-books. They were lucky that one of their titles Swimming Home was short listed for the Man Booker Prize. Before that, they had a book that was a bestseller, Down the Rabbit Hole.
They charge £10 for an e-book but with Amazon discounts their titles are about £4 in e-book format.
For more popular titles, Amazon will decide to discount to 20p - £1. What the publisher gets, it was stated, is much more than that. Amazon makes the decision to cut the e-book prices, not the publishers, yet Amazon pays the publisher much more than they get from sales.
***
A few other points of interest that came out of that panel discussion were:
1. Children's books are not very popular as e-books. Some people have said that they don't like the idea of children's books as e-books and prefer their children to have the experience of reading real books. One audience member said that she only buys children's books as e-books when travelling because it's easier to have the books on an e-reader rather than carrying lots of actual books.
2. The forecast is that sales of e-books will overtake paperback/hardback books by 2017.
3. One journalist in the audience stated that outside of London, in the UK high street bookstores are "practically dead".
I'll be posting more about this conference soon.
A panel of publishing professionals gave us their overview of the changes this year and how they are adapting.
Here are a few significant points that were made:
Gordon Wise, a senior literary agent at Curtis Brown talked a bit about how agents are now getting involved with assisted self-publishing for authors. The Amazon "White Glove" service was talked about. I had never heard of that before. Here's an article that explains a bit more about the idea behind it: http://paidcontent.org/2012/12/04/ama...
At the moment it seems to be geared towards helping authors who already have an agent becoming published with the help of the agency. I think the idea is also to help more well-known authors with maybe uploading their back catalogue of books, that many be out-of-print, onto Amazon.
Little is known about the "White Glove" service, but it's something that we may be hearing more about in the future.
***
Dan Franklin, who works at Random House Digital talked a bit about how the growth in self publishing has affected the larger publishing houses.
He said that e-books make up 23% of the publisher's revenue.
He said that authors demand much more from the publisher now because of the changing environment. They are working more towards author transparency, for example in respect of how royalties are paid. They are running social media tutorials for their authors because that is becoming more important for published authors.
Publishers are now obliged to provide more data to authors than before.
He also talked about how there are going to be mergers between publishing companies.
Interestingly, he believes that the words are more important when it comes to e-books and it seems the major publishers are not too concerned about evolution of the e-reading form.
***
Stefan Tobler, of And Other Stories, a small publisher, gave a bit of insight into the way they have met the challenges presented by the digital revolution.
The volume of e-books they sell is 5% of their total sales. They don't do heavy discounting on e-books. They were lucky that one of their titles Swimming Home was short listed for the Man Booker Prize. Before that, they had a book that was a bestseller, Down the Rabbit Hole.
They charge £10 for an e-book but with Amazon discounts their titles are about £4 in e-book format.
For more popular titles, Amazon will decide to discount to 20p - £1. What the publisher gets, it was stated, is much more than that. Amazon makes the decision to cut the e-book prices, not the publishers, yet Amazon pays the publisher much more than they get from sales.
***
A few other points of interest that came out of that panel discussion were:
1. Children's books are not very popular as e-books. Some people have said that they don't like the idea of children's books as e-books and prefer their children to have the experience of reading real books. One audience member said that she only buys children's books as e-books when travelling because it's easier to have the books on an e-reader rather than carrying lots of actual books.
2. The forecast is that sales of e-books will overtake paperback/hardback books by 2017.
3. One journalist in the audience stated that outside of London, in the UK high street bookstores are "practically dead".
I'll be posting more about this conference soon.
No comments have been added yet.
