Has amazon devalued the written word?

[Tim]

Jud (Disney Diva) wrote: "Are you a death eater?"

No. Bacon.

[Jud]

Oh of course, that merry band of bovineiphilics

[Patti (baconater)]

Tim wrote: "Jud (Disney Diva) wrote: "Are you a death eater?"

No. Bacon."

That's my line Tim!

[David]

Tim wrote: "David wrote: "Although, as Stephen Leather once said (paraphrase), isn't it better to sell several thousand at 99p, then to sell a few hundred at £6.99, or whatever?"

No."

This is - I think - his article about it. He does say the same sort of thing elsewhere if you want to explore more of his blog.

http://stephenleatherpublishingebooks...

[Will]

But the fact is that you have to sell several thousand, isn't it?And that's not easy.

I've just seen my sales report for the last calendar quarter for the Banned Underground series, and I'm quite pleased that for the first time the unit sales are into 3 figures. But mostly it's unreal (ebook) sales, so the royalties would only pay for a decent meal out.

[David]

Will wrote: "But the fact is that you have to sell several thousand, isn't it?And that's not easy."

That's true. It does help for him that he was a big seller before ebooks came along.

But there is also the economics of ebooks in that it costs no more to 'make' thousands than it does hundreds, unlike actual physical books.

[Will]

For the Big 5, the print cost is peanuts. Literally. With offset printing, it can be less than a pound per book. Their investment is in the editorial and artwork, which remains a constant.

[Jim]

Patti (baconater) wrote: "Our Dark Lord!

I love it!"

Well it's his picture, all he needs is a white cat. It's a brilliant picture

[Darren]

Consider Terry Pratchett. His ebooks are a fiver a pop. He drops the price of Pyramids by 50% and it outsells everything but the new one due out soon.

Price is pretty important to consumers, but only if your books and blurbs are worth it in the first place. Concentrate on that and worry about pricing later.

Oh, and tbe 77p first book in a series does work. I can almost see the wave crest passing through the Man From UNDEAD series sales figures as readers sucked in by the first book move on to the next.

[Andrew]

Worked on me, Darren :)

[Marc]

Darren wrote: "Consider Terry Pratchett. His ebooks are a fiver a pop. He drops the price of Pyramids by 50% and it outsells everything but the new one due out soon.

Price is pretty important to consumers, but but only if your books and blurbs are worth it in the first place. Concentrate on that and worry about pricing later...."

You've missed an earlier crucial stage. Making readers aware your book exists for them to come and browse you blurb and sample Look Inside... That is the great conundrum.

[Patti (baconater)]

Darren wrote: "Consider Terry Pratchett. His ebooks are a fiver a pop. He drops the price of Pyramids by 50% and it outsells everything but the new one due out soon.

Price is pretty important to consumers, but o..."

But if the first one was crap, nobody would buy the second.

[R.M.F.]

Patti (baconater) wrote: "Darren wrote: "Consider Terry Pratchett. His ebooks are a fiver a pop. He drops the price of Pyramids by 50% and it outsells everything but the new one due out soon.

Price is pretty important to c..."

50.Shades.Of.Grey. And. It's sequels!

Rubbish books are no barrier to success, unfortunately.

[David]

R.M.F wrote: "50.Shades.Of.Grey. And. It's sequels!

Rubbish books are no barrier to success, unfortunately."

I wish my books were that rubbish.

[Marc]

Rubbish by whose judgement? So many sales are not to be sniffed at. Are people really dismissing the critical faculties of so many readers who bought that book? Same thing Dan Brown. An author may find fault with aspects of the craft or the language, but their very success attests to merit.

[David]

Marc wrote: "Rubbish by whose judgement? So many sales are not to be sniffed at."

You do raise an interesting point here.

People like James, Brown, Archer, etc sell metric shed-loads of books, so people must like them despite the derision from what you might call the literary establishment.

Yet the lit-estab wet themselves with excitement every year over who is and isn't on the Booker list, which sell relatively few.

So there is a great deal of disconnect between what some regard as a good book and what the rest (the majority) of us actually buy and read.

I was only thinking too the other day that I can't remember anyone in this group even mentioning the recent Booker at all, despite us all reading the odd book or two between bacon sandwiches (with brown sauce, obviously).

[Patti (baconater)]

Actually thought about buying it but ten quid?

I don't think so.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Luminarie...

[T.D.]

This is a great conversation - and one I have at work, with a large measure of frustration, several times a year. I produce weekly and monthly author interview programs that air nationally in the U.S., and my bosses love to emphasize coverage of the "big names" and the "award winners," while I'd rather spotlight the books by so-called nobodies that are a great read.

I've found in the many years I've been doing this that there's an agenda setting effect in the publishing industry: readers are told what they're supposed to consider good; they go out and buy what they're told to; the increased sales fuel the message that the book(s) must be good - and thus, an award-winner is born, or rather, made.

To be fair, most of these award winners/best-sellers are good, but that's most often true when the author is new to all the lists. Once a star is born, a disturbingly high amount of material is a rewriting of what's already been said, with a new cover slapped on it. I can't tell you how many times I've had to read an author's an entire body of work only to find not just pages but large sections of chapters from their first or second book repeated verbatim in book four or five. But the reader doesn't know that until after buying the book.

I could rant on about the publishing industry for hours, but I have to get back to work.

I did love the series I was lucky to produce from London earlier in the year, with quite a few of Britain's award winners. There's some re-writing on the eastern side of the Atlantic too, but not nearly as much as in the States - at least of what I've read.

[David]

Patti (baconater) wrote: "Actually thought about buying it but ten quid?

I don't think so."

You would think they'd see the sense in not price-matching the ebook to the hardback price - but then these are publishers.


I think its odd that the media gives so much attention to the Booker, who relatively few read, but ignore things like say the big SF prizes and things like the Theakston's that much more people - judging by the readership figures - would be more interested in.

[Marc]

Literary prizes are really for the publishing industry to generate more interest and sales around the listed books.

[Tim]

Marc wrote: "Rubbish by whose judgement? So many sales are not to be sniffed at. Are people really dismissing the critical faculties of so many readers who bought that book? Same thing Dan Brown. An author may ..."

I quite like Dan Brown.

I've no idea about Jeffrey Archer or EL James because I haven't read any. For all I know, 50 shades might tickle my hidden wossname.

I do know that I've tried several times to read a Booker winner, and have universally found them to be pretentious rubbish. I 1*'d Life of Pi, and I'd do it again: Too much pretentious bollocks, not enough pie.

[Marc]

Tim wrote: "Marc wrote: "Rubbish by whose judgement? So many sales are not to be sniffed at. Are people really dismissing the critical faculties of so many readers who bought that book? Same thing Dan Brown. A..."

That is your opinion. You can certainly declare it to be pretentious, but I don't think by any standard it can be dismissed as rubbish.

I'm really surprised at how dismissive fellow authors are of the work of successful authors, whether commercial fiction or literary fiction. What I think you mean is their books aren't to your taste

[Patti (baconater)]

A couple years BK (before Kindle) I ordered a load of prize winning books and worked my way through them.

I found very few of them to not be to my taste.

And that's the first time I've heard a man refer to it as a 'wossname'. ;)

[Jim]

The only booker winner I ever read was 'Schindler's ark' (It was Schindler's list in the US and so that's what they called the film) because it was the only one that looked if it might appeal

[Marc]

The year Howard Jacobsen won the Booker, I read 3 of the 6 shortlisted (not Jacobsen's) and they were excellent reads. The last 2 years there hasn't been a Booker title that sounded my sort of thing. The judges each year are different and this seems to make the choices vary wildly from year to year. That year I read those 3, the list was very daring, I think "Room" by Emma Donaghue was on it, but it was still frustrating to me that they gave it to Jacobsen who it seems to me writes the same book every time and that it was more an award in recognition of his career rather than the particular book that won it.

[David]

Looking at the list of winners and runners up, I'd say I've read a fair wodge of them, about half to two-thirds, especially from the time I was keen on literary fiction in the 70s & 80s.

But, the media, especially the BBC & the posh papers often talk as if these are the only genre of books out there, and the Booker is the only book prize, and so these are the only ones worth taking seriously, and yet they are a minority interest, especially when compared with the big sellers.

[Marc]

David wrote: "Looking at the list of winners and runners up, I'd say I've read a fair wodge of them, about half to two-thirds, especially from the time I was keen on literary fiction in the 70s & 80s.

But, the ..."

that's absolutely true David, which is why it's possibly no bad thing that the cultural elite who curate and gatekeep entry to literature will be swept away in the self-publishing revolution, or at least their role diminished.

But it's also worth pointing out that the literary fiction brigade get their (un-)fair share of mud thrown over them by the world of genre literature - called snobbish, elitist, looking down their noses at genre, writing unreadable books or books that no-one wants to read etc etc. It's a false division between commercial & literary fiction, but both sides seem happy to indulge in the tribalism of it. To me it's all just fiction....

[David]

Marc wrote: "It's a false division between commercial & literary fiction, but both sides seem happy to indulge in the tribalism of it. To me it's all just fiction...."

I've never really liked the idea of genre - I can see it has some marketing value apparently, but I find it more trouble than it is worth. I don't care if a book is classed as SF, literary, thriller, erotica, cheese porn or bicycle horror, or whatever division or sub-division of whatever genre and I don't understand people who say things like: 'I only read SF, or romance, or books about depressed parakeets in Luton' or whatever.

Which, to meander back to the point is why I find the Booker so uninteresting as a concept when it narrows all this wide variety down by ignoring the majority of it - especially the books people like - by excluding them and then claiming that such and such is the best book of the year.

[Will]

And that, David, is why the Guardian's 'Not The Booker' could develop into something really interesting. I read a few of the nominated books, and they did take me out of my comfort zone.

[David]

Yes, I've seen that a few times, looks interesting.

[Jim]

Will wrote: "And that, David, is why the Guardian's 'Not The Booker' could develop into something really interesting. I read a few of the nominated books, and they did take me out of my comfort zone."

I'm afraid I read books to chill and relax. If I want to be 'stretched', 'taken out of my comfort zone' or to be exposed to the 'horrors of real life' I've merely got to step outside and get on with my real life. So that way at least I find genre labels useful, I don't end up buying squid porn by accident ;-)

[David]

Jim wrote: "I don't end up buying squid porn by accident"

Yes, it is always best to stride into the shop purposefully when you buy it.

Er... so, I've been told.

[Gingerlily - The Full Wild]

Is there actually a shop where you can buy squid porn??

[David]

Gingerlily - Expendable Redshirt wrote: "Is there actually a shop where you can buy squid porn??"

Yes. of course.

Blenkinsop's Ye Olde Squid Porn Emporium on the High Street in Macclesfield. Purveyors of bespoke squid porn for the connoisseur since 1789.

[Gingerlily - The Full Wild]

Has anyone told Patti?

[David]

Gingerlily - Expendable Redshirt wrote: "Has anyone told Patti?"

I assumed she already knows everything.

[Gingerlily - The Full Wild]

Not everything. She's too busy eating bacon.

[David]

But bacon is the only true path to wisdom and knowledge.

[Jim]

David wrote: "Blenkinsop's Ye Olde Squid Porn Emporium on the High Street in Macclesfield. Purveyors of bespoke squid porn for the connoisseur since 1789. ..."

I hate to be controversial here but I think if you check you'll find that the shop was originally founded by the last Duc de Coigny who fled France in 1791, was a dancing master for six months before meeting up with Salvador Blenkinsop, notorious aquarist and 'man about town' in Kerridge and Bollington. It was their partnership which led to the founding of the shop in 1793 when they were run out of Buxton for rank indecency

[R.M.F.]

Marc wrote: "Rubbish by whose judgement? So many sales are not to be sniffed at. Are people really dismissing the critical faculties of so many readers who bought that book? Same thing Dan Brown. An author may ..."

I like Dan Brown - at least there's a story in there, and a mad monk, of course.

But 50 shades? C'mon :)

Success is no marker of quality, and quality doesn't always lead to success. I hate to Godwin this thread :) but a certain madman with a dodgy fringe and a moustache sold quite a lot of books as well.

[R.M.F.]

Patti (baconater) wrote: "A couple years BK (before Kindle) I ordered a load of prize winning books and worked my way through them.

I found very few of them to not be to my taste.

And that's the first time I've heard a ma..."

When Jonathon Ross had Pierce Brosman on his show, once, he pronounced it Pierce Wossman, so a man has done it before! :)

[R.M.F.]

Jim wrote: "Will wrote: "And that, David, is why the Guardian's 'Not The Booker' could develop into something really interesting. I read a few of the nominated books, and they did take me out of my comfort zo..."

Squid Porn? 50 shades of ink? Terrible joke as usual :)

[David]

Jim wrote: "I hate to be controversial here but ... [] when they were run out of Buxton for rank indecency"

Ah, yes, rank indecency - that usually involves doing something rather rude with a taxi driver, knowing what they are like in Buxton, there was little surprise they had to be run out of the place, especially as the taxi driver was indisposed for several weeks afterwards.

As for the squid, it could never look at a private hire vehicle without blushing for years afterwards.

[Marc]

R.M.F wrote: "Marc wrote: "Rubbish by whose judgement? So many sales are not to be sniffed at. Are people really dismissing the critical faculties of so many readers who bought that book? Same thing Dan Brown. A..."

But 50 shades? C'mon :)

Success is no marker of quality, and quality doesn't always lead to success. I hate to Godwin this thread :) but a certain madman with a dodgy fringe and a moustache sold quite a lot of books as well.


so you are dismissing the judgement of all those millions of readers as wrong then?

[Jim]

Just to say that if his sales cannot have been that good or he wouldn't have had to go into politics.

Strangely enough, in 1970 our school still had a copy of Mein Kampf in the school library. I think they felt that it was a historical document and those reading it might then understand why so many old boys of the school had given their time to making sure the writers political aspirations came to naught.

[Jim]

David wrote: "Ah, yes, rank indecency - that usually involves doing something rather rude with a taxi driver, knowing what they are like in Buxton, there was little surprise they had to be run out of the place, especially as the taxi driver was indisposed for several weeks afterwards.

As for the squid, it could never look at a private hire vehicle without blushing for years afterwards. ..."

It got awfully embarrassing, people do stare so when a squid gets on the bus :-(

[Marc]

Jim wrote: "David wrote: "Ah, yes, rank indecency - that usually involves doing something rather rude with a taxi driver, knowing what they are like in Buxton, there was little surprise they had to be run out ..."

well how many seats does it take up? There's always full and frank exchange of views about how many tickets the squid should be purchasing

[Gingerlily - The Full Wild]

And then theres the problem of having to clean it up afterwards.

[Jim]

I know that there fundamentalists claim that the squid doesn't have a fundament so in theory is always standing. On the other hand the pragmatists point out that when the squid gets on, everyone else goes upstairs, so it should pay for all of the seats.
Me, I take the existentialist position that the squid is only there if you allow it to worry you, therefore those who avoid the squid should pay for the tickets

[Will]

Jim wrote: "I know that there fundamentalists claim that the squid doesn't have a fundament so in theory is always standing. On the other hand the pragmatists point out that when the squid gets on, everyone el..."

So you employ one of douglas Adams' SEP Fields, then?