My report on the Rogue Digital Conference
This is my summary of and commentary on the Rogue Digital Conference, a presentation on digital publishing that was held today in Washington, D.C., by several folks in the romance fiction industry. The initial quotations in each section are from the official announcement of the conference. If I've misquoted or misinterpreted anything anyone said, I hope someone who attended the conference will correct me. (Incidentally, the conference was officially tweeted, so I assume that the organizers don't mind their remarks being reported in public.)
KASSIA KROZSER
"Kassia Krozser of Booksquare.com and a frequent speaker on the publishing circuit and the head of a new romance epublisher, Quartet Press, will start us off by focusing on digital issues, particularly the contrasts between traditional print publishers and digital publishers. She will be highlighting the efficiencies of the latter, challenges (and strengths) for the former, and questions authors (and maybe readers) should be asking. Kassia will touch on timing of reversion of rights, territorial rights in the worldwide digital audience, chunked content, and the spectre of being paid on the net."
One of the things Ms. Krozser emphasized was that you, the publisher, want to make it as easy as possible for readers to buy and access e-books, because otherwise, they'll search for illegal alternatives.
"You don't even want people to say the pirate word. Most of us won't, because we're human and we're basically lazy" - i.e., it's usually easiest to buy a legal copy. However, "DRM [Digital Rights Management] doesn't stop piracy." Instead, she believes, DRM encourages piracy because honest customers can't be bothered to go through all the hoops involved in dealing with a DRMed e-book. "[You need to] make it harder for them to Torrent than to pay five, six bucks for your book," she concluded.
Or as she put it later, "[Readers] don't have to sail on the S.S. Costing-Me-Money pirate ship."
As for chunked content, that's stuff that would be sold as part of a collection if it were in print, but can be sold separately if it's e-published, such as a poem or a story. Also, she says, serializations have made a comeback. "Charles Dickens will never die," she concluded.
You guys already know that I heartily agree - both as a reader and as self-publisher - with Ms. Krozser's views on DRM. My view on chunked content is that, while it undoubtedly provides more profit for the publisher, it's also more time-consuming. I've considered issuing my novels as several novella/novelette e-books (that's how I wrote most of them, after all), but every time I consider that possibility, I find myself asking, "Is it worth the amount of work I would have to put into creating six more front/back matters, six more layouts (in HTML, Kindle, and plain text), and six more struggles with the publishing interfaces at Lulu and Kindle?" So far, my answer has been, "No."
JANE LITTE
"Jane Litte from DearAuthor.com will share with you the five questions you need to ask your agent about the Google Book Settlement. She will discuss how evolving technology may affect the number of ereading devices in the future such as transreflective LCD screens, the popularity of netbooks, tablets, and dedicated readers and the rise of the smartphone."
She only got through the first part of her presentation before she ran out of time, alas.
Ms. Litte is currently running a series of posts at DearAuthor.com about the Google Book Settlement. I intend to read them, and I recommend them, sight unseen, because her conference presentation dealt in-depth with the nitty-gritty details of the settlement. It was a well-balanced presentation, not taking sides on whether the settlement was a good or bad thing, though she did say, "If the registry sounds a little frightening, it's because it is."
I asked in the question period whether the Google Books Settlement covered previously published e-books. Ms. Little offered a simple "yes."
[Edited to say: In e-mail to me, Ms. Little changed this to a "no." I've looked at the wording of the settlement, and it looks highly ambiguous to me, though it seems to lean toward a "no.]
SARAH WENDELL
"Sarah Wendell of SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com, co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms, and lecturer will discuss digital promotion and some self publishing numbers shared by authors as well as the results of the Smart Bitches eBook Reader Olympics."
"Bottom line: It costs money to make an e-book." That was Ms. Wendell's conclusion. To demonstrate this, she offered the cost figures of a self-published author: nearly $6000 to publish in print (by offset lithography) and nearly $4000 to publish e-books in nine formats. These figures, she says, show that e-publishing is cheaper than print publishing, but it still costs a lot.
She added a disclaimer that she knows that this particular self-publisher's experience may not be matched by other self-publisher's experiences. Well, yeah.
I hate to second-guess publishers' decisions; for all I know, this particular self-publisher took the correct route for her particular situation. I can say, though, that those cost figures are atypical. Even the venerable offset-lithography self-publisher Dan Poynter is now publishing some of his books by POD, and while I can't say that I've looked at every romance e-publishers' Website, I don't know of any that have published in nine different e-book formats. E-booksellers, yes, which is why they usually have automated software to take care of the horrendous job of producing e-books in that many formats.
Various decisions that this particular self-publisher made - for example, to bypass POD (which resulted in high printing costs and the pricy problem of getting the book onto Amazon), and to buy e-book creation software rather than to publish in e-formats that have free creation software, sent her budget skyrocketing.
By contrast, the route taken by most professional self-publishers these days (and many small presses) is to have their books printed POD through Lightning Source. Taking into account the ISBN cost, one can print a book through Lightning Source for less than two hundred dollars. Thanks to Lightning Source being owned by the wholesaler Ingrams, this will get you onto Amazon and other online booksellers. You need only give those booksellers 20% of the profit of each copy of the book, which leaves the self-publisher with a hefty profit per copy.
As for that self-publisher's e-book costs, I assume that most of her costs went to her editor and designer. If a self-publisher can't design, and can't find qualified volunteers to edit her, I'm all in favor of her hiring professionals. However, it's necessary to point out that this situation doesn't apply to all self-publishers. I have a background in design, I belong to a fiction community with many volunteer editors (and have edited professionally myself, which is useful as a doublecheck), I use public-domain and Creative-Commons-licensed artwork for my covers, and I was lucky enough to receive a layout program, InDesign, as a gift. (I'm told that there are free layout programs out there that will do a professional job.) Therefore, my cost for producing e-books is zero.
So I think the question of how much self-publishing costs depends on (1) the choices that the self-publisher makes and (2) how much of a Renaissance man the self-publisher is. The more specialized that a self-publisher is in their skills, the more outsourcing they will have to do. This is the situation faced by nearly all small-press and big-press publishers, which is why they have lots of costs.
I'm not going to downplay the benefits of hiring a specialist - specialization arose for a reason. But self-publishers do have more of a tendency to be all-round in their skills; that's why a lot of us got into this business. Therefore, it's really not a good idea to make simple comparisons between big/small-press publishing and self-publishing. One of the major differences between big/small-press publishing and self-publishing is that self-publishers are less likely to have to farm out work that other publishers would have to hire someone to do.
Having said that, I will add that I've encountered far too many self-publishers who ought to have hired people to be their editor and to be their designer, and clearly didn't. So all those news articles suggesting that self-publishing is free in the age of Lulu and CreateSpace and Amazon DTP? Those articles are lies, unless the self-publisher is already educated in publishing and has a network of volunteer editors to tap into (because it's very difficult to edit oneself without missing something).
ANGELA JAMES
"Angela James, executive editor of Samhain Publishing will present the digital publishing model and how it works along with the pros and cons of publishing with a digital publisher (aka why you may or may not want to go this route with your next book) with a straight look at the money."
Ms. James traced why the typical e-publishing payment structure (no advance, but higher royalties) arose, starting in the early 1990s.
At first, she said, there were very few readers of e-books, so the e-publishers simply couldn't afford to pay traditional advances. Then, as time went on, e-publishers were experimenting with risky new formats, such as erotic romance and m/m. As it happened, their experimentation paid off; niche genres sell well in e-publishing. But keeping the no-advance structure allows e-publishers to take the sort of risks with new authors or striking books that royalty-paying publishers simply can't afford to take.
So essentially, Ms. James concluded, anyone who says, "You should pay royalties," is saying, "You shouldn't publish the type of books you do." "Our business model cannot exist with a thousand-dollar advance," she said.
She went on to list in detail where the money goes. Usually 35-45% goes to the author. Usually 45-75% goes to the distributor--
"Yes," she says, "we've already gone over 100%."
Even by the most conservative figures, once all of the costs are added up, the publisher only collects 5% of the profit on the book, she says. (Which, I notice, is one-eighth of what the author is making.) How much profit the author makes varies by the author - anything from a few dollars on the low end to $170,000 on the very high end.
She was later asked how many copies Samhain had to sell of an e-book to make a profit. She said that it depended on the particular e-book, but typically it was 750-1000 copies.
My only comment is to point out that print publishers have traditionally funded their risk-taking books by making a lot of money out of their best-selling authors. (Alas, this model is dying, now that the publishers have been bought up by corporations that demand high profits from all authors.) So the reason that e-book publishers currently can't make much profit may have more to do with the state of e-publishing (fewer readers buying e-books than buy print books) than it does with e-publishers being more willing than print publishers to take risks. Perhaps that will change as e-publishing becomes bigger business; perhaps the day will come when the profits from best-selling e-published authors can be used to fund the risky e-books.
MAYA BANKS AND LAUREN DANE
"Maya Banks and Lauren Dane, two epublished and print published authors, are ready to share the hard numbers about digital publishing and why they've both chosen to keep one foot in the digital publishing pond."
Jane Litte, who moderated this part of the conference, urged anyone who reported on these authors' statements to place in context the numbers that the authors gave. I'm not sure how to do this except to summarize everything the authors said (other than the bits where my note-taking failed me).
Q: When do the authors make their main profit?
LD: 1-2 months.
MB: "Usually within the first day." Usually it's one thousand copies sold the first day, 500 the next two weeks, and after that the sales gradually plateau.
Q: Has the profit from any of your e-books ever equalled a typical print advance you received?
MB: "Yes, with almost all of them."
LD: Ditto.
Q: Do you continue to make money from backlisted e-books?
MB: Yes. "I worship Kindle every time I get my royalties."
LD: Yes.
Q: What about digital backlist profits versus print backlist profits?
MB and LD: The print backlist profits tend to be greater, but the e-book backlist sales are steadier.
Q: Why publish in digital format?
MB: "I like my monthly checks." Also, quicker publication times result in greater profits. Having a midlist by the time her first print book came out resulted in her having a bigger audience for the print book, and now her print readers are buying her e-books.
LD: Greater freedom for the writer in terms of book length and in terms of level of sensuality. She values the readers of her e-books, having started out in e-publishing. E-book readers tend to be very loyal.
Ms. Litte pointed out that a lot of the figures being discussed assumed that many fewer e-books would be sold than print books. She thinks that will change, and that within five years, digital publishing may make up 30% of the publishing world.
ABOUT THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CONFERENCE
It was standing-room only (and sitting-on-the-floor only) at the conference. Reportedly, 80-90 people showed up.
This was my first real-life contact with the romance community (I've been hanging out online with romance writers since 2005), and I was struck by how similar the conference attendees were to slashers. There was the same sort of immediate friendliness, cheerfulness, good humor, and informal give-and-take. (Also, the same relative lack of men in the room.) In fact, I left the Rogue Digital Conference regretting that I couldn't afford the RWA Conference; if this is typical of RWA-connected gatherings, the RWA Conference attendees must be having a fun time this week.
Incidentally, the first person to greet me - and who had to prod my poor memory for her name - was someone I knew from the Erotic Romance Writers Forum . . . and whom I'd met at the last Con.txt slash fiction convention. Sitting next to her was a woman who turned out to be from Romance Divas, and who recognized my name from my posts at the Diva forums. That was nice, having my name recognized. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the only chance I had to talk with anyone there - other than a brief chat with a representative from the publisher Avon, who happened to be sitting next to me - but overall, it was a fun and informative gathering to attend. I'm glad I had the chance to do so.
KASSIA KROZSER
"Kassia Krozser of Booksquare.com and a frequent speaker on the publishing circuit and the head of a new romance epublisher, Quartet Press, will start us off by focusing on digital issues, particularly the contrasts between traditional print publishers and digital publishers. She will be highlighting the efficiencies of the latter, challenges (and strengths) for the former, and questions authors (and maybe readers) should be asking. Kassia will touch on timing of reversion of rights, territorial rights in the worldwide digital audience, chunked content, and the spectre of being paid on the net."
One of the things Ms. Krozser emphasized was that you, the publisher, want to make it as easy as possible for readers to buy and access e-books, because otherwise, they'll search for illegal alternatives.
"You don't even want people to say the pirate word. Most of us won't, because we're human and we're basically lazy" - i.e., it's usually easiest to buy a legal copy. However, "DRM [Digital Rights Management] doesn't stop piracy." Instead, she believes, DRM encourages piracy because honest customers can't be bothered to go through all the hoops involved in dealing with a DRMed e-book. "[You need to] make it harder for them to Torrent than to pay five, six bucks for your book," she concluded.
Or as she put it later, "[Readers] don't have to sail on the S.S. Costing-Me-Money pirate ship."
As for chunked content, that's stuff that would be sold as part of a collection if it were in print, but can be sold separately if it's e-published, such as a poem or a story. Also, she says, serializations have made a comeback. "Charles Dickens will never die," she concluded.
You guys already know that I heartily agree - both as a reader and as self-publisher - with Ms. Krozser's views on DRM. My view on chunked content is that, while it undoubtedly provides more profit for the publisher, it's also more time-consuming. I've considered issuing my novels as several novella/novelette e-books (that's how I wrote most of them, after all), but every time I consider that possibility, I find myself asking, "Is it worth the amount of work I would have to put into creating six more front/back matters, six more layouts (in HTML, Kindle, and plain text), and six more struggles with the publishing interfaces at Lulu and Kindle?" So far, my answer has been, "No."
JANE LITTE
"Jane Litte from DearAuthor.com will share with you the five questions you need to ask your agent about the Google Book Settlement. She will discuss how evolving technology may affect the number of ereading devices in the future such as transreflective LCD screens, the popularity of netbooks, tablets, and dedicated readers and the rise of the smartphone."
She only got through the first part of her presentation before she ran out of time, alas.
Ms. Litte is currently running a series of posts at DearAuthor.com about the Google Book Settlement. I intend to read them, and I recommend them, sight unseen, because her conference presentation dealt in-depth with the nitty-gritty details of the settlement. It was a well-balanced presentation, not taking sides on whether the settlement was a good or bad thing, though she did say, "If the registry sounds a little frightening, it's because it is."
I asked in the question period whether the Google Books Settlement covered previously published e-books. Ms. Little offered a simple "yes."
[Edited to say: In e-mail to me, Ms. Little changed this to a "no." I've looked at the wording of the settlement, and it looks highly ambiguous to me, though it seems to lean toward a "no.]
SARAH WENDELL
"Sarah Wendell of SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com, co-author of Beyond Heaving Bosoms, and lecturer will discuss digital promotion and some self publishing numbers shared by authors as well as the results of the Smart Bitches eBook Reader Olympics."
"Bottom line: It costs money to make an e-book." That was Ms. Wendell's conclusion. To demonstrate this, she offered the cost figures of a self-published author: nearly $6000 to publish in print (by offset lithography) and nearly $4000 to publish e-books in nine formats. These figures, she says, show that e-publishing is cheaper than print publishing, but it still costs a lot.
She added a disclaimer that she knows that this particular self-publisher's experience may not be matched by other self-publisher's experiences. Well, yeah.
I hate to second-guess publishers' decisions; for all I know, this particular self-publisher took the correct route for her particular situation. I can say, though, that those cost figures are atypical. Even the venerable offset-lithography self-publisher Dan Poynter is now publishing some of his books by POD, and while I can't say that I've looked at every romance e-publishers' Website, I don't know of any that have published in nine different e-book formats. E-booksellers, yes, which is why they usually have automated software to take care of the horrendous job of producing e-books in that many formats.
Various decisions that this particular self-publisher made - for example, to bypass POD (which resulted in high printing costs and the pricy problem of getting the book onto Amazon), and to buy e-book creation software rather than to publish in e-formats that have free creation software, sent her budget skyrocketing.
By contrast, the route taken by most professional self-publishers these days (and many small presses) is to have their books printed POD through Lightning Source. Taking into account the ISBN cost, one can print a book through Lightning Source for less than two hundred dollars. Thanks to Lightning Source being owned by the wholesaler Ingrams, this will get you onto Amazon and other online booksellers. You need only give those booksellers 20% of the profit of each copy of the book, which leaves the self-publisher with a hefty profit per copy.
As for that self-publisher's e-book costs, I assume that most of her costs went to her editor and designer. If a self-publisher can't design, and can't find qualified volunteers to edit her, I'm all in favor of her hiring professionals. However, it's necessary to point out that this situation doesn't apply to all self-publishers. I have a background in design, I belong to a fiction community with many volunteer editors (and have edited professionally myself, which is useful as a doublecheck), I use public-domain and Creative-Commons-licensed artwork for my covers, and I was lucky enough to receive a layout program, InDesign, as a gift. (I'm told that there are free layout programs out there that will do a professional job.) Therefore, my cost for producing e-books is zero.
So I think the question of how much self-publishing costs depends on (1) the choices that the self-publisher makes and (2) how much of a Renaissance man the self-publisher is. The more specialized that a self-publisher is in their skills, the more outsourcing they will have to do. This is the situation faced by nearly all small-press and big-press publishers, which is why they have lots of costs.
I'm not going to downplay the benefits of hiring a specialist - specialization arose for a reason. But self-publishers do have more of a tendency to be all-round in their skills; that's why a lot of us got into this business. Therefore, it's really not a good idea to make simple comparisons between big/small-press publishing and self-publishing. One of the major differences between big/small-press publishing and self-publishing is that self-publishers are less likely to have to farm out work that other publishers would have to hire someone to do.
Having said that, I will add that I've encountered far too many self-publishers who ought to have hired people to be their editor and to be their designer, and clearly didn't. So all those news articles suggesting that self-publishing is free in the age of Lulu and CreateSpace and Amazon DTP? Those articles are lies, unless the self-publisher is already educated in publishing and has a network of volunteer editors to tap into (because it's very difficult to edit oneself without missing something).
ANGELA JAMES
"Angela James, executive editor of Samhain Publishing will present the digital publishing model and how it works along with the pros and cons of publishing with a digital publisher (aka why you may or may not want to go this route with your next book) with a straight look at the money."
Ms. James traced why the typical e-publishing payment structure (no advance, but higher royalties) arose, starting in the early 1990s.
At first, she said, there were very few readers of e-books, so the e-publishers simply couldn't afford to pay traditional advances. Then, as time went on, e-publishers were experimenting with risky new formats, such as erotic romance and m/m. As it happened, their experimentation paid off; niche genres sell well in e-publishing. But keeping the no-advance structure allows e-publishers to take the sort of risks with new authors or striking books that royalty-paying publishers simply can't afford to take.
So essentially, Ms. James concluded, anyone who says, "You should pay royalties," is saying, "You shouldn't publish the type of books you do." "Our business model cannot exist with a thousand-dollar advance," she said.
She went on to list in detail where the money goes. Usually 35-45% goes to the author. Usually 45-75% goes to the distributor--
"Yes," she says, "we've already gone over 100%."
Even by the most conservative figures, once all of the costs are added up, the publisher only collects 5% of the profit on the book, she says. (Which, I notice, is one-eighth of what the author is making.) How much profit the author makes varies by the author - anything from a few dollars on the low end to $170,000 on the very high end.
She was later asked how many copies Samhain had to sell of an e-book to make a profit. She said that it depended on the particular e-book, but typically it was 750-1000 copies.
My only comment is to point out that print publishers have traditionally funded their risk-taking books by making a lot of money out of their best-selling authors. (Alas, this model is dying, now that the publishers have been bought up by corporations that demand high profits from all authors.) So the reason that e-book publishers currently can't make much profit may have more to do with the state of e-publishing (fewer readers buying e-books than buy print books) than it does with e-publishers being more willing than print publishers to take risks. Perhaps that will change as e-publishing becomes bigger business; perhaps the day will come when the profits from best-selling e-published authors can be used to fund the risky e-books.
MAYA BANKS AND LAUREN DANE
"Maya Banks and Lauren Dane, two epublished and print published authors, are ready to share the hard numbers about digital publishing and why they've both chosen to keep one foot in the digital publishing pond."
Jane Litte, who moderated this part of the conference, urged anyone who reported on these authors' statements to place in context the numbers that the authors gave. I'm not sure how to do this except to summarize everything the authors said (other than the bits where my note-taking failed me).
Q: When do the authors make their main profit?
LD: 1-2 months.
MB: "Usually within the first day." Usually it's one thousand copies sold the first day, 500 the next two weeks, and after that the sales gradually plateau.
Q: Has the profit from any of your e-books ever equalled a typical print advance you received?
MB: "Yes, with almost all of them."
LD: Ditto.
Q: Do you continue to make money from backlisted e-books?
MB: Yes. "I worship Kindle every time I get my royalties."
LD: Yes.
Q: What about digital backlist profits versus print backlist profits?
MB and LD: The print backlist profits tend to be greater, but the e-book backlist sales are steadier.
Q: Why publish in digital format?
MB: "I like my monthly checks." Also, quicker publication times result in greater profits. Having a midlist by the time her first print book came out resulted in her having a bigger audience for the print book, and now her print readers are buying her e-books.
LD: Greater freedom for the writer in terms of book length and in terms of level of sensuality. She values the readers of her e-books, having started out in e-publishing. E-book readers tend to be very loyal.
Ms. Litte pointed out that a lot of the figures being discussed assumed that many fewer e-books would be sold than print books. She thinks that will change, and that within five years, digital publishing may make up 30% of the publishing world.
ABOUT THE SOCIAL ASPECTS OF THE CONFERENCE
It was standing-room only (and sitting-on-the-floor only) at the conference. Reportedly, 80-90 people showed up.
This was my first real-life contact with the romance community (I've been hanging out online with romance writers since 2005), and I was struck by how similar the conference attendees were to slashers. There was the same sort of immediate friendliness, cheerfulness, good humor, and informal give-and-take. (Also, the same relative lack of men in the room.) In fact, I left the Rogue Digital Conference regretting that I couldn't afford the RWA Conference; if this is typical of RWA-connected gatherings, the RWA Conference attendees must be having a fun time this week.
Incidentally, the first person to greet me - and who had to prod my poor memory for her name - was someone I knew from the Erotic Romance Writers Forum . . . and whom I'd met at the last Con.txt slash fiction convention. Sitting next to her was a woman who turned out to be from Romance Divas, and who recognized my name from my posts at the Diva forums. That was nice, having my name recognized. Unfortunately, that was pretty much the only chance I had to talk with anyone there - other than a brief chat with a representative from the publisher Avon, who happened to be sitting next to me - but overall, it was a fun and informative gathering to attend. I'm glad I had the chance to do so.
Comments