★ The New Statesman on Déjà Vu Sales

A heads-up from Ben Johncock tells me that no less than Nicholas Clee has been writ­ing in the New Statesman about the trans­ition from tan­gible to elec­tronic books. (I’ve been strug­gling to find an offi­cial link to the piece; here’s an unofficial-looking one.)

It’s fair to say that Nicholas Clee is tra­di­tional in his perspective.

Ebooks are des­troy­ing this eco­nomic model. …Will 99P become the optimum price for an ebook? If so, who is going to make any money out of pub­lish­ing or writ­ing books for such a market?

I agree with the first point here. The ebook is a dis­rupt­ive entity. But any­body who has been around since the early 1990s has seen, in the music industry, an example of elec­tronic mer­chand­ise des­troy­ing an eco­nomic model based on the phys­ical. Perhaps ‘des­troyed’ is the wrong term to use in this con­text. The mar­ket is still there. But how much growth does the CD mar­ket have? How much in the hard­back market?

The second point speaks to a fun­da­mental issue of busi­ness. One should not ask ‘How are all the employ­ees of the leg­acy pub­lish­ing industry — from recep­tion­ists to the CEO — going to main­tain their income?’ because this leads to the prob­lem that afflicts all pub­lish­ers: they decide as a group, impli­citly or expli­citly, to act as a car­tel. Prices are kept high. This cre­ates situ­ations where the elec­tronic ver­sion of a book costs the same as or more than the tan­gible. Try explain­ing this to a con­sumer. It’s hard. ‘We need these prices because of the way our busi­ness was set up’ makes for poor advert­ising copy.

Now for the part that men­tions your humble correspondent:

As for the fin­an­cial implic­a­tions — on the Me and My Big Mouth blog, the nov­el­ist Ian Hocking … has con­fided his sales fig­ures and rev­en­ues from self-publishing ebooks with Amazon. Two of them have sold more than 8,000 cop­ies. This is a fig­ure that many con­ven­tion­ally pub­lished nov­el­ists would envy. But Hocking’s profit to date is only just over £300 (his rev­enue is just over £2,000).

Had Hocking chosen a con­ven­tional pub­lisher, he might well have sold fewer cop­ies, but he would have earned more, thanks to the publisher’s advance.

Yes, my profit is just over £300, but this fig­ure is essen­tially mean­ing­less (the rev­enue is more inform­at­ive) as a proxy for suc­cess. First, I’ve ploughed vir­tu­ally all the money from the first book into the second, and so on. ‘Profit’, then, in this con­text, rep­res­ents the amount that I’ve decided not to spend. I might have adjus­ted that up or down arbit­rar­ily. Second, my sci­ence fic­tion nov­els con­tinue to sell in greater num­ber each month, and unless I can find other book-related expendit­ure, this ‘profit’ fig­ure will rise sharply. Overall, I believe it was more sens­ible for me (as a writer nobody has heard of) to price low and sell in quant­ity than opt for the pre­ferred option of a leg­acy pub­lisher, which, per­haps, is to price high and sell few.

The ques­tion of the pub­lisher advance is an inter­est­ing one. It would cer­tainly be in my short term interest to land a large advance, which I may not earn out. But, if I may say, the industry-wide beha­viour of dol­ing out these advances is one of the reas­ons the busi­ness model is unsupportable.

To return to this ques­tion: Is 99p too cheap for a book? I really don’t know. If you’re employed by a busi­ness that requires the new Ken Follett book to be £16 or more, you’ll prob­ably think it’s too cheap and con­sider me an upstart who is under­cut­ting you. If you’re an indi­vidual, cre­at­ive per­son who is put­ting out a product and is in con­trol of the con­sumer exper­i­ence, you will think care­fully about the impact that your price will have on the per­cep­tion of the product. I think 99p for Déjà Vu rep­res­ents good value. After all, you can get it from a lib­rary for free, and that doesn’t lessen its worth. Neither does pick­ing up a second-hand copy from the church bazar.

Last word from Mr Clee, which requires no com­ment bey­ond a brief nod to its past tense:

An industry that paid unre­cov­er­able advances for books, and then pub­lished them in formats that the pub­lic thought too expens­ive, had its eccentricities.