Over the
past several months, I have received numerous requests from readers of our
E-sheets, as well as from other interested parties in and out of the
publishing world, to provide some assessment of our progress. After all, we
are blazing a trail into the wilds of new technology as it relates to books,
and people want to know if we are making successful headway. Well, here it is.
It's been
more than a year since I plunged with both feet (and wallet) into this great
adventure of using technology to create greater accessibility and awareness of
my novels and to support the future of my new works.
The first
major step of this process entailed the reacquisition of nearly all of my
publishing and subsidiary rights in North America and in the thirty foreign
languages in which my books have been translated and published. The next (big)
step was to take all this varied material and digitize it to make it computer
ready for action.
As a
result of this effort by our publishing company Stonehouse Press, my novels
are once again available for purchase in the English language in every
conceivable format, through eBook downloads and print-on-demand technology in
trade paperback and hardcover everywhere in the world where books are sold.
My books
can be purchased through Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Powell's,
Borders, BooksAMillion, Fictionwise, PreviewPort,
and through many other online sites, and can be ordered from brick and mortar
bookstores everywhere. Our next thrust will be to link with sites and stores
in other countries to provide them with our previously translated works. We
will begin with French, German, Spanish and Portuguese languages, then follow
up with our Asian translations.
Before
this enterprise with Stonehouse, many of my books were out-of-print and could
only be found rummaging around The Strand or at your favorite used bookstore.
Now they are once again selling thousands of copies a year. Not bad. In
addition, the list of places to find our books and eBooks keeps getting
bigger. Stonehouse eBooks are now being sold on MobiPocket.com, eBookAD.com and soon on Galaxy Library.
Print-on-demand versions are becoming available through Barnes and Noble and
as part of a major new initiative by R.R. Bowker's "Books in Print."
Bowker, the leading provider of bibliographic information in North America,
has partnered with Booksurge to make available Booksurge's innovative
on-demand book printing service to publishers of all sizes, and Stonehouse is
right there at the forefront of this exciting new development.
No other
author with my output -- 25 novels published by major publishers worldwide and
spanning three decades -- has ever done this before. Part of the reason for
this is probably the substantial start-up costs, though they are getting
smaller and more manageable everyday. Part of it undoubtedly is also having
the time, energy, foresight, and entrepreneurial ambition to endeavor to
preserve and prolong the value of your work. The work of the author has
changed. The writing is the first part of the job, and this becomes the second
part.
But for
an author, what other choice is there? Why aren't they all doing this? The
normal shelf life of an author of novels is miniscule. Indeed, most authors
whose time of popularity has passed celebrate their former successes with
glass-enclosed household shrines of their now out-of-print books or with
tattered editions on library shelves, most of which will be headed to
recycling bins, if they haven't already.
Out-of-print,
by the way, is merely the measure of a book's salability at a moment in time.
It is a snapshot. A publisher's decision to remove a book from its backlist is
a business decision based on storage limitations, and, of course, the absence
of sufficient sales and a lack of appetite for promotion. The worth of the
book as an enduring object of interest or quality does not enter into the
equation. The fact is that only posterity, in its mysterious wisdom, can ever
make that judgment.
While we
are now selling books at a steady pace and have refined a proprietary tracking
program to assess results title by title, we are just beginning the
promotional effort to add heft to our awareness level. We are also embarking
on a major effort to restock the public library shelves with hardback copies
of my work and to begin to populate the libraries with eBooks as well.
Several
companies are taking aim at allowing library patrons to not only read eBooks
online at the library, but to check them out and take them home like
traditional books to be read on a home computer or handheld device. Two major
companies, Adobe Systems and Baker & Taylor, are just now beginning to
Beta test and roll out new technology systems that promise to do just this,
and the books from Stonehouse will have a major presence on both.
We are
hopeful that Stonehouse Press will become the matrix for authors throughout
the world seeking to control their publishing destiny. As the creation of our
elaborate and ever-expanding infrastructure continues, we will soon begin
experimenting with other distribution programs for newly published works, and
perhaps begin to work with other prominent writers in order to give them the
benefit of our acquired knowledge in 21st century publishing options.
What has
become increasingly apparent is that our venture has opened a tiny window of
hope to those authors who look toward a sales future that will benefit
themselves and their progeny unhampered by a publisher's whims and caprices.
Their books, like mine, will never go out of print again. The value of
author's "estates" will vastly increase as their books continue to
sell well into the future.
Admittedly,
the efficacy of the various awareness factors such as advertising, publicity
and promotion have not yet been fully developed. It is one thing to be posted
somewhere in a vast data bank and quite another to break out from the pack. Elements of economics, luck, and
imagination will have to come into play. There will be no magic bullet, but
hard slogging lies ahead.
Weathering
the bumps, knocks and detours along this road, especially for a pioneer, will
not be easy. Electronic books, for example, have received some horrendous
press this year, most of it inaccurate, since the demand for eBooks rolls
merrily along in tandem with the creation of more user-friendly devices.
On the
other hand, the other arm of the publishing technology revolution --
print-on-demand -- is developing economic muscle at an accelerating pace.
Print-on-demand literally means creating each book one at a time. For several
years, POD had been negatively associated with "vanity" publishing
-- in other words, if your book wasn't good enough for a real publishing
company, why, you could pay to publish it yourself! (The insinuation being
that only your mother and your closest friends would ever bother to read it).
However, as the increasingly low margins and tricky economics of the book
business are becoming more apparent in the new economy, even major publishers
are beginning to understand the benefits of and to utilize print-on-demand
technology: out of print books previously impossible to find except in dust
bins and second-hand book stores can now easily be kept active, printed and
shipped; niche books that might only sell in the hundreds or low thousands can
be profitable; and there is less guess work regarding ordering and returning
large numbers of books. All of Stonehouse's books are currently available as
print-on-demand and can be ordered online from any book retailer.
The fact
is that the publishing business is in the midst of a revolution. No one knows
quite how it will evolve, including -- and perhaps especially -- the big
publishers. But then, their interest is parochial, dealing with their own
evolution and survival. The authors have their own agenda, and they will
eventually recognize that it does not always coincide with the interests of
the major publishers.
At some
point, in my opinion, there will be a rapprochement of sorts between authors
and publishers that will change the face of the publishing industry as it
exists today. At this juncture, distribution is still king and the big
publishers and chain booksellers continue to be the most powerful force in the
industry. But their roles are continuously being reassessed.
While it
is true that other authors have not, as yet, jumped on the bandwagon, I
continue to believe that the technology for providing content, meaning all
forms of communicating via the printed word, fiction, non-fiction, poetry and
articles, will one day be an author's paradise, both in economic terms and in
the essential creator's dream of personal fulfillment.
In the
end, content, as always, will rule. Who provides this content and how it will
be disseminated is the central question that will determine our future.
- Warren Adler
