How To Think Like Your Agent

Ebooks are terrific and have changed almost nothing.

Yesterday, one of my favorite business writers, Umair Haque, tweeted this: “Books are a perfect technology. They need  no improvement; and they never will. ‘Ebooks’ aren’t books. They’re just text files.” I suspect even most of his followers scoffed.   Enjoy your horseless carriage, they may as well have replied. But as usual, beneath the bluster, Umair is onto something. 

If I had a nickel for every person who has asked me “haven’t ebooks changed everything?” I would have enough to buy a Kindle HD. I usually ask them, “what, exactly, do you think this would have changed?”

Let’s say you’re an agent; you’ve probably said to me, “They cost almost nothing to make.” It’s true. They’re about $2 less a unit to make than a physical book. When the profit on a book (when it’s profitable) is about a $1 a book, that’s pretty good. However, could also call that $4 a unit if you include the savings from storing and shipping them and destroying unsold copies. The problem with that second number is that it has no basis in reality. There may be a day when publishers will have to stop printing books, but that day is not now or the next few years. So until then, publishers are still storing books and destroying unsold copies. And in the short term, with print runs shrinking (and unpredictable!) the cost of printing those physical copies per unit is rising. It’s doesn’t quite wipe out that $2 per unit savings per ebook, but it comes pretty close.

If you’re a tech guy, you’ve probably said to me, “You can put so much more into a book when it’s on a device: videos, links, audio, and more pictures.” I respnd, “Oh, you buy a lot of enhanced ebooks?” No, no they don’t. No one does. If you wanted a multimedia version of big story, you can already have it. It’s called the internet. I constantly say to people: readers read books so they can read less, not more. When you choose to read a book instead of articles or stories, you’re hoping to trade quantity for quality. A good clean, forward propelled story will trump bells and whistles every time. That’s not some fancy pants opinion I’ve developed; it’s what the numbers say.

If you’re a consumer, you may have said to me, “It’s killing my local bookstores.” I don’t even ask when their local independent store closed, because they never went to it. But it was probably before 2009. Amazon started killing off physical bookstores long before the Kindle was introduced, with price clubs and Target quietly having a greater impact than you’d think. If you wanted to save a bookstore in your town, you’d be better off outlawing buying physical books online  than outlawing ebooks.

If you’re a writer, you may have said to me, “What about self-publishing?” Now we’re getting somewhere.  It’s now common for romance writers to start out self-publishing, quickly building up an audience via ebooks.  But what do those writers do when they get successful enough? That’s right, they sign contracts with publishers of physical books.  More importantly, though, the romance market is sui generis. These writers have long been ignored and underserved by publishing and the wider media. They already had built a microcosm these books were launched into. They already had a very large readership who knew exactly what they wanted and found $2.99 a bargain and not a red-flag of low quality. This is slowly spreading to other kinds of books, with a small amount of traction for horror, thrillers, mysteries, sci-fi, and even a little self-help. However, if everyone who has read the whole TWILIGHT series took a vow tomorrow to never buy another ebook, the ebook self-publishing market would turn from oasis to desert in a heartbeat. So again, maybe someday that change will come, but it’s not today.

This isn’t to say technology hasn’t changed publishing. It has, tremendously, and the industry isn’t dealing as well with it as it could. The same forces affecting the Gap and Wholefoods also affect book publishing, but none of that has to do with ebooks. 

I like having another way to buy books, but that’s all it is: Another way to buy books.