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: Ebook musings
My article on the Best of BC Books Online project is now at the Globe and Mail online. Actually, it has been online since February 10th, but I wasn't notified until today.
I've been thinking a lot about ebooks and epublishing lately. At the launch party for the Every Day Fiction anthology a few weeks ago, I got to know the inner circle of Every Day Fiction. To my surprise, they're based right here in Vancouver. The site runs basically as a hobby, with revenue from advertising banners. About one-third of the readers visit the site, another third subscribe to the RSS feed and the remaining third read via email subscription. This latter detail surprised me, as I would have thought that would not be a preferred method. This did persuade me to set up email subscriptions on my other blog.
While I was interviewing people about the ebook publishing, I told a person who works in publishing that the market for erotic romance is apparently booming, despite the commonplace that people don't like to read off screens. She said that this was because romances are sold in large quantities and not reread.
This got me thinking about how much the medium influences the message. Certain "low" genres are thought to be disposable, the kind of thing that is read once, superficially, and disposed of: romance, science fiction, action/adventure, mysteries. You don't keep them on your shelf as a visible sign of your taste and literarcy. That means that the media for these works can be cheap, portable and disposable. E.g. the paperback book, printed on cheap pulp, with an eye-catching cover for visibility on the retail shelf (sex and/or violence generally works).
The cheaper medium has other effects as well. Both the reader and the publisher can take a risk on new products because the cost of each unit is less.
And yet, these "low" genres can grow to have the characteristics of "high" genres: favorite auteurs, collectability, rereading, critical and academic attention. The medium itself can be popular because of material characteristic, like those who collect pulp novels for their lurid covers. I don't know about romance readers, but I know that science fiction and fantasy readers love to collect and accumulate books, the supposedly disposable paperbacks.
I can't back this up, but I have the strong impression that paperback books have gotten a lot more expensive and a lot thicker over the past couple of decades. At least part of that can be chalked up to inflation, but I think they're pricing themselves out of accessibility to the casual reader, and they're also becoming too long for the casual reader.
Years from now, the entire panoply of respectable literature may have developed around the supposedly ephemeral ebooks published by Ravenous Romance and Ellora's Cave. There could be retrospectives and collections of "cover" art and people writing their theses on what these books say about gender relations in the early 21st century and so on.
I'm preoccupied about this because I've been thinking a lot about the nibble I've had for a book from an erotic romance publisher. Would I follow up on this, even if it meant having to follow the genre conventions of erotic romance ebook: this many words, so many sex scenes with this degree of explicitness, a HEA ("happily ever after") ending? Yes, if it meant getting my name out. Compare that with slogging through the regular publishing industry or slogging through self-promotion of self-published, print-on-demand work. Attaching to a brand and a ghetto of the publishing world nevertheless means attention, means getting noticed at all. Literary greatness and respectability can come later.
Tags: fiction, publishing, qor, writing
My article on the Best of BC Books Online project is now at the Globe and Mail online. Actually, it has been online since February 10th, but I wasn't notified until today.
I've been thinking a lot about ebooks and epublishing lately. At the launch party for the Every Day Fiction anthology a few weeks ago, I got to know the inner circle of Every Day Fiction. To my surprise, they're based right here in Vancouver. The site runs basically as a hobby, with revenue from advertising banners. About one-third of the readers visit the site, another third subscribe to the RSS feed and the remaining third read via email subscription. This latter detail surprised me, as I would have thought that would not be a preferred method. This did persuade me to set up email subscriptions on my other blog.
While I was interviewing people about the ebook publishing, I told a person who works in publishing that the market for erotic romance is apparently booming, despite the commonplace that people don't like to read off screens. She said that this was because romances are sold in large quantities and not reread.
This got me thinking about how much the medium influences the message. Certain "low" genres are thought to be disposable, the kind of thing that is read once, superficially, and disposed of: romance, science fiction, action/adventure, mysteries. You don't keep them on your shelf as a visible sign of your taste and literarcy. That means that the media for these works can be cheap, portable and disposable. E.g. the paperback book, printed on cheap pulp, with an eye-catching cover for visibility on the retail shelf (sex and/or violence generally works).
The cheaper medium has other effects as well. Both the reader and the publisher can take a risk on new products because the cost of each unit is less.
And yet, these "low" genres can grow to have the characteristics of "high" genres: favorite auteurs, collectability, rereading, critical and academic attention. The medium itself can be popular because of material characteristic, like those who collect pulp novels for their lurid covers. I don't know about romance readers, but I know that science fiction and fantasy readers love to collect and accumulate books, the supposedly disposable paperbacks.
I can't back this up, but I have the strong impression that paperback books have gotten a lot more expensive and a lot thicker over the past couple of decades. At least part of that can be chalked up to inflation, but I think they're pricing themselves out of accessibility to the casual reader, and they're also becoming too long for the casual reader.
Years from now, the entire panoply of respectable literature may have developed around the supposedly ephemeral ebooks published by Ravenous Romance and Ellora's Cave. There could be retrospectives and collections of "cover" art and people writing their theses on what these books say about gender relations in the early 21st century and so on.
I'm preoccupied about this because I've been thinking a lot about the nibble I've had for a book from an erotic romance publisher. Would I follow up on this, even if it meant having to follow the genre conventions of erotic romance ebook: this many words, so many sex scenes with this degree of explicitness, a HEA ("happily ever after") ending? Yes, if it meant getting my name out. Compare that with slogging through the regular publishing industry or slogging through self-promotion of self-published, print-on-demand work. Attaching to a brand and a ghetto of the publishing world nevertheless means attention, means getting noticed at all. Literary greatness and respectability can come later.
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