Moving Toward Equilibrium

I recently paid $1.99 for a digital copy of Stephen King's Doctor Sleep. The offer came to me in a daily newsletter I receive in my inbox that routinely lists books by Nora Roberts, Dan Brown, Tom Clancy, and other mega-watt bestsellers. In many instances, I can get e-books written by these authors for just a buck or two.

Maybe five years ago, this practice was unheard of. Then, the Department of Justice did a little poking around into the lockstep pricing of certain e-books. Phrases like "price fixing" and words like "collusion" became part of the publishing lexicon. The end result of the DOJ's investigation was lower e-book prices. This was where the market was naturally heading with the proliferation of e-readers and the low costs associated with making e-books, but some companies didn't want to see their books selling for a few bucks.

Guess what? Readers (the market) prevailed...

I like to study the markets where you can find my stories, and the more that I study Amazon (the largest volume bookseller by far), the more I see the price of books stabilizing somewhere between $2.99 and $4.99. If you look at any genre top 100 list on Amazon, you'll see traditionally published bestsellers right next to independent authors--in many cases, with both books somewhere inside that price window.

We're seeing the quality of the artwork and packaging improve for independent authors, and it's often hard to distinguish at all between the products (with the notable exception of the established author's name on the front, of course). 

Heck, here's a listing of 300 books (!) that fall within that price range--many of them from well-known traditional publishing houses.

This marks an interesting trend, and one that I think bodes well for the next generation of independent and hybrid authors. I expect that more of the mega-watt bestsellers will experiment with self publishing, and that an entirely new collection of cooperative business practices will emerge between authors and publishers, who still hold a distinct advantage in engineering successful marketing campaigns for a book.

Readers should be excited about these trends. Given the cost of putting together a solid e-book, it stands to reason that they should be able to buy five or six quality books for the price of one traditionally published hardcover...

You Snooze, You Lose!

I posted an image of a draft of a cover for my second collection of short stories that will be released later this spring. The Silver Coast and Other Stories is a collection of reprints, along with a few newer stories, that were mostly written in 2010 and 2011.

Last night, I was looking at some reviews on BookReporter when, lo and behold, I saw this!

I was floored. I work with a very talented designer at the college. His business is called Canopy Studios. I'm not sure quite how many clients he works with, but he and I see each other all the time to talk about writing and design.

Zoe Sharp's title The Fifth Victim is being published in the United States by Pegasus. I asked my friend how it was possible that we'd both have the same image on the cover artwork.

"We've got access to similar resources, I suppose. What do you want to do?"

We can run that same cover. In fact, ours is actually a different image (it's a closer vantage point). We don't encounter any issues with legality if we just go with it (and the cover has changed some since I posted that link).

I felt kind of weird about it. I checked with my contacts at Distillations Press and they did, too. We're going back to the drawing board on the artwork. We'll take a fresh run at it.

But still, I was pretty stunned when I saw that cover. It's kind of cool seeing designers and publishers with limited resources (or at least I thought that was the case) playing with the big boys.

Oh, well. The key is to write good stories that can become entertaining books. I'll update the blog when I have a new draft and more information on a release for my second collection.

In the meantime, here's a look at the cover for a novella that will be released very soon. Distillations Press has novellas coming out from a number of different authors, in a number of different genres, with an eye toward publishing twelve of them in 2012. I've contributed the story Frozen and I'm working on the follow-up, whose title I'll write more about here when I get it approved.

Pay to Read Online

Here we are, writing and reading through an historically poor economy.

I spent over an hour today at the Duval County Fairgrounds, picking through books at the Friends of the Library Book Sale. It was $10.00 for a grocery sack filled with books, and I nabbed nineteen for that amount.

And let me say, the tables were picked. I couldn't find any good King titles. Not one Lansdale. No Richard Ford or Jeffrey Ford. No Neil Gaiman, no John D. MacDonald, no Chuck Palahniuk, no John Connolly.

The sum total? Four Michael Connollys, four John Grishams, one John Farris, one Robert McCammon, one Michael Crichton, three Elmore Leonards, one Peter Straub, one James Lee Burke, one Lawrence Block...so on and so forth.

Now, I've already written about the importance of supporting a magazine in these rough times. But, in case you need another look at what is amounting to the paramount discussion on where the world of writing is headed, take a gander at this article, and the discussion that ensues, at the Internet Review of Science Fiction.


I applaud all of the quality markets and editors who are making a very serious job of publishing work in this down time. I'm simply thankful for the hard work that editors devote to putting together a quality magazine (online or print), and I think they deserve a ton of credit for having the stones to do that.

As an aside, I just asked my wife if she'd be willing to subscribe to the Oregonian online, and we both agree that we would. The question then boils down to what that would mean. Could online subscriptions ever eclipse the economic thrust of advertising, or would content providers find some common ground between the two?


To be honest, I can't imagine paying much more than six or seven dollars a month to read the Oregonian online. That said, I can certainly live with that, while maintaining my subscription to the physical copy of the Florida Times-Union.

So here it is: would you pay for online content? If yes, how much?