Three years ago, when the Amazon Kindle was little more than a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye, I wrote an article for The Walrus called “Apocalypse Soon: The future of reading.” In it, I lamented how my book publishers had prevented me from releasing my debut novel online, and predicted an e-book revolution, the rise of e-readers, widespread e-piracy, the demise of many publishers and booksellers, and, ultimately, a world in which readers would decide whether to pay for books after reading them.
Now seems like a good time to follow up. Not least because my predictions appear to be coming true. E-readers like the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad (with its associated iBooks app) are spreading everywhere; the market share of e-books has already eclipsed audiobooks, and continues to grow like bamboo; local bookstores are vanishing by the hundred, Amazon has gone to war against publishers over e-book prices, and Borders is teetering on the brink of bankruptcy. Meanwhile, the publishing industry has been sufficiently shaken that hardly a day goes by without one of its dinosaurs penning another tedious navel-gazing essay about this terrifying brave new world. (Most such claim that piracy won’t be a significant factor, from which I conclude that the essayists in question are either smoking crack or in deep denial.)
But the important question isn’t What does this all mean for the book business? What matters is What does it mean for books? (Though authors, and aspiring authors — a group which, so far as I can tell, includes approximately half the human population — tend to also tack on What does it mean for us?) Answers are hard to come by. My friend Jo Walton recently wrote a blog post about her personal experience with online publication entitled “Some actual information about ebooks”; it ends with, “I’m posting this because it’s not handwaving or airy speculation, it’s actual data, of which there seems to be something of a shortage.”
She’s quite right. And so, in a similar vein, I’d like to tell you about my squirrel.
In 2006, I wrote a 300-page novel called Beasts of New York about a squirrel in Central Park. Yes, a squirrel. No, it’s not a children’s book. My agents loved it, and sent it out to dozens of publishers. They did not love it. Who, they quite reasonably asked, is the market for this book? Alas, that was a question without an answer.
In 2007, I wanted to release my debut novel Dark Places online under a Creative Commons license, so that anyone would be permitted to download it, copy it, and give away as many copies as they liked. My publishers would not permit this. (Yes, publishers, plural; the American, British, and Canadian e-book rights were sold separately. And yes, that’s insane.) So I decided to release Beasts of New York online instead. Boldly forth I went, into the digital maelstrom.
The initial results can most charitably be described as a crashing failure. I built a spiffy-looking web site, thanks to a graphic designer friend and my own software skills. I posted a chapter every day, as all the how-to-blog articles advised, hoping that serialization would grow an audience. I emailed every media contact I had, hoping for reviews and coverage. And…
Nothing. I was the author of four previously published, well-received novels which had sold tens of thousands of physical copies; my work freely given online attracted fewer than 200 readers. The audience did seem to really like the book, which was gratifying; but their numbers did not increase. A year after I released BoNY online, it had been read by perhaps 500 people. I wrote it off as a sad, failed experiment, and stopped paying any attention to it.
And then.
In January 2009, someone uploaded a copy of BoNY to a website called Feedbooks, which quickly became the Internet’s primary source of free e-books. According to BoNY‘s Feedbooks page, it has since been downloaded almost 10,000 times from that site alone. Throw in Manybooks, scribd, and similar sources, and I went from 500 to 15,000 readers in the space of a year. Nowhere near bestseller territory — but given the approximate 5 percent market share that e-books command, not bad at all. (What happened? I have a two-word, one-gadget explanation: the iPhone.)
In September 2009, I sold Beasts of New York to The Porcupine’s Quill, one of Canada’s most prestigious literary presses. They didn’t buy it because it had become an Internet hit; they bought it because they liked it. But its online success sure didn’t hurt.
Lessons learned, for aspiring authors:
• There’s no money in online publishing — yet. Between Amazon’s Kindle platform, Apple’s iBooks, and Google Books, there may be some money, eventually; but for now, you release a book online to grow your audience, not to get rich.
• If you love your book, set it free. Don’t charge for it. Release it under a Creative Commons license that explicitly allows readers to copy it and give it away. Half-measures — making the text available only as JPGs on your website, to pick one egregiously awful example — are worse than nothing.
• Not least because no one wants to read your book on a computer. They want to read it on the subway, on their phone, their Kindle, or some other mobile device. So make it available as a download formatted for e-readers or smartphones. (Feedbooks does this automatically.)
• But don’t just dump a lump of text on people. Do a little basic typesetting (and consider specifically typesetting for smartphones, as a friend of mine did for BoNY), and copyedit, copyedit, copyedit.
• Be patient, and recognize that you may not succeed. In fact, you probably won’t. Success in the arts is always a crap shoot; you can improve your odds, but you can never guarantee a win. That’s something that hasn’t changed between the old world and this brave new one.
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