October 27-November 2 Issue 3781
COVER STORY
The Secrets of e-Book Success
Felicity Price and Rebecca Macfie report on e-books and how they are
revolutionising the literary world, with advantages for both readers and
writers. Also in this issue, Carroll du Chateau reports on New
Zealand’s first Social Entrepreneurs School and how it is helping
grass-roots people build businesses out of their ideas and passion; and
Diana Wichtel talks with Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville who says he hasn’t let period-drama fame go to his head. Last month I wrote a story about e-books and self-publishing - surprise! - and it was published in the NZ Listener for this week's edition. It included this piece on self publishing:
Print
is still prized above digital
Despite the rapid rise
in e-book popularity and the rush to self-publish online, every author I’ve
come across still prefers to see their book in printed form, to have and to
hold, to bury their nose inside the fold and inhale that wonderful combination
of new paper and printer’s ink.
In July, I published “In
Her Mothers’ Shoes” – a novel about the adoption triangle and mother-daughter
relationships – up on Amazon Kindle as an e-book. But I couldn’t quite come to
terms with not having a real book. When a growing number of people said they
couldn’t access it because they didn’t have an e-reader, in August I had it
printed as well.
As an e-book, it joins
the one million others apparently published for the first time in the last year
alone, along with the 20 million e-books available online worldwide, many of
them classics scanned and available free, many more on sale for under $5.
That’s the expectation
we have of the internet – most stuff is free or extremely cheap. Which begs the
question: how can readers expect to receive a quality product when it’s written
by amateurs with little or no editing and none of the quality control a
professional publishing house would impose?
The answer is simple:
the market decides. Currently, the market is deciding it wants paranormal and
erotic fiction and it doesn’t care if it’s not terribly well written. And the
market is coming full circle. Authors of this hugely popular stuff, who
couldn’t get their books published a few years ago and self-published online
instead, are now being offered eye-wateringly lucrative publishing contracts by
traditional publishers so they can sell the printed version in the high street
bookstores.
Increasingly, established
authors like me are learning not only how to get your creative masterpiece into
a professional-looking e-readable book form with an attractive cover, but how
to price it and then promote it, so it sells more than the usual 100.
Self-publishing has
become a huge industry, with hundreds of companies offering services to design
and publish your book. My initial foray has so far been limited to Amazon
Kindle – it offers special deals for short-term exclusivity, it covers the
majority of the e-book market, it already has my last three books listed, and
Amazon makes the experience (which is full of pitfalls and complexities)
comparatively easy.
Amazon also offers a
service called CreateSpace that allows you to self-publish your book in printed
form and buy as many copies as you want, complete with barcode and glossy
colour cover.
Photo Caption: Rejected by my publisher, “In Her Mothers’
Shoes” is now on Amazon and in bookshops. It tells the fictional story of two
mothers – my teenage birth mother who never even got to see me let alone hold
me before I was taken away for adoption, and my adoptive mother who had waited
for a baby to call her own for over ten years of marriage. And it traces the
adoptive child’s constant need to fit in, to find a sense of belonging.
