A long road to Mount Useful

A book is a book is a book

Books are books, right? It doesn’t really matter whether you read them on a phone or a Kindle, or whether you read the paper sort. A book is a book is a book.

And yes, a pulpy thriller is very different from a piece of classy literary fiction, but most passionate readers read widely – the pulpy thrillers and the literary fiction and the niche non-fiction and work in translation and other things that just happen to strike our eyes and our appetites at the right moment on a sunny day. That’s the best way to read.

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NEWSFLASH

We’ve extended the application deadline for Ultimate Novel Writing Programme and the Novel Writing Course to Sunday 22 March. The course starts on 1 April, so this is your last chance saloooooooon.

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At first glance, the market for books operates just as you might imagine.

Everyone sells in all formats

Ebooks are usually said to account for maybe 25% of the overall books market. I’m sceptical of those estimates, however, certainly as applied to novelists.

Self-publishers – who are overwhelmingly ebooky – don’t generally assign ISBN data to their books and those sales are excluded from most industry data. Further, the “25% overall” figure ignores vast genre disparities. Non-fiction (especially reference) is heavily print-led. So is children’s fiction.

Indeed, I had an argument just now with an AI-bot, challenging its summary and it acknowledged, “You’re right that once we look specifically at adult fiction and account for the “dark matter” of the industry—self-published digital sales—the picture shifts significantly … the adult fiction category is the one place where electronic formats (e-books and audiobooks combined) are arguably the primary way people consume stories today.”

So let’s say that for adult fiction, electronic formats account for half or more of unit sales. (Print, being more expensive, accounts for more than half of revenues.)

Naturally, trad publishers offer books across every major format.

All digital-first and indie publishers do the same.

It’s true that the digital-first folk can’t usually reach High Street bookstores, but they can easily offer print books through Amazon and Amazon is still by far the most consequential bookshop in the world, accounting for more than half of most trad publishers’ revenues.

So no matter how you publish, everyone can publish in all formats, with ease.

And yet …

Despite all this, the market for books cleaves into two vast hemispheres with stunningly few points of connection.

Tradworld looks to physical bookshops as its north star.

It thinks about print before ebook. It thinks about physical bookstores before Amazon. It thinks about critical acclaim from newspapers and other sources far more than it does about reader reviews on Amazon.

To be clear, this isn’t a dumb strategy. Tradworld publishers make very healthy profits. Ten or fifteen years ago, I thought there was a significant chance that traditional publishers would just fold up and shrink to a fraction of their previous size. They haven’t. They’ve thrived.

In the meantime, there’s a flourishing host of digital-first publishers (including self-publishers, all of whom are digitally-led.)

Those guys – the Digifirsters – don’t care about physical bookshops: they have no access.

They don’t care about newspapers and traditional sources of literary praise: they don’t get any love from those places and, even if they did, it would make no difference to sales.

They may or may not care about Apple and other non-Amazon bookshops, but really Amazon is the thing. The Digifirsters are all about selling on Amazon. They arguably have more in common with people who sell household wares on Amazon than they do with the fine old literary houses who once sold Jane Austen or Herman Melville.

And as I say, these worlds barely connect – or connect to a remarkably small degree.

You can literally sell 1,000,000 ebooks on Amazon and yet struggle to shift 20,000 paperbacks through physical stores.

You can sell 1,000,000 ebooks and yet have zero reviews in newspapers. Indeed, it’s stranger than that. If newspapers do end up writing about you, they’ll say things like, “the million-copy selling author that no one’s ever heard of.” By which they mean, “the million-copy selling author that we’ve never noticed because we were looking in the opposite direction.”

What’s more, Tradworld still operates in a universe where there are such things as nation-states. Woe betide you if you sell a British book to an American reader, or vice versa.

Digifirsters don’t really notice the existence of nation-states. Book covers, blurbs, marketing strategies and digital support in general cross continents, with barely more than a tweak or two along the way.

What this means for you

All this is my own long and winding road leading up to Mount Useful.

And on the tippy-toppy summit of Mount Useful there is a sign which says: “You need to know what kind of book yours is.”

If your book is better suited to the Digifirsters, you may as well skip over agents (to start with) and submit straight to the better digital-first houses. Or, if you approach agents, you should do so aware that those agents are not about to get you a trad deal with Penguin Random House. And, of course, if your book is naturally digifirst, then self-publishing is also an option, and a very good one.

If on the other hand, your book is better suited to Tradworld, then you need to go there (via an agent) without much pondering the alternatives.

There are some general pointers to how to understand your book.

Is it commercial genre fiction, with plot more important than prose style? It might well be digital-first.

Is it a standalone book, not part of a series? It might be more suited for trad.

Is it going to appeal to somewhat self-important newspaper reviewers? Think trad.

Do you see a properly global (albeit English-speaking) market for your book? If so, digital publishing beckons.

And so on.

These are hints, not final determinations. I said the two hemispheres connect to a remarkably small degree, and that’s true. But there are still plenty of books where you could choose to go either way, and your final judgement needs to take into account all the factors, including of course your own preferences.

And – as usual, this email is too long

And – as so often, it’s hard to set out reliable, general rules.

But –

Worry ye not, oh Friends of Jericho. We created a whole month of events to help you tease these things out for yourself. We thought for a very long time about what to call this group of events – we summoned brand advisors, logo designers, and a troupe of creative artistes from Mongolia – and, for reasons that now escape me, we ended up calling it GETTING PUBLISHED MONTH.

We have sessions on self-pub, on publishing with digital-first publishers, and on traditional publishing, as seen through the eyes of a literary agent. If you’re worried about which route is right for you, then you really need to join (and watch them back on replay).

The sessions are open to Premium Members only but – and here’s a tip you can use at any time – you can join us for just one month for £30 (using the “Flex” option). Just be sure to cancel your membership to prevent auto-renew. Or get 10% off pay-upfront and pay-monthly plans by using the hard-to-remember code GETPUBLISHED10 at checkout, offer ends 31 March.

That’s it from me. I leave you with a sea shanty and a small ginger biscuit.

FEEDBACK FRIDAY / Ask us anything

Simple Feedback Friday this week. Do you have any questions? Then ask. I’ll do what I can to chip in, but I hope the Hive Mind gives generously of its honeyed wisdom. Please title your post in this format: Genre / question / [anything else if you want]. That helps others navigate a big old forum with speed. When you’re ready, you can post it here.

Til soon.

Harry