The ebook revolution part 1

2012-02-16T17:42:00.001Z

Some of my biggest fans came to Midwinter Lucie first as book collectors, after it was hotly tipped as a future collectable in Book and Magazine Collector in 2008. Many went on to actually enjoy the book, but ask now why Firestorm is only being published as an ebook.

Well, there are plans to do a printed version, but only when the trilogy is complete in 2014. It might be published as a three volume set, or possibly as a huge (1600 page) single epic. The three books exist well on their own, but the whole story arc does require the three books to be read as a single 'event', even if a year or two apart. Who knows.

Anyway, for me (and my publisher) ebooks were an obvious choice.

There are several huge obstacles to getting into conventional print for a small-press author.

Books are expensive to manufacture, even in runs of 2-3,000 as Midwinter was. Ebooks have no manufacturing costs (the costs for setting one up is about the same as for typesetting a print book, so there is no difference there).
Bookshops are dying. There are still some very good independent booksellers around, but the chains have made themselves more or less irrelevant as far as new authors are concerned. High discounting, reliance on lucrative deals with the major international publishers and more and more top-down management has made it virtually impossible for small presses to get good coverage. If you want a half-price cookbook or a D-list 'sleb memoir, they're fine, but for finding something genuinely new, forget it.
Bookshops take huge discounts from publishers (without adding much in the way of value to the buying experience for readers). Chains typically insist on 55-60% discount before they will even consider a title for stock - and for print-runs of under five thousand (which most small presses do) this makes the financials impossible.
It is virtually impossible to sell outside of the publisher's 'home' territory, which meant I was completely unknown outside the UK. Even now Barnes and Noble, who claim to be the world's biggest bookseller, refuse to deal with anyone who does not have a US address (astonishingly, this even applies to their Nook [ebook] division!). Does that inspire confidence in their range?

Ebooks have none of these disadvantages. I can sell as easily in the US, Australia or Singapore as I can in the UK. Amazon has made sure of it, and iBookstore is getting there. The bookshops took a big hit ten years ago when Amazon started to undercut them. Some played to their strengths, most just raced for the bottom. With the advent of truly global publishing, Amazon is banging the final nails into the booksellers' coffins.

And there's more.
Paperback fiction sales were down 30% post-Christmas year on year, but this reduction was more than off-set by ebook sales.
One million Kindles were sold at Christmas 2010.
Ebook account for 26% of adult fiction sales and 29% or sci-fi (according to digital book world expo).

This is something I will return to now and then, but for now, I think it's obvious why I was happy to go with an ebook-only release. There's a direct connection between me, the author, and you, the reader. No salaried 'book buyer' is filtering your choices, making it impossible for you to obtain a book because either you don't live in the same country as me or because my publisher was not prepared to pay £20,000 for in-store promotion or sell books at a loss.

Firestorm: Descent

2012-02-16T17:11:00.002Z

Firestorm: Descent, the first volume of the Firestorm trilogy, is finished, published and just waiting to go through the necessary systems on Amazon and iBookstore before going truly 'live'.

My two previous titles (Midwinter Lucie (2008) and The Black Pear (2009)) are still going strong, but it was time to release the shackles of writing for teen readers and let my imagination flow more freely. So Firestorm is a much more adult-orientated read, Decent being the first of a planned trilogy of time-travel horror novels to be published over the next few years. Other books will come out in between volumes of Firestorm (very much like Stephen King does with the Dark Tower series).

For a full synopsis of Firestorm and some of the mythology behind the stories, visit www.daxov.com. (The name Daxov will become slightly less opaque when you do. If you read the books, it will become much clearer again.)

Here we go again...

2012-02-16T17:06:00.000Z

OK, after four years of not blogging at all, I decided to delete the old posts and start again. Hopefully a bit more regularly this time.

This will be a periodic stream-of-consciousness relating to books published, books in progress and publishing thoughts in general.

Come back often, come back seldom, or keep in touch via www.daxov.com, the home-site of my new series of adult sci-fi/horror novels, FIRESTORM.

So, here we go again...

Alan Porter's book blog

The ebook revolution part 1

Firestorm: Descent

Here we go again...