The Blogging Luddite can’t be too large a demographic, can it?
I feel like a heel and a bit of a hypocrite every time I have to take a pass on electronic galleys and PDFs sent by publicists and authors. After all, they’re just playing the game, but me? I may write in an electronic medium, but I hate reading (books) on my laptop. I just don’t do it and I haven’t got one of those cool e-reading devices, but I’m beginning to feel my high-ground slip away. The luxury of choosing between print and electronic formats can't be taken for granted any more as a swelling tide of authors and titles being made available exclusively in an electronic format are changing things. I’d love to get my hands on something like Choke on Your Lies by Anthony Neil Smith, but I can’t. Literally can not. After four novels he’s released his fifth only digitally, (plus a previously unavailable book co-written with Victor Gischler To the Devil, My Regards). It’s not just for out of print books (like the just made available early Charlie Stella or Vicki Hendricks backlist) or those only available from a foreign press any more, and it's certainly not the wasteland of literary naval-gazing that certain publishing elites would have you believe. And since an author will make about the same amount per unit as he/she would by selling a mass market paperback, it's not simply the realm of vanity press, it makes good business sense.
Allan Guthrie would find that hard to argue with. In his own words, "since publishers have become increasingly risk averse, a lot of excellent new (and indeed previously out of print) crime fiction is available in that (electronic) format, sometimes exclusively." Guthrie's started a new blog specifically about e-Crime books (Criminal-E) and when I asked him about his own experience with e-publishing, he hit me upside the head with this little statistic, "My ratio of ebook sales to print sales over the last three months is fairly staggering: 450 to 1. And that's with only two e-books available and seven books in print."
Can John Grisham claim that? Probably not, but for many mid-list or cult writers, it's become an attractive alternative route to connect with their audience. The creative control, speed of publication and instant global availability have got to be good things, yeah?
But how do you navigate that great swell of titles now glutting the virtual shelf space? How do you browse and find the quality titles now that self-e-publishing is so easy to do? I'm asking you. Seriously, how do you e-shop for new books/authors? And what about the mid-list/cult author who's taking the reins in his/her career, how do they make their product stand out? Last year, I interviewed Dave Zeltserman as he was about to release his first e-book 21 Tales, (which is now also available in print). Since that interview, he's joined and help found the Top Suspense Group, which he says, "came out of discussions I had last year with Ed Gorman and Harry Shannon about how midlist writers were going to survive in this upcoming e-book centric world, especially with the Big Six shutting themselves off more and more to us midlist. The idea we came up with is conceptually simple--band together with top writers in our field and brand ourselves over time as a trusted place for readers to find high-quality genre fiction; in our case mystery, crime, horror and thriller fiction." The collective has published an anthology (Top Suspense) including stories from Zeltserman, Max Allan Collins, Vicki Hendricks, Ed Gorman, Lee Goldberg and Libby Fischer Hellmann, (which will soon be available in print too).
As technology improves and becomes more affordable, creative expression explodes and just as the made-for-home-video (or even gulp internet streaming) hasn't killed movie making, (in fact there's more variety and quality available now than ever before) I'm sure that e-publishing will have a similar effect on books, but where does that leave me? I feel like a vinyl collector in the record store.
What? Did you really just say, 'what's a record store?' You little whippersnappers get off my lawn! (Sigh) Steve Weddle has some thoughts worth reading over here at Do Some Damage and Zeltserman also notes, "Six months from now the e-book landscape is going to look very different than it does now, but I have to think (that) quality will eventually win out no matter how this landscape changes."
Hope so. What are you e-reading?
Jedidiah Ayres writes (e)fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
