16 ms·

Writer’s Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking

10 points by psawaya 14y ago

parfe 14y ago
I don't believe the article. The idea that eReader owners consume more than those without readers makes sense. I have no problem believing people who read a lot were first into the eBook market. The idea these eReader owners are now stressing the book market and putting more demand on authors for content is absurd. Ereaders don't make you read faster (slightly slower I'd say). The article is taking an old pressure artists face and rebasing it into a new techonlogy.
- tzs 14y ago
  An eReader might not make you read faster, but it let you read more often. This is especially true if your eReader is part of a general purpose device that you normally carry with you. Another possibility is that eReader users might consider more books than they would have otherwise, due to the ease of getting sample chapters. If you hear about a potentially interesting book and you don't have an eReader you have to remember to check it out next time you are at the bookstore. It's easy to forget about it, especially if you have several books you intended to check out. If you have an eReader, you can ask for a sample chapter right away. In effect, having an eReader is sort of like being in a bookstore all the time. I am certain I would read more if I lived inside a bookstore.
  - parfe 14y ago
    Do you own an eReader? It's less like living in a bookstore and more like owning a book you need to charge and constantly protect from theft while in public.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
fingerprinter 14y ago
I can believe it, but not like this article portrays it. I think there is room for CONTINUOUS writing and engaging people in a different way, but an epub vs a book is not going to be that different. Said another way, I doubt that a customers expectation is drastically different in an epub model for a traditional print model. However, an epub author CAN get their book out there sooner and they have an advantage there. I room for publishing a stream with characters rather than books, like a soap opera rather than a 20+ episode season for a show. However, the mechanism to consume this style is not ready yet (as far as I know).
lxt 14y ago
The good part about this is that it's much easier for a new author to build a following. Anecdotally, I have a good friend who had her first book published about a year ago. In the meantime she's published another full length book and about 5 novellas. They have come out through a range of publishers, from small e-pubs up to big, well-known houses. She makes incredible use of social media, and has recently seen her books starting to climb into top 100 lists on Amazon.
gamble 14y ago
Most traditional publishers refuse to publish more than one or two books per author in a given genre, out of a perception that it will hurt sales because the author's fans will only spend so much money on books from a single person per year. This is why so many authors have secondary pen names or force themselves to cross over into compatible genres. (eg. fantasy and sci-fi) And of course, it can take an entire year to go from draft to published novel... Traditional publishing is a grossly inefficient industry.
greenyoda 14y ago
If the average writer is going to churn out multiple books per year, the quality is almost certainly going to decline. Sure, there are exceptions, but not many.
- colomon 14y ago
  Sure, if writers write faster than they can write well, then there will be declines. But thinking about it, many authors I am quite fond of seem to have routinely published two or more books a year during their more productive phases. Elizabeth Bear and Charles Stross are two great young SF writers who have done it well for their entire novel-publishing careers. Going back further, Asimov (counting non-fiction) and L'Amour seem to have been that productive for most of their careers, Moorcock and Zelazny for the major portions of them. Thinking over it, I'd say what these authors had in common in their productive period was that they were writing full time and their books were short! I suspect the average page length of the books I counted was 250 pages, maybe as low as 200. Based on that, I'd suggest a good strategy for doubling the number of books you publish in a year without reducing the quality is simply cutting the page count for each book. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if that actually raised the quality of the books...

10 points by psawaya 14y ago

parfe 14y ago

I don't believe the article. The idea that eReader owners consume more than those without readers makes sense. I have no problem believing people who read a lot were first into the eBook market. The idea these eReader owners are now stressing the book market and putting more demand on authors for content is absurd. Ereaders don't make you read faster (slightly slower I'd say). The article is taking an old pressure artists face and rebasing it into a new techonlogy.

tzs 14y ago
An eReader might not make you read faster, but it let you read more often. This is especially true if your eReader is part of a general purpose device that you normally carry with you. Another possibility is that eReader users might consider more books than they would have otherwise, due to the ease of getting sample chapters. If you hear about a potentially interesting book and you don't have an eReader you have to remember to check it out next time you are at the bookstore. It's easy to forget about it, especially if you have several books you intended to check out. If you have an eReader, you can ask for a sample chapter right away. In effect, having an eReader is sort of like being in a bookstore all the time. I am certain I would read more if I lived inside a bookstore.
- parfe 14y ago
  Do you own an eReader? It's less like living in a bookstore and more like owning a book you need to charge and constantly protect from theft while in public.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

fingerprinter 14y ago

I can believe it, but not like this article portrays it. I think there is room for CONTINUOUS writing and engaging people in a different way, but an epub vs a book is not going to be that different. Said another way, I doubt that a customers expectation is drastically different in an epub model for a traditional print model. However, an epub author CAN get their book out there sooner and they have an advantage there. I room for publishing a stream with characters rather than books, like a soap opera rather than a 20+ episode season for a show. However, the mechanism to consume this style is not ready yet (as far as I know).

lxt 14y ago

The good part about this is that it's much easier for a new author to build a following. Anecdotally, I have a good friend who had her first book published about a year ago. In the meantime she's published another full length book and about 5 novellas. They have come out through a range of publishers, from small e-pubs up to big, well-known houses. She makes incredible use of social media, and has recently seen her books starting to climb into top 100 lists on Amazon.

gamble 14y ago

Most traditional publishers refuse to publish more than one or two books per author in a given genre, out of a perception that it will hurt sales because the author's fans will only spend so much money on books from a single person per year. This is why so many authors have secondary pen names or force themselves to cross over into compatible genres. (eg. fantasy and sci-fi) And of course, it can take an entire year to go from draft to published novel... Traditional publishing is a grossly inefficient industry.

greenyoda 14y ago

If the average writer is going to churn out multiple books per year, the quality is almost certainly going to decline. Sure, there are exceptions, but not many.

colomon 14y ago
Sure, if writers write faster than they can write well, then there will be declines. But thinking about it, many authors I am quite fond of seem to have routinely published two or more books a year during their more productive phases. Elizabeth Bear and Charles Stross are two great young SF writers who have done it well for their entire novel-publishing careers. Going back further, Asimov (counting non-fiction) and L'Amour seem to have been that productive for most of their careers, Moorcock and Zelazny for the major portions of them. Thinking over it, I'd say what these authors had in common in their productive period was that they were writing full time and their books were short! I suspect the average page length of the books I counted was 250 pages, maybe as low as 200. Based on that, I'd suggest a good strategy for doubling the number of books you publish in a year without reducing the quality is simply cutting the page count for each book. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if that actually raised the quality of the books...