Chuckarama left a good comment on a recent post, and I wanted to follow up on it. Chuck (can I call you Chuck? :)) writes:
“I’m not sure I fully agree. I’m not a writer, but I suspect built into that 10 year rule of thumb there is something else happening. Sure you’re improving your technical skills as you go along, no matter what level you’ve attained, but what you are probably spending a lot of time doing is figuring out what will make it through the filter and what won’t. Your testing the barrier to entry, for it’s weaknesses or trying to get in the heads of the editors and publishers, to know what they want. You probably aren’t even conscious of it a lot of the time. But what if the 10 year rule of thumb turns out to be an old wives tale?”
This idea of writing for an audience is important. If you just write for yourself, you may end up with only a fan-base of one. You must write with the target audience in mind. Editors know this, and they read looking for books that are ‘marketable’. I have heard from several authors who have written a book their agent or editor loved, but they ultimately rejected it because the book simply wasn’t marketable. What that means is the publisher doesn’t think they can sell enough copies to recoup their investment.
E-books offer two solutions to this problem.
First, it lowers the cost of recouping the initial print investment. In doing a bit of research, I think you can get an e-book to market for less than $2,000, not including marketing. If you sell your book for $9.99 on Amazon, you need to sell roughly 286 copies to make your investment back.
In other words, instead of a book needing to sell 5,000 copies to be ‘marketable’, a book would only need to sell 300 copies.
Second, it takes the guessing out of the equation. As I mentioned above, agents and publishers are guessing at what readers will like. They make an educated guess, publish the book, and cross the fingers. E-books give a direct line to readers. There is no guessing. If readers like it, they’ll tell their friends, and sales will go up. If they don’t, you’ll sell a few copies to your mother and your friends, and it will end there.
This site lists authors and books that were rejected by editors because they weren’t marketable. Books include Catch 22, Diary of Anne Frank, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Lord of the Flies, Animal Farm, and more. Of course these books went on to be published, and many of them have become classics. In other words, a lot of editors got it wrong–very wrong in some cases. We readers almost missed getting these books. With e-books, and a direct to reader approach, this is less likely to happen.
I’m going to end with a quote sent to me by my friend The Damsel. Sometimes I feel like I’m come across as disparaging the publishing industry. I don’t mean to, I just get excited about the possibilities of the emerging models, and tend to focus on the differences. I don’t think the old model will go away, simply it’s going to evolve.
“We should not see print and electronic literature as a competition, but rather a conversation. The more voices that join in, the richer the dialogue is likely to be.” N. Katherine Hayles
