Writers Disrupting Publishers: How Self-Published Writers Disrupted the Publishing Industry, 2nd Edition

By Hercules Bantas

The publishing industry has been disrupted by digital technologies that use the internet to distribute ebooks to a global market. As a consequence, publishers have lost market share to self-published authors, and the relationship between the industry and those who create the products it sells—the writers—has fundamentally changed. By delving deep into the publishing industry's roots, this book shows how the industry's history and structure created the conditions for the digital disruption to occur, and how this has changed the publishing environment.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hercules Bantas
• Release date: Mar 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370746019

Hercules Bantas

Dr Hercules Bantas has been teaching and reading the human sciences for the better part of a decade. It is his opinion that he is too often immersed in some weighty tome or other, the authors of which always use one thousand words where one hundred words would suffice. It was while juggling no less than three weighty tomes by the same author and trying to understand what the fellow was trying to say that the idea of The Reluctant Geek Guides was born. He is well aware that publishing clearly written and unambiguous guides to important ideas in the human sciences is frowned upon in some circles, but he's going to do it anyway. Despite his well documented grumpiness, Hercules claims to like people and can be contacted by email at reluctantgeek[at]tpg.com.au.

Book preview

Writers Disrupting Publishers

How Self-Published Writers Disrupted the Publishing Industry, 2nd Edition

Hercules Bantas

Copyright Hercules Bantas 2017

All rights reserved

Published by The Reluctant Geek

Melbourne, Australia

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: Recent History of the Publishing Industry

- Why Was There a Content Problem? A Brief History of Publishing

- The Content Problem

Chapter 2: Ebooks and Digital Publishing

- Ebooks

- Digital Distribution Systems

Chapter 3: Readers, Genre, and Bestsellers

Chapter 4: Writers and Publishing

- Unpublished writers

- Published writers

- The Industry Response

- The Rise of Self-Published Ebooks

Chapter 5: The Digital Author

Conclusions

Bibliography

Appendix 1: Literature Review

Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge Dr Michelle Smith for all her help in preparing this book.

Introduction

According to Arnaud Nourry, CEO of the Hatchett Group, ebooks are stupid because they are not made of paper but still let people read books as if the words were printed on paper,

The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it’s electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience. We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital. We’ve tried. We’ve tried enhanced or enriched ebooks – didn’t work (Gill, 2018).

Nourry's dislike of ebooks is understandable. He is the CEO of a publishing company and ebooks have made the lives of such folk rather difficult of late. He is obviously a little miffed that ebooks and digital publishing are so popular with readers and writers, and that digital publishing has given writers another option for getting their books to readers.

Although Mr Nourry is a big wig in the publishing community and would know a bit about books and publishing, his argument about ebooks is nonsense. Ebooks are not exactly the same as paper books. There is at least one vital difference between paper and electronic books, and it is giving publishing professionals sleepless nights. That difference is that publishers have no control of the distribution of ebooks, and that lack of control is the cause of all the industry angst about self-published books. If they have no control, they have no say about which books are published and which books are rejected. More importantly, if they have no control, they have no way of taking an ample slice of the revenue a book generates.

Most of the money from the sale of self-published ebooks goes to the author, which seems to really annoy publishing executives. They appear to be of the opinion that it is ridiculous for the person that writes the book to make most of the money from the sale of the book. And it is not just publishing executives who are hostile to ebooks and self-publishing. Academic and award-winning writer Ros Barber ignited an internet storm when she wrote that she would never self-publish even though she did not make all that much money as an industry-published author (Barber, 2016).

This book sets out why I think Arnaud Nourry's argument is wrong, and why Ros Barber will probably make much less from her writing than she should. Read on and make up your own mind. Oh, and it began its life as an academic text, so might be a tad dry in places.

The Publisher's Problem

In recent times, the traditional publishing industry that specialises in producing and distributing paper books (pbooks), has been forced to compete with the emerging digital publishing industry that uses the work of self-published authors to produce electronic books (ebooks). Spearheaded by Amazon (Hetherington, 2014, p. 383), online ebook sales have taken a substantial share of what was once an exclusive market for traditional publishers (2014, p. 385). However, it is not just competition with self-published ebooks that will cause ongoing problems for the traditional publishing industry. It will also be starved of content because many authors will eventually move to self-publishing in order to monetise their work while retaining control of the copyright (Coker, 2013, loc 1348).

For the publishing industry, the digital disruption has had two catastrophic effects. First, ebooks have captured a section of a market that traditionally published pbooks once dominated (Hetherington, 2014, p. 385). Second, digital distribution of ebooks has allowed authors to bypass the traditional publishing industry and sell directly to readers (Coker, Indie Authors, 2013, Loc 1346) (Gilbert, 2015, p. 182), which has changed the relationship between authors and the publishing industry and created an alternative route for authors to publish their work in the public sphere.

According to the experts, the innovative disruption of an industry usually involves only two parties—the incumbent industry and the usurper whose products displace those of the incumbent (Adner, 2002, p. 667). In the past two decades, digital communication technologies have disrupted several industries—of which publishing was one—including the music recording industry, which had to contend with the digitisation of music and its unauthorised distribution (Moreau, 2013), and television broadcasting, which had to contend with online streaming services such as Netflix (Wessel, 2012). The disruption of the publishing industry differed to both television and music, however, because it involved a third party—writers.

While the publishing industry has become internationalised in recent times, I will focus on the English-language industry unless otherwise noted. Most of the evidence for my arguments will come from two sources. Because publishing is above all else a business, I will draw upon empirically based economic studies to define the disruption and its consequences. And because writing is an artform, I will use the words of the writers and publishing industry professionals who were involved in the disruption to form the foundation of an examination of the role played by writers in the disruption.

This book will focus heavily on the role that writers played in the disruption because they create the product that the publishing industry—both paper and digital—packages and sells. Without authors, there would be no publishers, and without the content that unpublished authors provided, Amazon would have had no content for the ebooks it produced and therefore nothing to offer as an alternative product. Below is a brief description of each of each of the five chapters to show how the discussion will flow. The ultimate goal is to show how independently published ebooks have captured a section of the market that was once dominated by industry published pbooks, and that the rise of digital publishing channels such as Amazon's KDP has fundamentally changed the relationship between writers and publishers.

Chapter 1 will examine the recent history of the publishing industry. The primary argument will be that historical factors and the structure of the publishing industry made it vulnerable to disruption by creating a content problem that led to a power imbalance between authors and publishers.

Chapter 2 will focus on ebooks and digital distribution. The central argument will be