Some Interesting Differences Between Print Publishing and Electronic Publishing (And A Slight Delay)

[dr_pretentious]

I spent so much time studying how print publishing works, but e-publishing is a whole other world. A print book from a major house may take 18 months to get from the signing of the contract to the first copy sold at a bookstore. An e-book can, in theory, get from the contract to the first sale in about 4 months. Cutting out the printing, the binding, the warehousing, the shipping, the stocking of shelves, etc., cuts a lot of time out of the larval stage of a book's life cycle. Whereas authors and editors involved in print publishing have to live in fear of missing deadlines and throwing off their press's publishing schedule, there's a lot more wiggle room in e-publishing. Booksellers don't, or at least don't yet, impose drop-dead-dates on all the folks upstream.

Which is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, when life happens, you don't have to run yourself quite as ragged. On the other hand, when you're working with a small press, and both author and editor fall afoul of Murphy's Law simultaneously, you can watch your release date recede into the unknown. We really thought Closing Arguments would be out on May 5th. Now we really think it will be out Sometime In May. Everything's okay, it's just getting to better-than-okay kind of slowly.

I'll post more news as I have it.

Comments

[siobhra.livejournal.com]

The hang up is us older people. I browse book stores looking for something interesting. I don't even know where to go to find an electronic book. I have found a lot of short stories on Zines that I read on-line but they are free. The only reason I like them is I can copy and paste them to word and with find/replace I can replace the name of the female lead with my name.

Otherwise I would not read on-line.

The younger generation most likely know all about this stuff.

[dr-pretentious.livejournal.com]

Not yet, actually. There are a lot of reasons most younger people don't know any more about e-books than you do. Reading on a computer screen is just harder on the eyes than reading on paper, and only in this past year has an e-book device come to market that's not a pain in the ass to use. E-book readers are still so expensive, very few people want to shell out the bucks for them--even the new kind that's not a pain in the ass.

Probably most of the people I know personally who are planning to buy the book intend to get it in PDF format so they can print it out and read it on paper. A couple of friends who are MDs and spend a lot of time using their Palm Pilots at work will probably download it to their PDAs. The only person I know who owns an e-book reader and plans to buy the book in a format designed for e-books is my sister's father-in-law, who travels internationally on business so often that his favorite airline gave him an e-book reader as a perk.

I really hope e-books, as a technology, succeed, but I don't own an e-book reader, either. I'm waiting for one that doesn't cost so much. Meanwhile, the e-books I own are PDFs I printed out and clamped with binder clips. I still prefer paper books, and I still prefer browsing in a brick and mortar store over browsing online.

[siobhra.livejournal.com]

Thank you, now I don't feel as old. Or as far "out of it".

[jasminewind.livejournal.com]

Whenever it comes out, I'm getting it. I can wait but I hope, for your sake, it happens sooner rather than later!