The market for eBooks is on a cusp. It is changing rapidly and key pieces are beginning to come together. Change is in the air. But for the moment the traditional channels still rule. And that can mean profit for you.
But how?
Traditionally, almost all book sales went through the Publishing House – Bookstore channel. However, a number of years ago printing technology came together and a new type of publisher appeared — the on demand press. Not quite a vanity press, it allowed sales and printing to become closer together. And it put the self-publishing industry out of the realm of vanity press and into the world of the small press.
And worse, these new publishers were open to eBook sales since they saw no real difference between the electronic file they were printing from and the electronic file they sold as an eBook.
What this meant to the traditional channel is that change was no longer foreign. For the first time in a century the book sales industry was faced with a radical change.
Then along came digital books — the eBook. And the market was shook up yet again. Suddenly the big print publishers had to produce the book profits they bought in both print and digital format. And they added eBooks to their book lists. And they are soon going to discover how much they save by not printing books!
So what does this mean to you as the author of an eBook?
It means you should still try to sell to a publisher.
First, the publishing houses — traditional, vanity, and on-demand — publish a list of books which the booksellers buy from. And that’s what gets sold in their stores. And that technique will continue into the world of the eBook. Not so much in the large companies such as Amazon, but in the smaller stores.
And that means if you can get on the book lists you will be able to sell to all types of booksellers not just the big guys.
It also means that all the facilities of the traditional publishers are now available to the eBook market at a reasonable cost. This includes cover design and typography.
And it means you can sell in both eBook and print markets.
And of course, you still have all the benefits of selling through the big booksellers including access to the markets, and an increase in prestige.
