Authors Electric

I’ve written much over the years about the pros and cons of offering ebooks for free. I once swore I’d never do it, that I’d sweated blood and wasn’t about to give my efforts away for nothing, that writers should always be paid for their work. And then sales dried up. With a six-book series, FREE seemed the way to generate interest and offer readers a way to see if they liked my books. Try before you buy , in effect. And for a while it worked. For well over a year, I was selling more books by giving one away than I was when they were all at a fixed price. And then sales dried up. To be fair, the past year or so seems to have been hard for a lot of us. Blame the referendum, Brexit, Trump – whatever excuses you can come up with – but sales aren’t what they were eighteen months ago. At all. The traditional authors are squeezed in different ways, and I can’t pretend to understand how it all works in the rarefied strata of the big 6/5/4/whatever, but the indie pecking-order is so...

Uncomfortable Statistics for traditional publishers - Good news for Indies -            The Big 6 are not so big any more.  According to the latest figures for 2013, Penguin Random House came top of the table with a 24% share of the market, but its sales were down £342m (15%).  All the others - Hachette, HarperCollins, Pan MacMillan, Bloomsbury, and Simon & Schuster were also down.  Their total share of the market was only 59% - down from 70% in 2001.  Is this a sign that their dominance of the book trade is fading?  I think it is.  But they won't go down without a fight, so - more turbulent times ahead. The end of Constable and Quercus           The hope of many 'mid list' and 'literary' authors dumped by the Big 6 for commercial reasons has been a group of valiant and well-respected independently owned publishers still willing to take on authors for...