A Book is a Book is a Book - Right?

Let's think about books and readers. Books are books, right? It doesn’t really matter whether you read them on a phone or a Kindle, or whether you read a paperback, hard back or limited edition. A book is a book is a book.

And while a gripping thriller is very different from a dreamy romance or a piece of classy literary fiction, most passionate readers read widely. The read not just the thrillers, romances and literary fiction but also the niche non-fiction and work in translation and other things that just happen to strike their eyes and appetites at the right moment on a sunny day. That’s the best way to read.

It is also true that dedicated readers absorb their books in many different ways. This is why authors market their books in several formats. Their readers may listen to an audio book in the car or while undertaking household chores but take their ebooks on holiday with them and prefer to curl up with a 'real book' in the evening before retiring to bed.

Ebooks are usually said to account for maybe 25% of the overall books market. I’m sceptical of those estimates, however, certainly as applied to novelists. Certainly, many publishers I have spoken to suggest that over 90% of the books they sell are sold as ebooks.

Self-publishers – who overwhelmingly sell ebooks – sometime don’t even assign ISBN data to their books and those sales are excluded from most industry data. Further, the “25% overall” figure ignores vast genre disparities. Non-fiction (especially reference) is heavily print-led. So is children’s fiction.

Indeed, I had an argument about this very topic. I was challenged on my higher figure. But agreement was eventually reached on the basis that I was probably right once we considered adult fiction and account for the dark matter of the industry that is the self-published digital sales then the picture shifts significantly.

That adult fiction category is the one place where electronic formats (e-books and audiobooks combined) are arguably the primary way people consume those stories today. So let’s say that for adult fiction, electronic formats account for half or more of unit sales. Although print books, being more expensive, accounts for more than half of revenues. Naturally, traditional publishers offer books across every major format; digital-first and indie publishers tend to do the same.

It’s true that the digital-first folk often can’t reach High Street bookstores, but they can offer print books through Amazon which is still by far the most consequential bookshop in the world, accounting for more than half of most trad publishers’ revenues. So no matter how you publish, everyone can publish in all formats, with ease.

Despite all this, the market for books cleaves into two vast hemispheres with stunningly few points of connection.

Traditional publishers looks to physical bookshops as their north star. They think about print before ebook. They think about physical bookstores before Amazon and they think about critical acclaim from newspapers and other sources far more than it does about reader reviews on Amazon. And through these pursuits traditional publishers make very healthy profits. Ten or fifteen years ago, many thought there was a significant chance that traditional publishers would just fold up and shrink to a fraction of their previous size but they haven’t - they’ve thrived.

In the meantime, along side traditional publishers there’s now a flourishing host of digital-first publishers (including self-publishers, all of whom are digitally-led.) These publishers don’t care about physical bookshops because in the main they have no access to them. They don’t care about newspapers and traditional sources of literary praise: they don’t get any love from those places and, even if they did, it would make no difference to their sales. It is even possible that they don't even care about Apple and other non-Amazon bookshops, because really Amazon is the thing. Most of those who publish digital-first are all about selling on Amazon. They arguably have more in common with people who sell household wares on Amazon than they do with the fine old literary houses who once sold Jane Austen or Herman Melville.

These two worlds barely connect – or connect to a remarkably small degree.

You can literally sell 1,000,000 ebooks on Amazon and yet struggle to shift 20,000 paperbacks through physical stores. You can sell 1,000,000 ebooks and yet have zero reviews in newspapers. Indeed, it’s stranger than that. If newspapers do end up writing about you, they’ll say things like, “the million-copy selling author that no one’s ever heard of.” By which they mean, “the million-copy selling author that we’ve never noticed because we were looking in the opposite direction.”

What’s more, traditional publishers still operate in a universe where there are such things as nation-states. Woe betide you if you sell a British book to an American reader, or vice versa. Digital first publishers don’t really take any notice the existence of nation-states. Book covers, blurbs, marketing strategies and digital support in general cross continents, with barely more than a tweak or two along the way.

So, as an author you need to know your audience and where it fits into the literary quilt of books for sale. If your book is better suited to a digital first publisher, you may as well skip over agents (at least to start with) and submit straight to the better digital-first houses. Or, if you approach agents, you should be aware that those agents may not secure a traditional deal with Penguin Random House for you.

Of course, if your book is naturally more suited to a digital publisher, then self-publishing is also an option, and a very good one. However if, your book is better suited to a traditional publisher, then you need to go there (via an agent) without much pondering the alternatives.

If you are not sure which category your book falls into, these are the things to consider:

1) If it is commercial genre fiction, with plot more important than prose style - your book might well be better suited to a digital-first publisher.

2) If it is a standalone book, not part of a series - it might be more suited for traditional publishing.

3) If it is going to appeal to somewhat self-important newspaper reviewers - you want to think traditional publishing.

4) If you see a properly global (albeit English-speaking) market for your book - perhaps digital publishing beckons.

I hope these hints are helpful but they are not final determinations. I said the two hemispheres connect to a remarkably small degree, and that’s true. But there are still plenty of books where you could choose to go either way, and your final judgement needs to take into account all the factors, including of course your own preferences.

In the end of the day, I think we can agree that a book is a book is a book and however you choose to get your book to your readers, I wish you well in your writing endeavours.

Val Penny