

Writer’s Cramp: In the E-Reader Era, a Book a Year Is Slacking - psawaya
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/in-e-reader-age-of-writers-cramp-a-book-a-year-is-slacking.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&smid=fb-share&pagewanted=all

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gamble
Most traditional publishers refuse to publish more than one or two books per
author in a given genre, out of a perception that it will hurt sales because
the author's fans will only spend so much money on books from a single person
per year.

This is why so many authors have secondary pen names or force themselves to
cross over into compatible genres. (eg. fantasy and sci-fi)

And of course, it can take an entire year to go from draft to published
novel... Traditional publishing is a grossly inefficient industry.

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parfe
I don't believe the article. The idea that eReader owners consume more than
those without readers makes sense. I have no problem believing people who read
a lot were first into the eBook market.

The idea these eReader owners are now stressing the book market and putting
more demand on authors for content is absurd. Ereaders don't make you read
faster (slightly slower I'd say). The article is taking an old pressure
artists face and rebasing it into a new techonlogy.

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tzs
An eReader might not make you read faster, but it let you read more often.
This is especially true if your eReader is part of a general purpose device
that you normally carry with you.

Another possibility is that eReader users might consider more books than they
would have otherwise, due to the ease of getting sample chapters. If you hear
about a potentially interesting book and you don't have an eReader you have to
remember to check it out next time you are at the bookstore. It's easy to
forget about it, especially if you have several books you intended to check
out. If you have an eReader, you can ask for a sample chapter right away.

In effect, having an eReader is sort of like being in a bookstore all the
time. I am certain I would read more if I lived inside a bookstore.

~~~
parfe
Do you own an eReader? It's less like living in a bookstore and more like
owning a book you need to charge and constantly protect from theft while in
public.

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greenyoda
If the average writer is going to churn out multiple books per year, the
quality is almost certainly going to decline. Sure, there are exceptions, but
not many.

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colomon
Sure, if writers write faster than they can write well, then there will be
declines.

But thinking about it, many authors I am quite fond of seem to have routinely
published two or more books a year during their more productive phases.
Elizabeth Bear and Charles Stross are two great young SF writers who have done
it well for their entire novel-publishing careers. Going back further, Asimov
(counting non-fiction) and L'Amour seem to have been that productive for most
of their careers, Moorcock and Zelazny for the major portions of them.

Thinking over it, I'd say what these authors had in common in their productive
period was that they were writing full time and their books were short! I
suspect the average page length of the books I counted was 250 pages, maybe as
low as 200. Based on that, I'd suggest a good strategy for doubling the number
of books you publish in a year without reducing the quality is simply cutting
the page count for each book. Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised if that
actually raised the quality of the books...

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fingerprinter
I can believe it, but not like this article portrays it. I think there is room
for CONTINUOUS writing and engaging people in a different way, but an epub vs
a book is not going to be that different.

Said another way, I doubt that a customers expectation is drastically
different in an epub model for a traditional print model. However, an epub
author CAN get their book out there sooner and they have an advantage there.

I room for publishing a stream with characters rather than books, like a soap
opera rather than a 20+ episode season for a show. However, the mechanism to
consume this style is not ready yet (as far as I know).

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lxt
The good part about this is that it's much easier for a new author to build a
following.

Anecdotally, I have a good friend who had her first book published about a
year ago. In the meantime she's published another full length book and about 5
novellas. They have come out through a range of publishers, from small e-pubs
up to big, well-known houses. She makes incredible use of social media, and
has recently seen her books starting to climb into top 100 lists on Amazon.

