Yes. In the majority of the ePubs I've read -- okay, all of them, except Matthew Haldeman-Time's (which was originally a self-published Luna real-paper book, and he made it accessible as an ePub a year later, post-slight-revisions -- there's a certain...rushed quality to them.
Not in the sense of "let's slap this puppy up there!"; to assume that would be to diss the ePub companies on the level of calling them in it for the money, and I don't get that impression. But more of what you mention, that there's not as much attention to the stories' quality, the time alloted wasn't as great.
Then again, the numbers are also much, much smaller. I paid maybe $5 for one of those ePubs, and it was about 200 pages. With formatting and whatnot, and the time it took me to read (little over an hour), I'd call it a long novella or a very short novel -- perhaps 70K, if that much. There's time to proof and format the document, print it as a pdf, put together the page with its info, add it to the shopping cart program, and...there you go. At least three-quarters of the cost a traditional publisher would deal with are gone, just like that (including the 50% or so the bookstore would claim to sell the book, and the 15% per in costs to make the book)...
But from what I've seen, ePub sales think it's a great deal to sell 500 copies or so; there's not really anything tracking the numbers (as opposed to long-established tracking for trad books), so who knows how much is really getting purchased. And yet a trad publisher would consider 2500 books sold to be so pathetic as to drop that author like a hot potato.
To me, that says that whatever money ePub is saving by going ePub, it's not making a great deal, either. There's an offset -- and that means the only way ePub can make anything is to churn out a lot, push writers to create a lot, and get it up there -- and they don't have money to pay professional editors, or see reason to encourage authors to go back and expand.
ePub is like this century's version of the 1930s dime novels, I think, and in some ways just as ephemeral.
no subject
Date: 23 Jan 2007 01:58 am (UTC)Not in the sense of "let's slap this puppy up there!"; to assume that would be to diss the ePub companies on the level of calling them in it for the money, and I don't get that impression. But more of what you mention, that there's not as much attention to the stories' quality, the time alloted wasn't as great.
Then again, the numbers are also much, much smaller. I paid maybe $5 for one of those ePubs, and it was about 200 pages. With formatting and whatnot, and the time it took me to read (little over an hour), I'd call it a long novella or a very short novel -- perhaps 70K, if that much. There's time to proof and format the document, print it as a pdf, put together the page with its info, add it to the shopping cart program, and...there you go. At least three-quarters of the cost a traditional publisher would deal with are gone, just like that (including the 50% or so the bookstore would claim to sell the book, and the 15% per in costs to make the book)...
But from what I've seen, ePub sales think it's a great deal to sell 500 copies or so; there's not really anything tracking the numbers (as opposed to long-established tracking for trad books), so who knows how much is really getting purchased. And yet a trad publisher would consider 2500 books sold to be so pathetic as to drop that author like a hot potato.
To me, that says that whatever money ePub is saving by going ePub, it's not making a great deal, either. There's an offset -- and that means the only way ePub can make anything is to churn out a lot, push writers to create a lot, and get it up there -- and they don't have money to pay professional editors, or see reason to encourage authors to go back and expand.
ePub is like this century's version of the 1930s dime novels, I think, and in some ways just as ephemeral.