Writing Tips

You Write to Publish, So Why E-Books?

The market for wireless digital text reading devices has skyrocketed. They have become competitive, which means a niche market demand exists.   Companies are rushing to be first in line to meet that demand.  With better portable handheld e-book readers and competitive marketing, prices are dropping and consumer attention is going up. Santa stuffed plenty of stockings with e-readers, such as Amazon’s Kindle, Sony Reader and Barnes & Noble Nook, along with other handheld portable devices capable of reading digital text, like high-tech phones, palms and music video devices.  They provide consumers with immediate electronic access to both the newest and now most diverse print text available.

Amazon is the largest online book seller in the world.  Recent sale figures suggest that 1 in 3 Amazon book buyers owns a Kindle.   Of the top bestsellers sold on Amazon, about as many Kindle copies as paper copies are sold.  It is estimated that over three million Kindle ebooks were sold on Amazon just during the last week of December in 2010.  There are between 5 and 10 million Kindle reading devices in the U.S. alone.

E-book has easy accessibility and reasonable costs, which makes it a perfect medium.  Owners of book readers can also choose to have a man or woman’s voice read the text to them.  To capture trendy consumers, e-book reading devices also offer software that allows them to listen to music, log onto the Internet, do Google searches or communicate on their electronic social networks.

Unfortunately, in the swirling midst of all this media text frenzy, a bevy of predators surfaced.  Electronic pirates pillaged everything from instruction manuals to underground cult favorites. In 2009, the Kama Sutra was the most pirated text--which supports the fact that erotica e-publishers, without the need for plain brown wrappers, turned the highest profits.  Pirating is the most frustrating and frightening  deterrent to e-book publishing for most authors.  However, as Neil Gaimon said in the Comics Alliance,

“You’re not losing sales by getting stuff out there. When I do a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people ask “What about the sales you are losing by having stuff floating out there?” I started asking the audience to raise their hands for one question — Do you have a favorite author? And they say yes and I say good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book put up your hand. Then anybody who discovered their favorite author by walking into a book story and buying a book. And it’s probably about 5-10%, if that, of the people who discovered their favorite author who is the person they buy everything of and they buy the hardbacks. And they treasure the fact they’ve got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it. That’s how they found their favorite author. And that’s really all this is; it’s people lending books.”

This is why we encrypt our files and do everything in our power to keep from having our files pirated, but we still feel it would be a foolish oversight of the market not to make our publications available in e-book sales as well as paper print texts. 

So what can a publisher such as Tell-Tale Publishing Group offer its authors?  We provide proofreading, text conversion and format, cover design and custom illustrations, issuance of ISBN number, registration of title in the Ingram database, submission of Copyright application, registration of Library of Congress forms, marketing and promotion.  We advertise with Amazon/B & N, Facebook, Twitter, Websites, Google ads, reviewers, book club reviews, Press releases, Print ads and networking used in PR.