Non Fiction

E-books Versus the Big Presses

Justin Schwan

On the surface of this question: E-books vs. the Big Presses, picking E-books over the Big New York publishers is selling yourself low, taking a cut in any amount of money you could make, and risking not getting out to the masses because you were in a rush to get published. On the surface, the facts are these: Big presses make writers more money, not just a little more, like the difference between two loaves of bread (one named brand and one generic if there is such a thing as generic bread), but the difference between owning your own private jet and flying third class. Big presses reach more readers, getting the author more exposure, getting the author more famous. Not only that, but the Big presses are now doing E-books, so that leaves medium-sized E-book publishers, the ones we’re comparing to the Big New York presses, in a bind. Big presses pay big advances, though E-books do pay higher royalties, but seldom big advances, and usually none.

But of course, looking at the surface of the Earth from space is a farce. In order to know what the Earth is made of, you have to get past that thin layer of atmosphere that makes the sky blue and dig in the mud. A crust, a layer of molten rock, a layer of molten iron, then a core of very, very hot iron, so hot that logic would say it’s melted, but by the very pressures of all the material above it, it’s as hard as some politicians’ heads.

That pressure pales in comparison to the pressure we writers face to get published. So no one can blame a writer who gives up the big bucks for the small just to see their name in print...but if we take a look underneath the surface, we could easily pose this question: what are we really giving up to take online publication over print?

The more I pay attention to, and learn about, online publication, the more I see for myself that it’s not such a bad thing, and can very easily be testing grounds for a dedicated author. For those writers who only dream in green and metal Leer jets, you can’t really go wrong by starting out in what I’d like to call the “minor leagues of the writing industry.” Well, the baseball minor leagues, not the basketball’s D-league. The D-league isn’t even second best to college ball which is a sad aspect. It comes in a distant second to European leagues, and that’s like the equivalent of poetry.

So you’re not going to get paid millions upon millions of dollars, but let’s not forget that Stephen King sold half a million copies of his short story “Riding the Bullet.” And! And, it beats having your manuscripts just sit around until you hit it big. Think about it, most writers in the golden day of print press didn’t get manuscripts published unless they were absolutely good enough. Not even if they were good did they get them published. They may have sold thousands of copies but no one would touch them because everyone wanted to sell tens of thousands of copies. The internet gives us a way to make those shelve-lifers work for us. That’s like, duh. And it heads back to my proving ground theory. Print publishers want writers that they know can sell. Just like baseball teams want players they know can play.

If a writer has a work that is good enough as an E-book but not good enough as a paperback for Doubleday, and that writer publishes it as an E-book and sells X amount of copies (which is X amount of copies more than he’d sell if it sat collecting dust) then Doubleday is going to have a better estimate of what that author can sell for them. It’s not rocket science, it’s just basic DUH!

Let’s face it; e-books are growing into a hot commodity. Save the trees they say, save the space they say, save the money they say (they’re cheaper), save the time and effort they say, because everyone in the publishing industry knows how hard it is to typeset a book for print and how easy, relatively easy, it is to do so for electronic print.

E-books are really the best thing since--not sliced bread; not the ability to meld metal; not the wheel; not the opposable thumb or walking upright; not speech; not the extinction of the dinosaurs which gave mammals the chance to inherit the Earth, but, for Writers--E-books are the best thing since the development of cellular respiration some three and a half billion years ago by single celled organisms.

So, it’s easier for us to get published online in e-book format. There is obviously a growing market for e-books. There is money to be made, even if it’s not cosmic amounts of money like New York promises. So, the moral to this story is, not only to look past the surface, but to think outside the box. The box here is the big publisher and the big money and the big fame.

Little publishers and little money and little fame can go a really long way to making us great. Take a tiny hit in your ego and jump into the shallow end of the pool and swim to the deep end. You’ll become as stronger swimmer/writer if nothing else than just walking to the deep end and jumping in. I shouldn’t have to even mention the water may be cold and getting wet a little at a time can be a good thing.

Embrace the analogies. If you can’t do that, what can you do?