Why books are not videos or music

We are all used to the comparison of the book trade and its approach to e-books with the music and video industry - ie hiding the head in the sand, ostrich-like, and vainly hoping it will all go away, only to raise the head, shake the sand out of the eyes, and see the pirates swarming over the beach with the treasure. Unless publishers get their act together, we hear, it will all be gone to piracy and the publishing industry will be bankrupt, derelict, a dinosaur, etc.

Yes, publishers need to work out what they are going to do about electronic distribution (and theft) of content. Yes, more people are buying e-books in one form or another - but cheap iPhone and Touch apps are going to stamp all over the expensive Kindle/Sony/etc model (book apps are already outselling games on the iPlatforms). Yes, books are pirated (often from the pdfs the publishers send to printers in India and China) and distibuted for free.

But books are NOT like videos and music. Why has no-one noticed? An mp3 or other audio file is a natural evolution of an LP, an audio tape and a CD. Think Pokemon - you get a basic level little monster and if it is successful it evolves into something more powerful in a Great Leap Forward. Films, too - from video tape to DVD to mpeg and other video formats on computer. But books? No. The difference is that you could never read a record, a CD, a video tape or a DVD without a piece of equipment. You can't hold a DVD up to the light and watch the movie. So if a better technology comes along, the cruddier technology will fail - of course. But a book you can read without any technology, and an e-book is an alternative rather than a replacement. The bicycle didn't replace walking; cars didn't replace bicycles, though the market share changes as new options are added.

e-books are an indulgence for the tech-savvy, money-rich, 1st world, social elite. If publishers neglect paper books while pursuing the illusory moneypot of e-books many, many readers will be disadvantaged and some people - those who most desperately need books - will be denied them. A library with 20 computers each with 2 million e-books can serve 20 readers at a time; a library with 20,000 books can serve 20,000 readers at once. A book doesn't turn off because it's run out of electricity; it's format doesn't become unreadable; you can only lose your whole library at home if you have a fire - you can't leave it on a train.

Make e-books, but give them away free with paper books - the format has no value, and if you are producing a paper book, producing a basic e-book is free - it's a by-product like weetabix or marmite (you can make it by sweeping up the spare electrons from the production process).

People will buy books if they are available and nicely produced. Books were always borrowed for free from libraries (and friends) and yet still people bought them. People like to have the physical object because of things they can do with it that they can't do with an e-book (like show it off on the shelf, smell the paper, enjoy the binding, flick through it to remind themselves of what it's like...)

Books aren't going away unless publishers give up on them, and even then there will be small presses and (God help us) self-published books. Because you could never do those things with a CD or LP or video (except, note, with the printed inserts) the change for the consumer from black vinyl to a bunch of electrons was insignificant. But an e-book does not replace all the functionality of a paper book so individual consumers will choose the format they prefer. Interestingly, it is the celebrity pulp novels that people are least likely to want in paper format. There is no pride or pleasure to be had in owning a Dan Brown paperback, surely? So the very books publishers are choosing to print are the very books that eventually - if they are right about the expansion of e-books - will be least well suited to that format. Hollow laugh.

Over there

Sorry, folks, I've not been blogging because things have been going wrong in a big way for more than a month. But I will be back. And in the meantime, I've blogged (about disasters) at ABBA.

eeeee - royalty fail

How much should you be paid for an e-book? As with so many things - that depends. There is no concensus so far. There are two very different situations in which you may be negotiating e-book royalties.

If a book is produced only as an e-book and never on mashed-up dead trees, there are certain costs that will never arise. These are the costs relating to printing, shipping and warehousing books - and then, on a bad day, pulping remainders back into mashed-up trees. (There is no need to pulp the electrons if they don't sell the e-books. Indeed, pulping electrons would cause a cataclysmic disaster, so let's not suggest it.) But all the other costs still exist, at least if the book is done properly. The costs of commissioning, editing, design, layout, and producing the final files are the same (though design may be lower, with a drab page design and no glossy cover). If the e-book sells for a substantially lower price than a paper book, the publisher may offer exactly the same percentage royalty as for a paper book. This might seem unfair, but it's possible that the maths are correct. A paperback produced in a large print run may have a printing cost of only a 25p or so; if the e-book sells for around two thirds or half the price of a paper book, the publisher is reducing their risk but not their costs.

If a book is produced as a paper book and then also as an e-book, the situation is rather different. The publisher is aiming to break even (at least) on the paper sales, so any e-book sales are a bonus that cost next-to-nothing to generate. (To convert from a print-ready file to an e-book format is the work of minutes, and even with checking and so on it's only a few hours). If the publisher is offering you the same royalty for print and e-book in this case, you're being cheated. The Society of Authors recommends asking for a royalty in the region of 40%. If a book is in print anyway, it is entirely reasonable for the profits from the e-book to be shared pretty much equally between publisher and author as neither is doing any substantial work to sell the e-book, and neither is taking any extra risk.

Many publishers are sneaking low-royalty clauses into contracts while authors aren't looking. You may think that your book won't become an e-book - but it may do, or it may be used in some other electronic format which your publisher hasn't even thought of yet. You need to keep electronic rights, say explicitly in the contract that they are to be separately negotiated or, at the very least, licence these rights for a short period with a review after 18 months or so. Things are moving quickly - the deal that looks OK now might look atrocious in 12 months' time. And you might even want to produce your own e-book... but that's an entirely different post for another day.

The Bint in the Bathroom

Blogging over at the awfullybigblogadventure today - see you there!

Tell me about me

How often do you crop up on the web? How many times do your books crop up? Unless you search for yourself on Google every day - and if you do that, it's time to get a life - you probably don't know. Google Alerts can do the checking for you. Register, enter the term you want to search for - your name, the title of one of your books, the name of your main character - and pick 'comprehensive' as the search method and Google will email you each time your chosen phrase is found in new pages going online.

How useful it is depends on your name/book title. If you're called Gordon Brown, you might as well forget it, as wading through all the references to Gordon Brown to find one that relates to you, the real Gordon Brown, will take up so much of your time you won't be a writer any more.

Why do this? Vanity? 'Oooh, look at me, look at me, I'm on Google'? No, though you could do it for that reason. It's a good way of keeping track of reviews of your books and, increasingly, pirated uploads. That is, electronic copies of your books posted without your permission (or your publisher's) permission, usually for people to download for free. You can then decide whether to issue a DCMA take-down notice (more on that another day) or just glory in how popular your book is when it's free. Either way, it's good to know. Knowledge is power. And knowledge is also smug-juice.

'It's a business trip'

Practise saying it: 'I'm working; it's a business trip.' Good. Now plan your writing life around places you want to visit. Don't - like Meg Rossof (why did she do that?) - set your novel in Luton. OK, she set it in the airport, so maybe she got to claim all her flights to wherever she felt like so that she could keep researching the departure lounge.


As the bats flit over the Grand Canal and the strains of Cosi fan tutte fill the palazzo, so kindly leant to me by another writer who has the good sense to set her stories in a wonderful place, I can honestly say 'it's not a holiday, it's work'. I'm killing off 16th century Venetians and following the exploits of Melampyge, the cat who lived in the Campanile and it is not, for tax purposes, enjoyable.


Actually, I didn't choose Venice for this story - it chose itself. I stopped by en route to the Bologna Book Fair and the story started itself in a pizza restaurant north of Rialto. Thereafter, I followed where it led, through the archives of the Marciana, the offices of the Istituto Cini, the manuscript room of the Corer and back, again and again, between the Palazzo Pisani Santa Marina and Zanipolo. But it has taught me a useful lesson which I will generously pass on - never set your story in Basingstoke when you could set it in Berlin, or Barcelona, or Sao Paulo. Or Venice.

Don't mention it ... (or No sex, please - we're American)

Yale University Press is getting some flak for its decision to remove pictures of the prophet Mohammed from The Cartoons That Shook the World. As well as the cartoons published in Jyllands-Posten in September 2005 lambasting Islam, the book was to have included an engraving by Gustav Dore for a 19th-century edition of Dante's Inferno. (The illustration of Mohammed in Hell here is by William Blake.) They have been removed to avoid offending Muslim readers and so prompting terrorist acts. This type of pre-emptive censorship is hardly news to children's writers. We live with it all the time. And it's not Muslims we can't afford to offend, it's Americans.

A friend (an MP) recently grumbled that he couldn't find a book about evolution for his young son. He sent me a message on Facebook to suggest I write one. I would love to, but evolution is one of many topics that are out of bounds for children's writers. Although most British parents and teachers want their children to know about this important aspect of science, the US market is evolution-hostile. There are enough Creationists to make it difficult for US schools and libraries, and in some places even bookshops, to stock a children's book about evolution because they are worried about complaints and boycotts. This year I even had an adult book about evolution turned down because the UK publisher (who wanted to do the book) couldn't find a US publishing partner to take it on.

Without a US market, many full-colour children's books aren't financially viable. The result is that the reading of UK children is limited by a bunch of nutty Creationists 4,000 miles away who don't even work in publishing. It's insane - as insane as the idea that the world was created by a supernatural being in seven days (or six with a holiday - why would an extra-temporal being need a holiday?) And no, I am not going to 'respect their beliefs' any more than I would respect an adult who believed in the tooth fairy.

It's not just evolution that's out of bounds. Sex and nudity are also ring-fenced - to the extent that it's not possible to show an image of Michelangelo's David in an art history book, or a teenager in a short skirt or a bikini. In 2007, an American publisher precipitated a row with a German illustrator after asking that the virtually invisible penis on statue in an illustration of an art gallery be airbrushed out. The statue itself was only 7.5 millimetres high, so you can imagine how hard you would have to look to find the penis and be offended by it. (In this case the publisher backed down under the ridicule heaped upon it.)

Violence fares no better, despite American children spending most waking moments playing World of Warcraft and watching Terminator movies (or worse) while choosing which gun to buy later. Books on medieval warfare can't show dangerous weapons or violent activity - so no swords, and no bows and arrows. And for later periods, absolutely no guns. (How the West was won - they gently persuaded the native Americans to die off?)

Fiction is no easier than fact. Stories can't feature unfamiliar things such as a hedgehogs, wardrobes and sausages (God forbid the American child would have to find out something about wildlife or bedroom furniture outside the Land of the Free). Witches are often vetoed, too, unless you are JKR (and her books aren't allowed everywhere). It's a bit easier at the upper end of the age range.

It's not just the US that limits what British children can see in books. As more and more books are printed in China, offending Chinese sensibilities has become a new concern. Anthony Browne tells of how he had a book pulped by the Chinese printers after they noticed it showed a Taiwanese flag. Other books have any mention of Tibet removed, and even any critical remarks about China's allies in Africa may be censored.

Why do we allow this? Why don't publishers print their books elsewhere (yes, I know China is cheap - but so are India, Russia and eastern Europe), and why do they go along with US nannying? Separate US language editions are produced anyway - it wouldn't be hard, since the black plate is different, to blot out the bits of pcitures that American children aren't allowed to see, and to edit the text. Of course, blotting out would let them know their book has been censored. And they have that thing, don't they, about freedom of speech? As long as you don't use your freedom of speech to say something like - life on Earth evolved over billions of years... (For a confusion of Creationism, evolution, prejudice and gun crime, see this brilliant scene from Mean Girls.)

Some of this nannying is dangerous not only to the intellectual health of children, but to their physical health, too. A book about healthy living for teenagers can't include advice on aspects of sexual health - presumably because teenagers who hadn't thought of having sex might feel encouraged to try it if a book mentioned condoms or health checks or contraception. American children need this information as much as - and perhaps more than - British children (who have other sources, at least). Here's another bit of advice from Mean Girls, this time on sex education.

Enough grumbling - I'm off to sit in the wardrobe in a skimpy outfit, drink some Taiwanese spirits, and write the outline for my book on the evolution of the Tibetan hedgehog. UK market only, of course.