Writers in Brittany, Normandy and the Pays de la Loire, France

It wasn’t that long ago Amazon announced that the e-books it was selling for its Kindle platform were outselling hardbacks. Cynics have commented that that’s not a hard trick to pull off, but they’re wrong. E-books aren’t just a new book format, like pop-ups: they represent a whole new way of experiencing writing.

At WebVivant Press, we can confidently say that e-books are also outselling paperbacks.

Now, this isn’t exactly a scientific survey. And given that we’re a small, web-only press, this is based on a small sample. But the second we made Make Do & Cook available in the Apple iBookstore, it sold. And it’s been selling ever since, with no special effort on our part. It’s selling almost as well on the Amazon Kindle.

We’ve also make my novel, Lady Caine, available on the Kindle in the US and UK, and are selling it through the iBookstore in the US, UK and other territories. Again, we started getting sales in spite of making no special announcement or engaging in any marketing activity.

In fact, Apple iBooks and the Amazon Kindle are now our primary channels for our books. Yes, we’ve sold print editions and will continue to make them available for all future books. But as a web-based business, it makes sense to prioritise e-books. The print edition sales have been very sluggish compared to the e-books, and I think this is largely a matter of price. Print On Demand (POD) is very convenient, but tends to drive up the unit costs. With e-books, there’s virtually no unit cost.

We’ve been using other e-book channels, too. Both books were published through Smashwords. But I don’t think much of their format conversion (from Word .doc files to multiple e-book formats) and we’ve since withdrawn the titles. We’ve also tried using Lulu for e-books, with little success.

We’ve recently made both titles available through Kobo, and will be watching that service with interest. In a way, it was a case of ‘why not?’. We already had good, well-formatted ePub versions of the books, which we’d prepared for iBooks. So sending the same files to Kobo wasn’t exactly a chore.

We know that there are lots of people out there who love printed books: we do too. And that’s why we’ll always make print editions available. We also have some illustrated books in the pipeline and, until e-book formats progress, those will be print-only. But for most of our upcoming titles, the e-book is the thing…

Rather than a web-based forum, which seems an inappropriately clunky way of meeting up, we’ve now moved discussions to a Yahoo group.

If you’re a writer based in the Grand Ouest and feel like a chat, join us at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/grandouestauthors/

If you’re still waiting for a sign that e-books have arrived in the mainstream of publishing, here it is: Nielsen says it is months, rather than years, away from producing a sales chart for digital editions.

Nielsen is responsible for the most important charts used by the trade. It’s how you know if your book is an official bestseller. It is also the organisation responsible for the ISBN system in the UK.

In an interview with The Bookseller, Jonathan Nowell, president of Nielsen Book, said that the company would not launch a sales chart unless it could obtain reliable figures, and was certain those figures were significant. Yet he said that such a chart is only months away.

How do we interpret this? Clearly e-book sales are significant enough to warrant this activity.

Nowell also mentioned that it’s important that publisher assign separate ISBNs to their e-book editions, rather than using the same ones they give to the print editions.

Amazon’s claim that it is selling more e-books than hardbacks is surprising only in how quickly it has happened. It was bound to happen sometime.

First, a couple of caveats. Hardbacks represent a small proportion of book sales. E-books outselling paperbacks would have been a far more significant story. Plus, Amazon is keen to promote the Kindle (note the recent price drop) in the face of serious competition from the Apple iPad. But anyway…

For all that traditionalists witter on about how the printed book will never die (which is almost certainly true, in a highly qualified way), the transition to e-books is inevitable. And it will happen in a piecemeal fashion, affecting one discrete area of the publishing world after another.

Hardbacks are a soft target because they’re expensive. Textbooks will yield to digitisation because you don’t read them for pleasure and the many benefits of the e-book – especially search – have particular attractions here. What’s more, the current generation of students doesn’t have the same relationship with ‘books’ that typified previous generations. I’ve heard numerous professors claim that their students complain bitterly if asked to read an entire book. They are far more accustomed to getting their information online. And the e-book experience is closely related to the web – after all, ePub files are just HTML.

Other areas of publishing will succumb as the technology develops. Already, the iPad has given us a taste of how illustrated books might move to the digital world.

What does all this mean for publishers? Well, as it happens, publishers are more likely to be concerned with other implications of the e-book. They’re looking to their business models.

For example, for small presses and independent publishers it now makes sense to develop an ‘e-book first’ strategy. This is what we’re doing at WebVivant Press.

Our publishing workflow is geared around producing high-quality e-books. We produce ePub editions for publishing via Apple’s iBookstore, Lulu (and, soon, Kobo and Barnes & Noble’s PubIt), plus a Kindle edition. We also produce free e-books and samples in ePub and PDF formats. The recently published Make Do & Cook is a good example of this.

We use Adobe InDesign to lay out the books, which means that it’s simple to create a print-ready PDF too. So far, we’ve used Lulu to create print editions, but we’re moving more towards Lightning Source.

The idea is that the e-book editions are our main products. They offer the best margins while still keeping the retail cost low. But we can offer a print version for those people who want it.

With an e-book, you can make a profit with cover prices as low as $2-3. With print books, given the cost of manufacture and mailing, the customer ends up paying, say, $10 for the same book even though the publisher makes no extra profit from it.

Book publishing has always been a difficult business. And what makes it difficult are all the wasteful and costly processes that intervene between author and reader – the costs incurred and profits taken by the publisher, printer, distributor and retailer. Revolutionising that model is where the e-book will have its greatest impact. So forget the arguments about how people like to read, whether the screens are good enough, and so on. The real case for e-books is a business one. And it’s a business model that benefits small publishers the most.

Poetry Workshop – Le Moulin, Villebaudon, Normandy

28 June – 2 July 2010

‘Crossing Points and Risks’ – a four day poetry course for seven participants led by Katherine Gallagher.

Course cost (includes tuition and accommodation) £350.

Further details: Kay Cotton & Sylvia Miles

email: moulin50410@hotmail.com

Tel: 00 33 (0)2 33 59 21 81

Web: www.lemoulin50410.eu

In spite of what the current foodie fad might have you believe, good food isn’t all about exotic ingredients and show-off techniques.

Patricia Mansfield-Devine’s new cookery book, Make Do & Cook, is all about how understanding basic foods allows you to create delicious and nutritious meals even on the tightest budget.

Make Do & Cook is aimed at anyone who wants to eat good food while saving money, including:

• Students looking for healthy and easy-to-prepare meals.
• Parents on tight budgets who want to provide their families with nutritious food.
• Beginners who want to learn how to cook good, simple meals without pretensions.
• Experienced cooks looking to cut costs without sacrificing quality.

There are 100 recipes in the book, many based on timeless peasant cuisine from around the world.

But Make Do & Cook offers still more. It helps you to understand food, giving you the insight you need to plan and create your own menus.

The print version is available now, via Lulu, and various e-book formats – including Kindle and ePub will be out soon.

For more information, visit WebVivant Press.

The Apple iPad has turned out to be pretty much what everyone expected. And, as foreseen, it has some serious implications for the publishing industry.

iBooks - the bookshelf and the e-reader

On my WebVivant blog, I’ve detailed how I think the arrival of the iPad is good news for self-publishers. In fact, it’s not the iPad per se, but the publishing environment that Apple is creating with the iBooks application and the accompanying online store.

This is going to give e-publishing the boost it needs. As I said here, yesterday, it may prove to be a tipping point. And the good news for self-publishers is that e-books provide a far more level playing field on which they can compete with the mainstream publishers.

However, it’s still going to be tough for individuals. And that’s where groups like Grand Ouest Authors, and web-based imprints like WebVivant Press, can play a role.

By banding together and co-operating on marketing, promotion and creating a web presence, independent author/publishers can gain a much higher profile than they could individually.

These are going to be exciting times for publishing – though not, possibly, if you’re a slow-moving corporate with fixed ideas about what ‘publishing’ means.

As I write, Apple fans around the world are slavering over the impending launch of the company’s tablet device. And I’m sure they’re right to be excited – it’s bound to be gorgeous. But it’s unlikely to be the most significant thing that happens today in San Francisco.

Wired magazine, perhaps with some insider knowledge, has an interesting take on this. What’s really important is not the hardware, but what it’s likely to herald in the way of changes to media as we know it.

There have been tablet devices around for years. Yes, Apple’s will be prettier. Yes, the technology has advanced somewhat. And no, it won’t be crippled by trying to run bloatware like Windows 7. Yet, for all the sexiness of the machine, this will be as nothing compared to the way the media world will shift on its axis.

We know that Apple is in negotiations with book, magazine and newspaper publishers. We pretty much know that one function of the tablet – iSlate, iPad or whatever it ends up being called – is as an e-reader. But that’s still to concentrate on the hardware. The tablet will be more than just another – albeit somewhat larger – e-book reader.

Apple has done this kind of thing before. The iPod is not just an MP3 player. It is the hardware part of a music ecosystem. The iTunes software and iTunes Music Stores are every bit as important – arguably more important – than the cute device in terms of the changes the iPod made in how music is distributed, bought and consumed.

Microsoft has been trying to flog tablet computers for a while now, by teaming up with the likes of HP. But it failed to give us a compelling reason to buy one. That’s what Apple can do.

With iTunes, Apple integrated the whole process of buying and listening to music into a seamless, one-click experience. If it produces an iTunes equivalent for magazines and books, then that may prove the final tipping point for digital media.

This is because it opens the way, not just to buy books easily, like you can with, say, the Kindle. Apple’s adoption of technologies like HTML5, paves the way for whole new forms of media. And just as HTML5 is one of the major technologies giving rise to a new breed of hybrid applications, which live partly on your machine and partly on the web, so it may provide a mechanism to invent a new form of media – not quite a web page, not quite a magazine.

Imagine your favourite magazine being delivered automatically to your tablet (the way iTunes currently picks up my favourite podcasts). But it’s not just the text and pictures you’re used to: it has embedded video, animations and links. And it’s updated regularly. And maybe you don’t buy the whole magazine, but just your favourite sections – much as I currently download my favourite bits of Radio 4.

The same could happen with books. They might be sold chapter-by-chapter, with embedded rich content. It might open the way for serials – just as Dickens used to publish his books in weekly parts. There will be a significant blurring of the boundaries between books and web content.

What’s more, all this will be available just a click away. With iTunes, Apple revolutionised the ease with which we can find and buy music. Everything you want is one easy search away. And with a click, it’s bought and on your device.

I’m not saying this will all happen today. But what we can be sure of is that the Apple announcement won’t just be about a nice bit of hardware.

The big bookshops are in trouble. Borders has gone. Waterstones is locked in a discounting fight to the death with the likes of Amazon and the supermarkets. Independents are faring better but have yet to engage fully in the looming battle that is digital. And the effects are felt by all of us.

With margins slashed, publishers are abandoning their midlists and focusing more and more on celebrity titles. The range of work being published is diminishing. Literary works are being squeezed out. There’s a dumbing down going on in the literary world.

Self-publishing offers authors an alternative to risk-averse mainstream publishers. But it’s not without its problems, too. For every decent book published this way, there are scores, hundreds of titles that – judged purely on literary merit – should never have seen the light of day. How does anyone find the jewels dropped into this morass of vanity?

Publishers and agents have always acted as a kind of filter. Their knowledgeable professionals not only know the market but generally have a passion for books. They weed out the rubbish – except when they can see that it might be profitable rubbish. Alas, in these difficult times for publishing, the profitable rubbish is becoming a larger proportion of what they do.

Self-publishing has no filtering mechanism of this sort. But it needn’t be that way.

On my blog at WebVivant, I’ve published a number of posts about self-publishing detailing how I think there’s a viable new web-only model made possible by Print On Demand (POD) technology. My wife, Trish, and I have created WebVivant Press as a web-based small press. Initially, the idea is to publish our own books (with three or four new titles due this year). However, we’re also considering publishing the works of other writers.

There’s an opportunity here to create a kind of book boutique – a web-based publishing and/or sales operation. The key to the book boutique would be to establish a reputation for consistent quality. Some boutiques might adopt themes or specific genres.

This sounds like a specialist bookshop, but the web-based model has some advantages. It can be run with minimal overheads and – thanks to POD technology – zero stock. I can set up a boutique simply by linking to books I like. Already, some digital publishing services make it possible to sell books through affiliate schemes. For example, my boutique might be a list of titles sold as e-books through Smashwords. Thanks to that company’s affiliate scheme, I would get a commission on each sale.

Setting up a boutique would be the work of a few minutes – just create a web page with the necessary links. But there’s more work involved to make it successful. The best, most valuable boutiques would be those that provide customers with some kind of guidance and guarantee of quality. A good boutique, then, would carry reviews and would sell only those books it recommends. If you find a boutique that matches your taste, you can shop there with confidence.

That would create a new market for those authors who have not appeared on Strictly Come Dancing, have not been involved in some life-threatening event and who can actually write. Perhaps it could be the saviour of worthwhile literature.

The Brittany region of France is densely covered with the remains of our ancient past. The megaliths – standing stones, dolmens and passage graves – of the prehistoric, neolithic period remain stubbornly mysterious yet (or perhaps because of that) endlessly fascinating.

The large alignments of Carnac are what people normally associate with Brittany megaliths. Yet other areas of the region offer relics just as capable of firing the imagination. Central Brittany, for example, has boasts the world’s tallest menhirs, largest dolmen, largest collection of standing stones and the largest cairn

Samuel Lewis lives and works in Central Brittany. He writes the ‘Megalith Diary’ column in the Central Brittany Journal and knows the area’s megalithic monuments intimately.

His book, Guide to the Menhirs and other Megaliths of Central Brittany, provides detailed information on more than 50 sites, including maps and the history and folklore associated with each location.

The guide is available in a print edition for just €5, or as a free e-book edition in PDF format.

For more information about the book, visit: Guide to the Menhirs and other Megaliths of Central Brittany.

Felicity Jane Laws’ new children’s book, A Cat’s Eye View, sees the world from a unique perspective – an ex-pat cat living in France.

Here’s Felicity’s description:

You may think your cat is resting tranquille in the sunshine and not very much is passing his intellect but you could be completely mistaken in that assumption if Purrpinal is representative of ex-pat cats, or indeed any cats at all. His irreverant view of what’s happening in the world outside and his struggles to educate his personal slave afford amusement and more than a sliver of truth.

Full colour photographs and unique chapter illustrations enhance the pithy prose; a book to enjoy many times over.

The book is available in both print and e-book editions.

» More information about A Cat’s Eye View »

» To buy A Cat’s Eye View, visit the Grand Ouest Authors shop »

There’s plenty of evidence that e-books are taking off, yet there are format issues to resolve and some publishers are still running scared.

According to The Bookseller, Waterstones has sold over 350,000 e-books since launching its online store 15 months ago. Around 30 titles have sold over 1,000 copies each. The buyer responsible for e-books, Alex Ingram, insists that these sales haven’t been at the expense of print editions, yet it seems some people aren’t convinced.

The Bookseller also reports that several US publishers are delaying the availability of e-book editions of certain titles until the hardback editions have had a chance to sell. That can be read a number of ways, but it seems to me to be an acknowledgement that e-books are selling, but at lower margins. Does this spell the end of the hardback?

Which format?

It may be too early to tell. For one thing, there’s still some shaking out to do with regard to formats. Many new media formats have been through this process. There was VHS vs Betamax, of course. Even in the field of music, which is now ruled by digital downloads, iPod users originally had to acquiesce in using Apple’s proprietary, DRM-protected format. Apple has since backed away from that approach and is positively enthusiastic about DRM-free MP3s.

There are numerous e-book formats. They include the ubiquitous PDF, although that’s supported (and poorly at that) by only one version of the Kindle. Amazon is promoting its own format for e-books (based on .mobi), and is trying the same kind of rights-managed lock-in that Apple originally attempted with the iPod. That may be entirely the wrong direction.

Most e-book readers, the Kindle excepted, are capable of using the open-source ePub format (which is essentially HTML wrapped in some XML). It’s interesting that Sony – which has, somewhat notoriously, promoted proprietary, DRM-protected formats in the past – has switched to ePub for its Reader line of products.

Of course, it’s possible to add DRM to the ePub format. Abobe provides the tools to do this. An article at Computerworld suggests that Adobe feels it has positioned itself strongly to be the e-book publishing platform of the future. It might be right.

We’ve started sending out press releases about the launch of Grand Ouest Authors (GOA), although it’s been difficult getting some people to understand that this isn’t, per se, a commercial venture.

Yes, we have a shop, and book pages with links to where you can buy the books online. But the money made from those sales goes to the authors, not GOA.

Our aim here is imply to provide a (free) network so that writers can collaborate, exchange ideas and get together to promote themselves and their books.

When we’ve got something new to announce, we’ll generally write about it here, in the blog. So if you want to stay up to date about what Grand Ouest Authors is up to, why not subscribe to our RSS feed using your favourite RSS reader, or sign up to email alerts via Feedburner, using the form in the sidebar on the right (‘Subscribe by Email’).

Writing is a solitary business. Even with the backing of an agent and a publisher, the common experience of most writers is one of lonely endeavour. And that even extends to those activities where you’d expect some support: in these cash-strapped days, many mid-list and newly published authors have found that their publishing houses are doing little in the way of promotion and marketing. And the self-published writer is even more isolated.

Then there are those of us who choose to live abroad. Read any advice on how to promote your book and you’ll find tips like approaching local bookshops, supermarkets and libraries. But when your book is in a foreign language, it’s a tough sell. The same goes for book signings and readings.

So that’s where Grand Ouest Authors comes in. Its aim is to build a network of anglophone authors in the Grand Ouest region of France – Brittany, Normandy and the Pays de la Loire. By banding together, I hope that we might more easily participate in regional events, and become a more attractive proposition for retail outlets.

The idea for this group came from an article in The Author, the journal of the Society of Authors. In ‘Ganging up’, author Simon Whaley described how he and a bunch of other Shropshire-based authors collaborated at cultural events and organised group book signings. They attracted far more interest than any one author would have merited.

And so that’s the plan here. Nothing is fixed in stone yet, but among the ideas for the group are:

• Group stands at local events, selling copies of books and doing signings.
• Approaching retail outlets with a point-of-sale display (‘local authors’) featuring our books.
• Group-based publicity – press releases issued to regional and national media covering our activities (including new books).
• A online presence (this site), including a group blog, online shop, author profiles, news and forum with both public and members-only sections.

If you’re a book author in the Grand Ouest, please do join us.