This book is too long.

E-book prices appear to be in a race to the bottom. When Amazon first opened its Kindle store, it priced most bestsellers at $9.99. Big publishers fought for higher prices, both to put more money in their pockets and to prevent “devaluing” books. But authors went the other direction. As David Carnoy explained in a recent article for CNET, “Just last year, the magic price point for a lot of indie (self-published) authors was $2.99.” Even this puny price–just a third what many mass-market paperbacks cost–didn’t last. Carnoy goes on, “But then something happened on the the way to the check-out cart. Some authors started saying, ‘Screw it, I’m not selling that much at $2.99, I’ll just go to 99 cents and see what happens.’ And bam, some of these books took off. And some really took off.”

Will Someone Not Think of the Authors?

This incredible shrinking price has provoked genuine questions about the future of the book, however. Today, a new fiction hardcover retails for around $30. Amazon discounts that, as do many bookstores, but even the discounted price far exceeds $0.99. Authors happily put in the long, long hours it takes to write a novel in exchange for their (surprisingly small) cut of $30. (“Surprisingly small” typically meaning somewhere between 10% and 15%, or $3 to $4.50.) Earning $3 for each copy sold without doubt beats the 29 cents Amazon gives an author when his book sells for $0.99.

The result of these one-tenth royalties, the worry goes, is fewer books. Who wants to put in the long, long hours it takes to write a novel if you’re only going to pocket a little more than a quarter each time someone reads it? (At $2.99, Amazon’s kickback to the author jumps to $2, which looks a whole lot better–and a whole lot closer to print book rates.)

Let’s set aside the reasonable counter that, at $0.99 (or even at $2.99), readers are likely to buy quite a few more novels than they did at $9.99 or $30. After all, no matter what the price, people only have so many hours in the day to read. It’s also why I believe $0.99 novels won’t mean fewer novels. Instead, $0.99 novels will mean shorter novels.

And that’s a very good thing.

Most Books are Too Long

Ed McBain’s first 87th Precinct novel, Cop Hater, publish in 1956, ran 166 pages. A decade later, in 1968, McBain published Fuzz, at 288 pages. By 1989, with Lullaby, the page count ballooned to 432. The length of McBain’s work fluctuated, but never settled to anything approaching Cop Hater’s sub-200.

Elmore Leonard’s famous 1961 novel, Hombre, runs a mere 208 pages. Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon is only 217 pages, while Raymond Chandler’s classic, The Big Sleep, is only 139. Would any of these giants of fiction been better longer?

These books are just right.

A place exists for long books, of course. Sticking with the crime genre, James Ellroy’s magisterial L.A. Confidential is 512 pages, without an ounce of fat. (The novel’s famously spare prose style in fact resulted from his publisher telling Ellroy that the original manuscript was far too long, Ellroy said to me at a book signing once. Ellroy went back and removed every unnecessary word, so as to bring the length down without impacting the labyrinthine plot.) Long novels can develop character and setting and mood in a way short novels often can’t. Long novels can, in that sense, be richer than their shorter peers.

But most authors don’t write rich novels. And most novels need not be rich. The bulk of fiction is not Charles Dickens or Marcel Proust, nor should it be. The bulk of fiction is story and stories frequently are better shorter. Infinite Jest (1104 pages) is great, but an armful of books like that would make any of us long for And Then There Were None (272 pages).

In Praise of Short Books

Few people walk out in the middle of a movie, even if it’s rather bad. Few of us will drop a novel once we’re more than a third in, even if the prose is miserable. We engage in such irrational behavior not because we’re crazy or because we don’t understand sunk costs. Rather, we stick with mediocre (or worse) storytelling because we want to know how the story ends.

In this way, long novels ask a great deal of their readers. If the novel is wonderful, the extra time the author demands will be repaid with dividends when the final page is reached. But most novels aren’t wonderful and almost all of us can think of several books we finished and thought, “That was okay or even pretty good, but it could’ve been half that long.”

The simple fact is that most novels are too long. We authors could learn a lot from the masters of the pulps, who churned out tale after rip-roaring tale, offering huge entertainment in very small packages. We may think our opus is worthy of 700 pages, but it’s probably not. And a 700 page book means asking our readers to forgo the other 350 page book they could’ve read if ours had been half as long. Or the two-and-a-half other books they could’ve read if novels averaged a reasonable 200 pages.

Cheaper Books are Shorter Books

That’s exactly what I predict will result from the price of novels dropping to a buck. Authors won’t give up writing (if we did it to get rich, few of us would be writing today, anyway). Rather, seeing that they’ll only earn a quarter for every sale will make writers look at their works not as monuments it took them ten years to craft and so it better take the reader that much time to appreciate. Instead, authors will shift back into the pulp mindset, seeing their books as stories to be written quickly for maximum entertainment, before moving on to the next.

In an ideal world, novels would settle into a happy length of around 50,000 words–or a little over 150 pages. That’s more than enough space to tell most stories.

And it’s short enough that readers can finish it quickly and move on to the author’s next 50,000 word, 99 cent pageturner.

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Let’s start with one vision of how people interact with books. This is the romantic vision, where a book is a loved member of the family, an intellectual artifact to be turned to again and again, passed down to children and grandchildren, and eventually bequeathed to a library for the enjoyment of our eventual flying-car-piloting, vat-grown-beef-eating descendants. This vision sees books as icons, as treasures. It doesn’t limit this to the physical objects. With an ebook, there is no physical book, just electric stuff floating in physical stuff and made manifest via screen technology stuff. But what matters to the romantic vision is the *idea* of the book, and that idea is bound to no particular medium.

But most people—or, at least, most people so far as they relate to most of the books they read—aren’t romantics. Instead, they adopt what might be called a pragmatic vision of readership. These are the people who buy the latest Alex Cross novel, read it on the airplane, the subway, and for a couple of hours before bed, finish it in a week, and then either stick the paperback on a shelf, sell it to a used bookstore, or just throw it away. Their interest is not in perpetual ownership of artifacts but in consuming—and hopefully enjoying—a story. That done, they move on to another James Patterson or John Grisham or Dan Brown. While I don’t have the numbers to support this, I’d comfortably bet that far more books are bought in furtherance of the pragmatic vision than the romantic.

And here’s where we get back to those evil Lemurians and Gnomes. Pragmatic folks have no real reason to care about DRM. So long as the Lincoln Rhyme thriller they bought on Sunday lasts on their reading device to last until they finish it on Thursday, then their entire library of old ebooks of suspense yarns and spaceship adventures can vanish in an epic corporate dustup and they simply have *no reason to care.* Why? Because the pragmatic readers have gotten everything out of each book they want to get at the moment they turn that last page.

In fact, the whole of the romantic crusade against DRM is based upon the (likely mistaken) assumption that most of us want to do things with our books after we’ve finished reading them. We want to lend them to friends or we want to share them with our children. No matter what, say the romantics, we most assuredly do not want to *lose* them.

But the romantics are wrong, and the reason they’re wrong is that they’re still thinking of books as moderately expensive physical objects instead of the fleeting packets of entertainment most of them are. To see how strange this view is, think for a moment not about books but DVDs. You don’t see campaigns on the Internet calling the Netflix empire evil because its customers don’t get to keep the third disc of the first season of The Office they watched over the weekend. We don’t think of TV shows or movies that way because services like Netflix have brought the marginal cost of consuming them happily close to zero. We don’t complain that we can’t give that DVD away to a friend, because we give away recommendation instead—and let our friend check out The Office themselves, on their own Netflix account. With ebooks driving the cost of books down, giving away a recommendation begins to look every much like giving away a book.

The romantics don’t see it this way. With books, they overvalue ownership because books are special. Books are creamy paper between beautiful covers, with a magical smell and that exquisite texture of print under the pad of the thumb. So *not owning* them sounds abhorrent, even downright uncivilized.

And I agree with them. For some books. I love my set of first editions of James Ellroy. I cherish my hundred year old, leather bound complete works of Edgar Allan Poe. I’ll read both to my daughter at bedtime, when she’s old enough and if my wife lets me. But most books, to me, aren’t James Ellroy and they aren’t Edgar Allan Poe. Most books I consume are just that: consumed, enjoyed, and set aside or thrown out or sold. For *those* books, I needn’t worry about the plug being pulled by the DRM provider and I needn’t worry about being locked into a particular device. I can read each in the moment and then move onto the next.

Digital rights managed ebooks will eventually fade away, just as digital rights managed music has. But the fact that we must deal with DRM today shouldn’t be the enormous, hyperbolic, tinfoil hat concern it has become. Rather, we should see DRM as the sugar making the move to ebooks more palatable for publishers and authors, and the move to ebooks as a phenomenal, revolutionary development that will lower the costs of reading, bring more authors to more readers, and grow the field of books like nothing since the printing press. DRM, simply put, just isn’t that big of a deal.

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Before exploring how Free applies to fiction writing, though, I should mention that Anderson has been nice enough to practice his own message and so is giving the book away for free in a variety of formats.  I listened to the audiobook version, which was of excellent quality.

The key idea in Anderson’s book is that the technology of the Internet drives the marginal cost of content to zero. Each print copy of my novel The Hole will, when the book is published, cost a dollar or two to produce. Paper is physical stuff and physical stuff has to be paid for.  But each web based copy costs me effectively nothing.  While I pay twenty dollars a month for web hosting, having you click through to the novel’s online serial edition doesn’t drive up that cost.  Each new reader of the online edition, in other words, is free to me. So, while I can’t afford to give away free copies of The Hole in print to anyone who might want one, I can afford to give it away without charge in an electronic format.  The trick–and the topic of much of Anderson’s book–is how to make money doing so.

A handful of business models exist.  I can go the traditional web publisher route and place advertisements alongside the novel’s text.  But that doesn’t produce much income because the traffic to even a hugely successful writer’s home page is tiny compared to the New York Times or ESPN. I probably won’t earn even a livable wage with banner ads.

I could adopt a “freemium” model, where a limited version of the service is given away for free in the hopes of attracting some users to a paid, premium version. This is the method most authors who’ve given away their works use.  Cory Doctorow, for instance, posts Creative Commons licensed electronic editions of all his novels for free download on his website. Readers are free to consume them without charge–but have to pay for a bound copy in a bookstore or from Amazon.com.  Chris Anderson does exactly the same with Free itself. And this is the method I’ve used for The Hole. Throughout the composition of the first draft, I serialized the chapters and let the world access them for free through my website.  The revised edition, however, will be a paid product, both in print and ebook.  This “freemium” model had the added benefit of landing me a publishing contract.  My publisher, Permuted Press, found The Hole through my webpage and offered to publish it partly because of the readers it had attracted.

The benefit of free is that it allows for a large audience.  People don’t have to give up anything except their time to use the product–in this case, to read the author’s book–so they’re more willing to give it a chance.  The key is turning that larger audience into cash. Besides the two methods outlined above, another possibility is granting early access to paid readers.  Subscribe and you can get the book in electronic format months before it hits stores.  The trouble here is that it reverses one of the key equations in the free ecosystem.  Namely, having a large audience of non-paying readers creates buzz, which attracts more readers, some of whom may pay. By limiting the initial audience to paid subscribers, the author forgoes that early buzz.

Or an author might front load the freemium model by using a bounty system.  I could post a one paragraph overview of a book idea I have, along with a free first chapter.  Readers could pledge to buy the print edition when the book is published and, if a certain threshold of pledges is met, I get to work writing and serializing (for free) the results. The trouble here is that it demands a sizable base of fans before any hope of meeting even a modest threshold can exist.

What’s important for fiction writers is not the specific business model each uses.  What’s important is understanding what free does to publishing.  Chris Anderson’s book provides a great starting point for the conversation.  It’s up to the market and the ingenuity of individual writers to take it from there.

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I’ll try to post my thoughts as I go through this first experience editing a lengthy work. Words of encouragement are great, too, however…

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To date, THE HOLE has been available in two formats: serialized in blog form and as a download for the Amazon Kindle. I realize–and the frequent email requests make obvious–that this leaves out a lot of the ways people might like to go about reading the book.  My intent all along has been to give away the serialized version for free on the website as a blog as I write it, and make other electronic versions available for a small fee.  Eventually, I hope to have the book in print, too, though in a thoroughly revised and updated form.

All that said, being exclusive to the Kindle is somewhat limiting.  So today I’m happy to announce that THE HOLE is now readily available in pretty much any format you can imagine thanks to the fine service offered by Smashwords.  Just follow this link:

Read THE HOLE in whatever format you desire.

Please let me know if you encounter any problems using the Smashwords site.  And, just as I did with the Kindle version, in a few months I’ll post my experiences with Smashwords to give other writers an idea of how well it works.

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Publishing to the Amazon Kindle

Getting setup as an Amazon publisher is easy.  The only step beyond having an Amazon login account was to give them my bank information for payment (them paying me, that is–I didn’t have to pay them anything).  Adding books takes slightly more work.  Most of this consists of filling out forms (title, author, edition, description, price, etc.) and the bulk of the work is in formatting the manuscript for Kindle viewing.  I have to admit, this was probably more difficult for me that it would be for most.  The reason is, I do all my writing in an application called Scrivener. It’s very likely the greatest writing tool ever, but it also means that I have an extra step when I’m done of exporting to Word and then taking care of a bunch of formatting issues.  Authors working in Word, or any other word processor, to begin with will have an easier time of it.

Uploading the manuscript is a snap and Amazon does a good job making it look pretty enough.  If I were publishing something new, I’d spend a bit more time coming up with a nice PDF with better chapter headings and other shiny formatting bits.  On the whole, though, getting the novel into Amazon was far smoother than I expected it to be.

Selling E-books

I did not price the book at anywhere near retail, as I couldn’t imagine doing so for something that wasn’t yet retail quality.  On the other hand, I knew people enjoyed reading it–this based on the enthusiasm the web serialization had garnered–so I figured there was nothing wrong with charging a little.  After all, I do write to (eventually) get paid and the story was available for free to those who wanted to browse through my blog to read it.  Having it on the Kindle was value added.  So I set the price at $3.49.  Amazon knocked twenty percent off to $2.79.  That put the book firmly in the impulse buy category.

The novel has sold relatively steadily since publication, with a slight bump in October (people like to buy horror stories around Halloween, oddly enough).  ”Relatively steadily” means roughly a copy a day–which is far better than I expected, actually, and an encouraging number for first outing.

Generating Feedback

My goal in making the draft edition available on the Kindle was two-fold.  Yes, I wanted to earn some money, and I succeeded in doing that.  But I was also hoping to turn the product’s Amazon page into a forum for reader feedback.  This hasn’t happened.  I’ve had four readers post reviews (three if you discount the one from my wife) and no one has started a thread in the book’s discussion area.  I’m not too upset by this, as it’s wonderful enough that people are actually buying and reading the book.  In the future, though, I’ll simply direct all feedback to my website.

Publishing to the Kindle has been–and continues to be–worthwhile.  I will certainly use it again the the future and I expect it to become a more viable income source as the number of folks out there with the device grows.  Amazon has a neat product on their hands and it’s one aspiring authors should consider embracing.

Update: As part of signing a publishing deal for THE HOLE with Permuted Press, I agreed to take down the ebook discussed above. The web version is still available, however, and I’m currently working on editing that draft for eventual print release (and ebook) release. If you want to know when that happens, just follow me on Twitter or fan me on Facebook and you’ll automatically be in the loop. Oh, and you’ll get notices about my new fiction, posts on writing and publishing, and more.

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That said, I do have a project I’m kicking around that I’m hoping to get some feedback on from my readers.  I have quite a few short stories I’ve written over the years and countless ideas for more.  I love writing serial novels, but short fiction is a blast, too.  Based on my experiences with–and the success so far of–the Amazon Kindle e-book version of THE HOLE (about which I plan to post more soon), I’m inclined to continue the model.  My intention is to put out a short book worth of stories and serials on a quarterly basis.  I may bump that up to six times a year depending on how productive I am.  Each issue would be priced reasonably, be better edited than what’s been going up on the website (I problem I’m noticing, and apologize for, as I do my revisions), and, most significantly, also available in print.

If all goes well, I hope to have the first issue ready for purchase on Amazon around the start of the new year.  I have enough stuff written at this point to put the book together, so it’s just a matter of finding the time to do the design, editing, and layouts.  This initial issue would include several stories I’ve already made available online, the first part of KARAOKE QUINTESSENCE, one new piece of fiction I wrote a month or so ago, and, finally, a short story providing some background on THE HOLE.  This last I’m really excited to write, as I’ll get to spill the secrets of how the world in the novel got to be the way it is.  Future issues would all never before seeing writing–though I’m going to have to think about how to handle future serial works.

All that said, I’d love to hear what you think.  Would a quarterly short story and serial publication be of interest?  Thanks for taking the time to let me know your thoughts.  Now I need to plunge back into the rewriting process.  It’s good to spend some time with Elliot and Evajean again…

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