I Have Seen the Future—And It Ain’t Got a Lot of Dead Trees in It
Let me start by saying that I love books and magazines. I like the heft and feel of them. I grew up with the printed page. I can’t remember ever having a house where most of the wall space wasn’t covered by overflowing bookshelves. I don’t especially like reading my science fiction off the computer screen.
But as a science fiction writer—and one who has to pay the bills with his science fiction—it’s my job to look ahead and see what’s coming, and whether I like it or not makes no difference. It is not a matter of Good or Bad, but rather of True or False. And the truth is that we’re not going to be pulping as many forests in the future.
Twenty years ago, when the Internet was just taking off, just about every established science fiction writer was approached by start-up publishers. The pitch was always the same: give me something for free today and I’ll make you rich tomorrow (or maybe next week, or possibly in 17 years, or conceivably in…) Every one of them went belly-up.
Then Omni Online, which certainly had deep pockets (or at least could borrow from Penthouse’s) came along, and suddenly we had a paying market. It lasted long enough for Ellen Datlow to become the very first to win a Hugo for editing an electronic publication. But it didn’t last a lot longer than that.
Then we had GalaxyOnline.com of sainted memory. My God, we writers loved it! Half a buck a word (if you wrote the minimum. It was a set amount.) But it was a loss leader for a film and TV company that never made any films or TV shows, and it was gone within a year.
Then there was scifi.com, which paid more than double the going rate of the digests, and lasted long enough to win Ellen Datlow another Hugo for editing another electronic magazine…but it, too, bit the dust.
So what’s with the title to this article (I hear you ask)? All these places had high hopes and high pay rates, and they all wound up in publishing’s graveyard.
What can I tell you? The first few settlers who tried to reach the West Coast didn’t make it either.
But they paved the way for those who came after them.
The first success story came from an unlikely source: Fictionwise.com, which publishes only reprints. They started out in 2000 with a small handful of science fiction writers—Robert Silverberg, Nancy Kress, James Patrick Kelly, myself, just a few others. And they paid twice as much for a short fiction reprint as the average anthology paid. And we all thought: wow, how long as this been going on? It’s like stealing!
And we never thought of it again—until later that same year, when the royalty checks went out, and we realized that, hey, there are thousands of people out there who, when confronted by trillions of free words of drivel on the Internet, prefer to pay for reprints by known authors.
That was only eight years ago. These days Fictionwise.com has literally thousands of authors, including such heavyweights as Dan Brown, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and that whole crowd.
They proved you could sell literally billions of words of electronic reprints, many (in fact, in the beginning, most) of them science fiction. So it was only a matter of time before a major science fiction publisher took a look at the direction the world was heading and decided it was time to go electronic. As I write these words, the pioneer is Baen Books with Jim Baen’s Universe, but I’m sure by the time you read this (maybe a year from now) others will have joined the parade.
And I wouldn’t be surprised to see some of the major houses start publishing novel-length science fiction online as well.
Will they have any trouble getting writers?
Not a chance. The online magazines can pay three and four times what the print magazines can pay, and the book publishers can easily offer 30-40% royalties, rather than the 10-12% most hardcovers pay and the 8-10% that usually goes to paperbacks.
How can this be?
Easy.
Let’s take a print magazine. It sells, let us hypothesize, for $5.00, give or take a nickel.
What does it cost to get that magazine in your hands?
Well, first of all, the publisher has to buy the stories.
There’s an office, which means an overhead.
There’s paper for the magazines to be printed on.
There are color separations for the covers.
There is the cost of printing tens of thousands (formerly a couple of hundred thousand) of copies of the magazine.
There are shipping costs. The subscribers don’t drive to the printing plant to pick their copies up. Neither do the distributors. Neither do the stores.
There are the distribution costs, both for the national and local distributors. They’re good guys, but they don’t place the magazines in the stores for free.
There are the stores themselves. If they sell a $5.00 magazine, most of them are going to want $1.75 or thereabouts for their trouble.
There are warehouse costs for those magazines that are neither sold nor pulped.
And a month later, every copy has vanished from the newsstands and bookstores, to be replaced by the next month’s issue, and the publisher will never make another cent on that out-of-date issue.
Now let’s take a look at how these expenses effect an electronic magazine.
There is no office expense and no overhead, because the editors work out of their houses.
There are no paper expenses, because the magazine doesn’t appear on paper.
There are no color separations, because they simply post the artwork right on the screen.
There are no printing expenses, because the magazine is not printed.
There are no shipping costs, because the magazine is not shipped.
There are no national or local distribution costs, because they are not distributed. They’re right there online, and they don’t have to pay anyone to put the magazine in your physical proximity.
There is no cut for the bookstores, because the magazine is not sold in bookstores. Or newsstands. Or supermarkets. It’s online. You pay the price, you get the magazine, and there are no middle men. (You might think about that. When you pay $5.00 for a digest magazine, the publisher might wind up with about $1.85 of it—and that’ll be his average only if he sells the entire print run, which never happens, or even comes close to happening these days. You pay $5.00 for an electronic magazine, and the publisher gets $5.00.)
There are no warehouse costs, because the magazine exists in electronic phosphors, not paper pages. They’ll post the next issue in another month or two, but this one won’t be through earning money, because it will always be available for anyone who wants it.
Do you begin to see where the print magazines are at a bit of a disadvantage?
Now it should be clear to you why electronic publishers can outbid the print publishers for the writers they want. The print magazines are paying authors, overhead, color separations, paper, printing, shipping, national distributors, local distributors, bookstores, and warehouses.
And the electronic publishers? They’re paying…authors.
Period.
So of course they can triple or quadruple what the print magazines pay. (I assume we don’t have to go over the whole thing again with books. Just cut to the last sentence: So of course they can triple or quadruple the hardcover and paperback royalty rates.)
Ah, but is there an audience out there in the vast electronic wilderness? After all, buying The Da Vinci Code or The Shining or The Foundation Trilogy from Fictionwise.com is one thing, but will computer users go for new science fiction? (The obvious answer is: certainly they will. An electronic story has already won the Nebula, and another one was just nominated for a Hugo the same week I am writing this. But those are voters, not masses of buyers, and you want numbers, right?)
Okay—numbers you want, numbers we got.
I’m a luddite, especially in a forward-looking community like science fiction writers and fans. Last summer I didn’t even know what the word “podcast” meant. Then the young man who runs a website called Escape Pod, one of many such sites, bought reprint rights to some of my stories. I didn’t give it another thought until he mentioned, a few months later, that the story of mine he had run most recently had received 22,000 hits in its first month online.
22,000 hits? The issue of the science fiction magazine it had appeared in had only sold 18,500 copies. More people heard my story online (or on their iPods) than read it.
I was sure it had to be an aberration. So when my next story, which was not a traditional science fiction story, but had been sold to a young adult anthology, came out, I waited two weeks and then asked how it was doing.
14,000 hits. In two weeks. For me. Not for Kevin Anderson or Anne McCaffrey or Robert Jordan or someone else who lives on the bestseller list.
That’s when I knew beyond any doubt that the world was changing, that the readers are still out there in quantity, but they’re not necessarily browsing the bookstores or the newsstands any more.
No sea change ever happens smoothly, especially not in as hidebound, old-fashioned and unimaginative a business as publishing. Some of the start-ups that look good today may be dead by the time you read this. But if so, others will take their place. There are 37 holes in the dike, and traditional publishers have only ten (figurative) fingers.
Like I said, I still love the feel of a book, the smell of an old pulp, the pleasure I get just from browsing a bookstore.
But I also can see the future coming at full speed, and I don’t think anything’s going to stop it. Certainly not me. I may not like reading electronic pages, but I’m editing an electronic prozine, and I’m selling to every podcaster I can find, and more than 200 of my books and stories have been sold as electronic reprints.
I’m not happy with electronic publishing. I probably never will be. But I’d be a hell of a lot less happy if I was left behind.