Just a thought here…. I saw reference to a ten-year-old book and wondered again about the prospects of authors taking their older books and making them publicly accessible. Will that become commonplace? (Creative commons license, not public domain.)
And that made me think about someone like John Irving, who didn’t hit it big for ten years till his fourth novel, or Elmore Leonard, whose career 20 years in seemed stuck in the second tier until John Leonard put one of his paperbacks on the cover of the NY Times Book Review. And Barbara Pym, who after publishing six books was deemed unsellable for 14 years.
Once they hit the bestseller list, their older books were valuable.
On the internet, in the initial period of an article being posted only about 20 percent of its readers will see it. Fully 80 percent will come later, often long later, brought there through web searches and links. So once you put something onto the web, you don’t really want to take it down (or, like the New York Times does, put it into a non-publicly accessible archive [1]), because you’ll lose the majority of your readers. That’s called the long tail of the internet, when low numbers over time mount up.
Publishers count on the long tail with their backlist. Sure they want and need bestsellers. But every season, the delight comes in finding books that they need to keep in print and will keep selling. They make a killing with bestsellers, but they pay the rent with the backlist.
If authors think they will lose out on selling old books with sudden new value — the Barbara Pym-type resurgence — I imagine they won’t relinquish anything. Of course, they can always retain movie and print rights, but the usual mix of fear, greed and envy will probably blind such authors to middle-road options like that. Yet allowing their books to appear in low- and no-cost electronic versions makes these books accessible again — the out-of-print books — and the long tail becomes effective again. Oh, you say, a free e-book can’t make money because there aren’t any sales.
No, it adds readers. And readers are what add sales. When a publisher drops a book — when sales don’t cover the taxes on inventory plus warehousing costs — the author stops adding new readers from old books.
Backlists are how publishers capitalize on the long tail effect, with print books. E-books are how authors can.
If authors understand that, then we’ll see their books on the web, brand-new as well as old, I think.
[1] While most stories in current issues are available online at no charge, the Times sells articles older than one week. One article costs $3.95 each; monthly and yearly options are available. While some might say this is “public,” I say that membership fees disqualify the service from that term.
