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Interview with Jeremy Greenfield, Editorial Director Digital Book World For podcast release Monday, December 10, 2012 Q: We’re in the offices of F+W Media, joined by Jeremy Greenfield, editorial director of Digital Book World. Jeremy, great to see you. A: Good seeing you too, Chris. Q: We wanted to chat today about what we’re calling the year of self-publishing. It really seems to be the dominant story in publishing, led of course by the tremendous success of 50 Shades of Grey, but so much more has been going on when it comes to self-publishing. It’s an area you’ve been covering a lot this year. So, tell us about what you feel are the high points on that subject? A: Well, I think that the biggest thing to note for both the industry and people, in general, is that we are going through a golden age, a renaissance for writers and authors. Never before have they been able to have so much access to distributing their stuff to such a wide audience. And I think for people who have something inside of them that needs to come out that they want to bring to the world, or who want to make a living off of their writing, this is really a wonderful time for them to be working. On the flipside, I think what this means is that for the publishing industry, there’s new competition. There’s new competition from these self-published authors to sell their books to readers. I think most publishers are looking at what’s happening in self-publishing as more of an opportunity, though, than a challenge. I gather that we’ll get into that later, how publishers are capitalizing on the opportunity. But for me, the dominant message is, is that it’s a great time to be a writer. It’s a great time to be an author. And depending on how much you like some of the self- published work, it might be one of the greatest times to be a reader now with more stuff out there than ever before. Q: Well, you know, I actually agree with you. I think the fact that people are able to write and express themselves in a way that they never have been able to before. They needed to get somebody to accept it. They don’t need that. They just need to go to their audience directly and find out what they think of it. That’s tremendous. And the numbers that are out suggest that something like 300,000 self-published titles came out last year. And if you do the math, in the time we’re talking maybe a dozen or maybe two dozen titles will appear in the world. That’s a great thing. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. But it is certainly a disturbing moment in the business. And it’s not only disturbing for publishers. There are a lot of other players who are finding this a challenge. Let’s take it apart, though. Let’s continue first on the point about authors. The advantage to authors isn’t simply that they can rid of those pesky publishers. It’s a better business deal for authors. A: I think yes and no. If you’re someone who’s doing the math and saying do I want to get 70% of the purchase price of the book or do I want to get 25% or 15%, or whatever, then yes, it seems obvious that it would be better to go alone, but most authors would benefit, I would argue, from the editorial and production and marketing that a larger publisher can provide. And say, for a book like 50 Shades, that book started off as fan fiction on a blog. And it really took a large publisher in Random House to take it to the 65 million-plus sales that it’s seen so far this year. It’s the fastest selling book in history. So, I would argue that for some self-published authors, yes, you’re right. The choices between do I publish something by myself or not publish at all, or maybe I take a small advance or I work with a smaller publisher and I could get more money by publishing myself. But for some authors there is a legitimate choice between do I go with the large publisher – maybe I take some money upfront for a smaller cut of the earnings – or do I go it alone and get a higher percentage of the royalties. I think it’s about risk. How are much are you willing to risk? Because if you get money upfront that’s not as much risk. And I think it’s also about what you think the potential of the book is. If it can be published in 15 languages, and go to dozens of countries, and be sold in multiple editions, and maybe there’s a movie in it, you might be better off with a publisher, even though the royalties on the book sales will be lower because the publisher already knows how to translate things into different languages, and sell rights to the books overseas, and to help license it for other ways for it to be exploited, like in a movie or a TV series or a video game. So, I think that it’s really up in the air whether it’s better or not to go it alone. And I really think it’s case to case. Q: And certainly going with the self-publishing route first and then, if you will, allowing yourself to fall into the arms of a publisher has worked for a lot of authors – Amanda Hocking as you mentioned, E.L. James. There are many other examples. And you’ve written recently in a blog post for Forbes about self-published e-books that become bestsellers. The potential – I don’t want to let this go – is tremendous. If you are successful, if you really do enjoy the marketing piece and the sales piece as an author, you can make a million dollars. You’ve written about people who do. A: Yeah. Bella Andre is a really good example of somebody who had been published in a traditional publishing environment and with, I think, three of the big six publishers, and decided when e-books began their rise, to go it alone. Her publisher had told her at one point that one of her pennames had sort of run out of gas and she disagreed. So, she decided to continue that penname and was able to be very successful with it. And she told Time Magazine recently that she’s making $2.4 million this year doing that. It really needs to be said that she is very much the exception to the rule. The odds are not as bad as say, winning the lottery, but they’re in that same theater. There are tens of thousands of self-published authors out there. It is thought that the vast majority of them don’t make any money or make very, very little money on what they do. Some very, very small group makes a small amount of money and some infinitesimally small group makes a lot of money. We’ll actually be discussing all of this at Digital Book World 2013. In January, we’re doing a survey of published authors, self-published authors and aspiring authors about how much money they make and what their attitudes toward publishing and self-publishing are, and which self-publishing services they favor, and how they go to market, how they use social media and blogging to get their message out there. So, we’ll learn a lot more in the next few months about what’s really happening with that community, but I think that people like Bella Andre who have had that kind of success are definitely the exception to the rule. That said, there are probably hundreds and hundreds of authors out there who are in a similar position who need to make that decision. Should I go it alone and self- publish, or should I could continue on with the publisher, or should I try to be published initially? There’s a woman just like you mentioned. One path for authors is now to self- publish and then get picked up by a larger publisher. Tammara Webber who just recently had her book sold to Penguin, I believe, for a seven-figure sum after self- publishing and seeing success there. Obviously, Penguin believes that it can pay that money up front and then recoup its costs by bringing the book to an even wider audience and selling it as a print book perhaps, or selling it in multiple countries. So, it’s a very interesting time out there for authors. Q: And we should specify that the kinds of authors who have seen the most success, as rare as it may be, are the authors of the genre fiction. This is very much a fiction story. Not so much for nonfiction. Unless you know of others who do write nonfiction who have done well with that. Can you talk about that? A: Yes. When it comes to the self-published bestsellers, to my knowledge, it’s all fiction. I think there are a couple of obvious reasons for that. It’s a little bit, I think, easier to put together a cogent, comprehensive, cohesive piece of fiction versus the same for nonfiction, but people are using self-publishing outside of what we would consider trade publishing for a lot of nonfiction and for a lot of business purposes that may not necessarily involve selling a tremendous number of copies for their books.

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