Saturday, August 6, 2011

So far, so good.

Last night I got a thousand words down on my second novel in progress.  I've about decided that I'm going to experiment with self e-publishing with this piece, because it's not the main genre I want to write in, so if it goes badly, then hopefully I won't screw up my chances at traditional publishing.

A lot of literary agents / editors / publishers are blogging about the changing publishing environment, and the possibility that someday soon, all books will be e-books.  I don't believe this will be the case, (though in fairness, I am about two steps from a Luddite and hate reading books electronically, so my opinion could be catastrophically wrong.)

I think e-books are here to stay, and that they will be extremely popular in the future.  However, they are a different enough format from traditional tree-flavor books that I don't think they are in a Highlander situation here.   When movies and television started up, people stated that it would be an end to reading.  Who would spend 3 hours reading a 300 page book on WWII when there was a snazzy movie with hot-bodied celebs to display pertinent information in a handy 150 minutes?  As it turns out, a lot of people.  The people who were prone to watching the movies instead of reading the book were, in a lot of cases, not the sort of people who were going to read the book anyways.

However, I think e-publishing in certain genres will be the way to go.  Young Adult of course, and the cheap romance / fantasy / sci-fi novels.  Those genres are full of people buying in bulk and volume, without expecting much in the way of emotional depth or re-readability.  (As an aside, I like all four of those categories, but I rarely buy any books in them, because I buy those books I would want to re-read.  Urges to read those categories are satisfied by my library card.)

I don't think mystery fiction will go that route as wholeheartedly, because mystery-lovers strike me as traditional readers.  They find something they like, and stick with it.  They're also typically looking for a little more from their books than a cheap thrill.  They want to be intellectually stimulated, and it's rare to see sloppily-written mystery fiction churned out with the same frequency as the other categories mentioned above.

We'll see, I suppose.  In the meantime, back to writing.  

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