 
Writers Disrupting Publishers

How Self-Published Writers Disrupted the Publishing Industry, 2nd Edition

Hercules Bantas

Copyright Hercules Bantas 2017

All rights reserved

Published by The Reluctant Geek

Melbourne, Australia

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter 1: Recent History of the Publishing Industry

- Why Was There a Content Problem? A Brief History of Publishing

- The Content Problem

Chapter 2: Ebooks and Digital Publishing

\- Ebooks

- Digital Distribution Systems

Chapter 3: Readers, Genre, and Bestsellers

Chapter 4: Writers and Publishing

- Unpublished writers

- Published writers

\- The Industry Response

\- The Rise of Self-Published Ebooks

Chapter 5: The Digital Author

Conclusions

Bibliography

Appendix 1: Literature Review

Acknowledgements

### I would like to acknowledge Dr Michelle Smith for all her help in preparing this book.
Introduction

According to Arnaud Nourry, CEO of the Hatchett Group, ebooks are stupid because they are not made of paper but still let people read books as if the words were printed on paper,

The ebook is a stupid product. It is exactly the same as print, except it's electronic. There is no creativity, no enhancement, no real digital experience. We, as publishers, have not done a great job going digital. We've tried. We've tried enhanced or enriched ebooks – didn't work (Gill, 2018).

Nourry's dislike of ebooks is understandable. He is the CEO of a publishing company and ebooks have made the lives of such folk rather difficult of late. He is obviously a little miffed that ebooks and digital publishing are so popular with readers and writers, and that digital publishing has given writers another option for getting their books to readers.

Although Mr Nourry is a big wig in the publishing community and would know a bit about books and publishing, his argument about ebooks is nonsense. Ebooks are not exactly the same as paper books. There is at least one vital difference between paper and electronic books, and it is giving publishing professionals sleepless nights. That difference is that publishers have no control of the distribution of ebooks, and that lack of control is the cause of all the industry angst about self-published books. If they have no control, they have no say about which books are published and which books are rejected. More importantly, if they have no control, they have no way of taking an ample slice of the revenue a book generates.

Most of the money from the sale of self-published ebooks goes to the author, which seems to really annoy publishing executives. They appear to be of the opinion that it is ridiculous for the person that writes the book to make most of the money from the sale of the book. And it is not just publishing executives who are hostile to ebooks and self-publishing. Academic and award-winning writer Ros Barber ignited an internet storm when she wrote that she would never self-publish even though she did not make all that much money as an industry-published author (Barber, 2016).

This book sets out why I think Arnaud Nourry's argument is wrong, and why Ros Barber will probably make much less from her writing than she should. Read on and make up your own mind. Oh, and it began its life as an academic text, so might be a tad dry in places.

The Publisher's Problem

In recent times, the traditional publishing industry that specialises in producing and distributing paper books (pbooks), has been forced to compete with the emerging digital publishing industry that uses the work of self-published authors to produce electronic books (ebooks). Spearheaded by Amazon (Hetherington, 2014, p. 383), online ebook sales have taken a substantial share of what was once an exclusive market for traditional publishers (2014, p. 385). However, it is not just competition with self-published ebooks that will cause ongoing problems for the traditional publishing industry. It will also be starved of content because many authors will eventually move to self-publishing in order to monetise their work while retaining control of the copyright (Coker, 2013, loc 1348).

For the publishing industry, the digital disruption has had two catastrophic effects. First, ebooks have captured a section of a market that traditionally published pbooks once dominated (Hetherington, 2014, p. 385). Second, digital distribution of ebooks has allowed authors to bypass the traditional publishing industry and sell directly to readers (Coker, Indie Authors, 2013, Loc 1346) (Gilbert, 2015, p. 182), which has changed the relationship between authors and the publishing industry and created an alternative route for authors to publish their work in the public sphere.

According to the experts, the innovative disruption of an industry usually involves only two parties—the incumbent industry and the usurper whose products displace those of the incumbent (Adner, 2002, p. 667). In the past two decades, digital communication technologies have disrupted several industries—of which publishing was one—including the music recording industry, which had to contend with the digitisation of music and its unauthorised distribution (Moreau, 2013), and television broadcasting, which had to contend with online streaming services such as Netflix (Wessel, 2012). The disruption of the publishing industry differed to both television and music, however, because it involved a third party—writers.

While the publishing industry has become internationalised in recent times, I will focus on the English-language industry unless otherwise noted. Most of the evidence for my arguments will come from two sources. Because publishing is above all else a business, I will draw upon empirically based economic studies to define the disruption and its consequences. And because writing is an artform, I will use the words of the writers and publishing industry professionals who were involved in the disruption to form the foundation of an examination of the role played by writers in the disruption.

This book will focus heavily on the role that writers played in the disruption because they create the product that the publishing industry—both paper and digital—packages and sells. Without authors, there would be no publishers, and without the content that unpublished authors provided, Amazon would have had no content for the ebooks it produced and therefore nothing to offer as an alternative product. Below is a brief description of each of each of the five chapters to show how the discussion will flow. The ultimate goal is to show how independently published ebooks have captured a section of the market that was once dominated by industry published pbooks, and that the rise of digital publishing channels such as Amazon's KDP has fundamentally changed the relationship between writers and publishers.

**Chapter 1** will examine the recent history of the publishing industry. The primary argument will be that historical factors and the structure of the publishing industry made it vulnerable to disruption by creating a content problem that led to a power imbalance between authors and publishers.

**Chapter 2** will focus on ebooks and digital distribution. The central argument will be that digital publishing became popular because traditional paper-based publishing was not fulfilling the needs of three stakeholder groups serviced by the industry. Two of the groups—unpublished authors and authors with out-of-print books—were the product of the publishing industry's content problem. The third group consisted of readers who wanted to access literature on electronic devices or who wanted to read genre fiction that the industry was not producing.

**Chapter 3** will examine how the profit motivation of the publishing industry meant that certain genres—such as horror or historical fiction—were neglected which created gaps in the market that consisted of unsatisfied readers (the third stakeholder group). The central argument of the chapter will be that the publishing industry, due to its profit imperative, could not fulfil the needs of every reader, and that those needs could only be fulfilled by self-published authors using digital publishing technologies.

**Chapter 4** will investigate how frustrated writers (the first and second stakeholder groups) used digital publishing to service the markets that the publishing industry could not. The central argument will be that many writers with finished manuscripts—whether they had been previously industry-published or not—were given no choice but to self-publish through the disruptive digital publishing technologies in order to monetise their work.

**Chapter 5** will investigate the new environment within which writers must publish their work. The central argument of this chapter will be that, although digital publishing technologies have solved the problem that writers had of accessing industry-dominated markets and given them the freedom to choose what and how to publish, they have also made the writer responsible for the entire publishing process, much of which was once the preserve of the industry.

Although most commentators agree that the innovative technologies that gave rise to digital publishing and distribution of ebooks have disrupted the publishing industry, they have overlooked the role played in the disruption by writers. This investigation will pay particular attention to the role of writers in the changes wrought to the publishing industry by the disruptive technologies, and will argue that it was Amazon's use of self-published authors to create alternative products that was the catalyst of the disruption.
Chapter 1: Recent History of the Publishing Industry

In this chapter, I will argue that the disruption of the publishing industry was made possible by historic events that led to a power imbalance between authors, who create literary content, and publishers, who package and distribute it. The discussion will begin with a brief history of the publishing industry up until Amazon released the Kindle ereader in 2007, before moving on to examine the content problem that effects both traditional publishers and all writers. It will suggest that the evolution of the publishing industry created the conditions for the content problem to occur.

Why Was There a Content Problem? A Brief History of Publishing

Books have been a part of human society at least since the third millennium BC, when the Egyptians used the pith of the papyrus reed to make scrolls upon which they wrote with a sharpened reed stalk (Dahl, 1968, p. 8). Although there have been various and diverse materials used to create books over the centuries, it was the mechanisation of the printing press in the early nineteenth century that made the _industry_ of publishing possible.

Mechanisation solidified the economic and cultural requirements for the industrialisation of publishing through the mass production of printed products such as newspapers and journals:

The mechanisation of printing was largely driven by the possibilities offered by the development in Britain of new power–driven machinery, which enabled the rapid printing of larger quantities of material by fewer workers. Consequently, the unit cost of the printed item was reduced. During the first decades of the 19th century, methods of mass production were applied to the printing of newspapers and journals, most significantly with the printing in 1814 of _The Times_ —the newspaper with the largest daily circulation—on a steam powered machine (Mosley, 2010, p. 98).

As an industry, publishing developed and grew within each nation state, evolving to fit the information and cultural needs of the citizenry. In the USA, for example, the increased sophistication of work machines that were a product of each of the two World Wars spurred a growth in printing because people needed manuals and how-to guides for the new technologies (Ramrattan & Szanberg, Revolutions in Book Publishing, 2016, p. 5). In Britain, however, the periods after each of the World Wars saw the publishing industry decline due to the lack of resources and personnel (Squires, 2010, p. 189). But it was the period from the 1960s that saw the greatest change in the industry, largely stimulated by advances in computer technology.

From the 1960s onward, publishing began to transform from an industry that was dominated by small-scale private companies to an industry owned and operated by large, transnational media conglomerates that were active in a variety of industries (Wirten, 2007, p. 395). In the USA in the mid 1970s, there were 17 publishing houses, which dropped to 7 by the 1990s (Ramrattan & Szanberg, Revolutions in Book Publishing, 2016, p. 6). By 2015, just five multinational conglomerates controlled eighty percent of the USA market (McIlroy, 2016). It was this corporatisation of the publishing industry, in conjunction with changes in technology that allowed for greater inventory control and sales tracking, which led to a change in the way that it was conducted as a business (Wirten, 2007, p. 397). The balance between producing quality products and making a profit shifted towards profit, and the improved tracking and inventory control systems facilitated that shift.

Although publishing has always been a balance between creating content and turning a profit, the move to corporatisation shifted the focus away from content. Prior to corporatisation, the attitude held by most of the private companies was that profits were secondary to the creation of quality content—it was a time when publishing was "run by its editors rather than its accountants" (Wirten, 2007, p. 398). The large corporations, who acquired most of the private publishing companies, had a more profit-focused attitude and that became the prevailing focus of the industry from the 1980s (The Global Market 1970–2000: Producers, 2007, p. 399). The change in culture and expectations of those controlling the publishing industry in the 1980s and beyond was also accompanied by technological change—this time it was the rise of computer and, from the mid- 1990s, advances in communication technologies.

While computerised typesetting sped up the printing process in the mid 1970s, it was the advent of powerful computing software and hardware in the 1980s that changed the relationship between the author and the publisher:

The Chicago Guide also demonstrates how the use of authors' keystrokes changed the role of the copy-editor, who now had to check on the author's presentation of the text, as well as prepare it for the typesetter. When all text had to be re-keyed, the imposition of house style imposed relatively little extra cost. Author-supplied text would now have to be put into house style by the author under instruction from a copy-editor, or else by the typesetter, which would reduce the savings promised. The Guide suggested that, "because an electronic version of the manuscript already exists, the printout should be marked more as if it were a proof than original manuscript." (Luna, 2007, p. 388).

The evolution of desktop computers such as the Apple Macintosh, and specialised software such as Adobe's PageMaker, simplified the page composition process (2007, p. 390) and allowed for the author's copy to be used directly from the word processor (2007, p. 391). In addition, personal computers equipped with word processing software simplified the task of writing and made the production of manuscripts easier. Writers found that writing on computers was more responsive to their needs because they could delete, modify, or rewrite text at any time without redrafting the entire manuscript (Haas, 1995, p. 95). At almost the same time that computerisation was making printing and writing easier and more efficient, network computer technologies expanded the market beyond national boundaries.

The technologies that had enabled the globalisation of the publishing industry were also used by retailers and vendors of printed products, which meant that the marketplace also became global in scope. Online retailers like Amazon, which opened in 1995, could service customers almost anywhere in the world without a physical presence, and ship books to wherever a postal worker or courier could deliver (Ramrattan & Szanberg, 2016, p. 9). The advent of online bookstores that sold both physical and ebooks, led by Amazon, heralded a decline in the sales in physical brick–and–mortar bookstores, and they quickly became a secondary force in the bookselling market (Hetherington, 2014, p. 384). The change in customer behaviour saw a wave of bookstore closures across the globe, the most notable of which was the bankruptcy of the international chain Borders (2014, p. 384).

The compression of the industry into the hands of a few global corporations, coupled with an expanding global market and the decline of brick–and–mortar bookstores, had a profound effect on the business of publishing (Wirten, 2007, p. 397). Corporatisation brought with it an increased focus on how many books were sold, where they were sold, and the profits made on each sale. Coupled with the profit motivation of the corporations, this led to a relentless search for bestsellers and the idea that each book published must 'carry its own weight' in terms of returning a profit to the organisation (2007, p. 399). The drive to create global bestsellers in order to maximise profits has seen various accusations levelled at the industry, including the production of homogenised content designed to appeal to the widest possible audience, and claims of cultural imperialism (Squires, 2010, p. 409). What it meant for writers is that there were fewer publishers to work with, and most of those that remained preferred manuscripts that they believed would turn a profit, with little regard for the cultural or artistic merits of the work. While there were some independent publishers that escaped corporatisation—such as Free Spirit Books (https://www.freespirit.com) who specialise in children's books, and Cardoza Books (<http://cardozabooks.com/>) who specialise in gambling and gaming books—most catered to niche markets.

The corporatisation of the publishing industry that began in the 1960s, in conjunction with the improvements of computer and communications technology, created a difficult environment for authors that led many to frustration, such as horror writer Adam Pepper:

I remember reading an interview with literary agent Scott Hoffman where he compared authors who submit to the slush pile to a desperate girl sitting waiting by the phone waiting to be asked to the prom. At the time it infuriated me. He was calling me a loser. What the hell else was I supposed to do? To me it was just another insider who had no clue what it was like to be on the outside breathing steam on the glass trying desperately to get noticed (Pepper, 2011).

Pepper described a situation where he was made to feel like he was not valued by the very industry that needed people like him—writers with manuscripts nearing completion—in order to create books. Computerised word processors made writing more efficient, which meant that there were more manuscripts nearing completion and almost ready for publication. However, the corporatisation of the publishing industry meant that there were fewer publishers to work with, which meant that publishers could pick and choose which writers they published. In addition, improved accounting and supply technologies allowed publishers to keep track of sales and to maximise profits. Therefore, if a writer did manage to have a manuscript published and it did not sell well, then the publishers could remove it from circulation and make it out of print (Bingham, 2015) (Irvine, 2005). Finally, the rise of online book sales had placed many brick–and–mortar retail outlets under financial pressure, which made them very risk averse. If a new author's book did not sell well from the outset, then bookshops often returned the unsold stock and the author did not get paid even if those books were subsequently sold elsewhere (Konrath J. A., Remainders, 2006).

The recent history of the publishing industry created the content problem because aspiring writers found it difficult to have their work published, and published writers could have manuscripts put out of circulation if they did not sell well. At the time Amazon launched the Kindle ereader in 2007, there was an oversupply of unpublished novels that had very little chance of ever being published by the traditional, paper–focused publishing industry. In addition, there were many published authors with out of print books that were never likely to be printed again or accepted for sale by struggling brick–and–mortar booksellers. Therefore, when Amazon opened their digital publishing platform to nearly all manuscripts, there were many authors eager to take advantage of the new pathway into the book market.

The Content Problem

A book is an artefact that hosts the written word, and the words remain the same regardless of whether the book is electronic, paper, papyrus, or a series of carved stone tablets (Suarez & Woudhuysen, 2010, p. 543). In the past, books have been made from all manner of material: wood, papyrus, bone, and even turtle shells (Dahl, 1968, p. 13). Regardless of its physical manifestation, it is the written content of a book that is its essence. And it is this written content—produced by writers—that the publishing industry packages and sells to its customers.

Prior to the advent of digital publishing, authors had little choice but to send manuscripts to publishing companies in the hope of getting published:

And yet despite the best efforts of editors and agents seeking new writers, finding a genuine new talent from the piles of unsolicited texts that arrive in the post every day is relatively rare. Faber's [publishing company] recent decision to discontinue its slush pile was put down to its lack of resources to do it justice (Bury, 2007).

Most authors were disappointed because, while many publishers received thousands of unsolicited manuscripts every year (L'Estrange, 2016) (Underdown, 1993) (Maughan, 1991), they published only a fraction of those they received (Irvine, 2005). Even literary agents, who petitioned the publishing industry on behalf of authors, were deluged with manuscripts despite being at one remove (Bury, 2007).

The flood of manuscripts meant that the publishing industry had a content problem—there were simply too many manuscripts to package into physical books and distribute to the reading public. The content problem was even worse for writers who, until recently, had no alternative but to petition a publisher if they were to have any hope of having their work distributed into the public sphere. The solution to this problem was the slush pile, and it heavily favoured the publishing industry at the expense of writers.

The slush pile is, quite literally, a pile of unsolicited manuscript that publishers sort through in order to find content that they think is worth publishing, and it is not just authors who found it problematic. Children's book editor Harold Underwood found dealing with the 'pile' frustrating:

I'll start where the process begins—the dreaded "Slush Pile". I could be polite and say unsolicited manuscripts, but that is not how people in publishing refer to them, though we use the term with a mix of frustration, bemusement, and hope—frustration with the volume of material we have to deal with, bemusement at some of the more misguided submissions, and hope that there will be something interesting in it today (and if not today, then tomorrow) (Underdown, 1993).

Despite editors like Underwood finding the slush pile annoying, it appeared to solve the publisher's problem by dealing with the huge volume of manuscripts that flowed into their offices. However, as a system of product acquisition it was notoriously haphazard. The subjective nature of the selection process (Maughan, 1991) and the general disdain publisher's felt towards the unsolicited manuscripts that piled up on their doorstep (Birnbaum, 2010, p. 21) meant that many successful books were rejected many times before being published, such as J. K. Rowling's best-selling _Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone_ and Yann Martel's _Life of Pi_ which went on to win the Man Booker Prize (Kevin Anderson & Associates, 2014). From a writer's perspective, it was a frustrating process because they were forced to compete with their peers for a publisher's attention, and needed to submit their work to organisations that may publish a handful of titles in a year but received thousands of manuscripts (Weaver & Brown, 2015) (Bent, 2004).

Another consequence of the disparity between the number of manuscripts looking for publication and the number of manuscripts published is that contracts between publishers and authors have usually favoured the publishers. Writer and epublishing advocate J.A. Konrath explains the power differential involved in publishing contracts:

I'm going to point out some of the more one–sided, onerous terms in a standard publishing contract. And make no mistake—these are practically universal, and for the most part, non–negotiable.

For decades, the only way to get widespread distribution was to sign with a publisher. Writers had no choice. You either accepted the terms, or your book stayed in the file cabinet.

Now I'm not a lawyer, and nothing in this blog post can or should be taken as legal advice. I'm just someone who has signed publishing contracts and gotten taken advantage of (Konrath J. A., Unconscionability, 2012).

Standard contracts often had clauses that gave the publisher ownership of a manuscript well beyond the death of the author, rights to sequels, and the lion's share of the profits the manuscript generated (The Authors Guild, 2015) (Konrath J. A., Unconscionability, 2012). Authors had no choice but to accept these lopsided deals because there were no other avenues into the public sphere and there were thousands of other manuscripts that the publisher could choose to publish instead.

In 2007, Amazon also had a content problem for their newly released Kindle ereader but it was the exact opposite to the one that had beset the publishing industry for decades. Instead of too many manuscripts to publish, Amazon had too few. This was because the established publishing organisations were paper–focused and did not prioritise ebooks, which left the owners of digital ereaders prior to the Kindle—some of which had been in circulation for nearly a decade—with very little to read (Hartman, 2001). Their problem was made more acute when the first batch of Kindles sold out within hours (Amazon, 2017) and by the end of 2013, there were an estimated 30 million Kindle ereaders in active use (Trefis Team, 2014). Amazon, therefore, needed to attract authors to its new digital platform so that the owners of the Kindle did not suffer from a lack of content for their device. Amazon solved this problem by upending the usual methods of content acquisition employed by the publishing industry.

Instead of creating a slush pile of manuscripts and 'gate keeping' who could and could not publish through their digital system, Amazon opened their platform to nearly everyone (Amazon, 2011)—with exceptions only for extreme sexual or violent content—and allowed authors to retain the copyright of their work, as well as paying higher royalties. Unburdened by the production and supply problems that restricted how many books a paper–book publisher can print and distribute, Amazon could distribute nearly all the manuscripts that authors uploaded onto the Kindle Direct Program (KDP). The ready–made audience of Kindle owners, combined with the favourable contract conditions that Amazon offered, made KDP an attractive to alternative for authors to the traditional, pbook focused publishers. As a result, self-published authors quickly flooded the Kindle store with content (Treanor, 2010, p. 121) and by 2010 there were more than six hundred thousand titles available through the Kindle store, which ballooned to over four million by 2016 (Alter, 2016).

Amazon left it to the market—the buying public—to do the gate keeping. Books that readers received well ascended the Kindle ebook charts and found new customers. Books that readers did not receive well, or did not make an impact with readers, quickly sank down the charts and into oblivion. To aid their customers in the task of gate-keeping, and almost certainly to minimise complaints, Amazon gave readers a seven-day money back guarantee for each sale, and the ability to sample 10% of an ebook without having to commit to a purchase. Readers flocked to the scheme, which encouraged more authors to join. By 2014, self-published authors accounted for 25% of titles in Amazon's Kindle top 100 bestseller list (Howey, The 7K Report, 2014).

The disruption of the publishing industry began when Amazon allowed writers to use their digital publishing platform to compete directly with the products created by the paper–focused, traditional publishing industry. But simply allowing such competition would not have been enough. By promoting ebooks, Amazon also introduced a product that, while serving the same functions as pbooks, were fundamentally different. The unique features of ebooks and the digital systems that distribute them from manufacturers to retailers and customers will be the focus of Chapter Two.
Chapter 2: Ebooks and Digital Publishing

In this chapter, I will argue that digital publishing rose to prominence because traditional paper–based publishing was not fulfilling the needs of three stakeholder groups. Two of these groups—unpublished authors, and published authors with books out of print—were a direct result of the publishing industry's content problem. The third group are readers, which consists of those who want to read genre fiction that is rarely published by the industry (discussed in detail in Chapter 3) and those who wanted access to literature on electronic devices, particularly those who bought an Amazon Kindle from 2007 onward. The discussion will begin by examining the unique traits of ebooks and the online distribution systems that solve, or reduce, the shortcomings of paper-based books. It will then move on to look at the organisations involved in the digitisation of publishing, and how authors and readers from the unfulfilled stakeholder groups have taken advantage of these computerised reading and distribution systems.

Ebooks

Ebooks grew in popularity because they solved a variety of problems associated with the physical nature of pbooks. Pbooks have weight so they can be heavy and difficult to carry. Pbooks have physicality and must be stored in a physical location when not in use. Pbooks must be transported from one place to another, and, when purchased, can take days or even weeks in transit. Finally, it takes considerable effort to replicate pbooks, and the economies of scale mean that it is not possible to create just a handful copies of a pbook on a commercial basis, especially if the customers who are buying the book are geographically dispersed (Ramrattan & Szanberg, Revolutions in Book Publishing, 2016, p. 73). Ebooks, on the other hand, are not physical and do not need to be manufactured, transported, or stored.

The problems of the stakeholder groups in the publishing industry were a direct consequence of the physicality of the pbook format. Publishing companies simply did not have the resources to manufacture and distribute physical versions of every manuscript they received, so aspiring authors had to compete with one another for the few available publishing contracts. Nor could publishers afford the expense of converting every book they published into electronic format, especially if the ebooks cannibalised pbook sales, so early adopters of ereader technology had very little to read on their devices. Retailers could not afford the storage or shelf space to keep physical copies of every pbook published on–hand for their customers, so published authors with low sales found that their books were quickly withdrawn from the market.

The defining feature of ebooks is that they have no mass and exist as data on computerised devices. To say that they have no physical presence is inaccurate because without physicality, people would be unable to read them. Rather, ebooks use the physicality of the electronic device upon which they are read. Although there are dedicated ereaders— such as the Nook made by Barnes and Nobles and the Kindle made by Amazon—ebooks can also be read on a variety of other devices such as mobile telephones, personal computers, and computer tablets.

The most obvious benefit of books without mass is that they are easier to transport. Many of the devices that can be used to carry and access ebooks are very light, and can store hundreds, and even thousands, of texts. For example, both the Amazon Kindle Oasis ereader and the Apple iPhone 7 can store thousands of ebooks, and they weigh 133 grams and 138 grams respectively (Jesperson, 2016) (Apple Inc., 2017). The lack of weight allows people to carry as many books as they need or want on a single device. It is good for students, for example, who can use a laptop or tablet computer to store all their textbooks, rather than lugging about several heavy, paper tomes.

In an educational setting, ebooks have several benefits beyond being easy to carry. Because they are defined by data and, depending on the format of the ebook, users can make detailed notes on a text and share them with others. It is also possible to link or embed auxiliary sources, like websites and online video, to the formal information of the text (Dobler, 2015, p. 488). The fact that there is no physical product that changes hands allows textbook publishers to create licensing agreements for students instead of selling them a full-priced product. Students can 'rent' a textbook for the term of their education at a discount to the full- priced paper book (Stone & Baker–Eveleth, 2013, p. 90). For example, Amazon has eTextbooks that students can either rent or buy, and which are formatted specifically for use in an educational setting: they include page numbers that match the pbook version of the text, are searchable, and designed to display user notes (Amazon, 2017).

Ebooks can be created in a variety of formats that define how they can be accessed and used. Scanned ebooks, such as the first ebook created by Project Gutenberg in 1971 (Gaigher, Le Roux, & Bothma, 2014, p. 262), are essentially pictures of a physical page and so have limited functionality. Most scanned documents are presented as Portable Document Format (PDF) documents, but can appear as image files like JPGs of GIFs, and while they can be read, they cannot be searched or the text highlighted. Ebooks made using an electronic manuscript, however, have far more functionality and, depending on the format, can be searched, the size of the fonts adjusted to suit the reader, the text can be highlighted, and notes can be added.

Most of the ebook creation and distribution companies, including Amazon and Smashwords, use a software application to combine the writer's word processed, electronic manuscript and a cover image file into a single ebook. While Amazon only creates one format—MOBI—the Smashwords 'meatgrinder' takes only a few minutes to create 8 different ebook formats including PDF, MOBI, and EPUB (Smashwords, 2017). There are also desktop applications such as Calibre that can change ebooks into a variety of formats for use on a variety of devices (Calibre ebook management, 2017).

The portability and the ease with which ebooks can be reproduced is also of great benefit across the entire span of the publishing industry. The data structure of ebooks means that there is no need to create physical storage and transportation systems to move them from manufacturers to retailers to customers,

On the foundations of their masterful retailing platform Amazon boldly ventured into the world of e–books. The gamble was a simple one: if the company could shift a substantial portion of its existing business away from physical inventory, the benefits on an operational and financial basis would be without precedent (Maxwell, 2013, p. 34).

Since ebooks are data, they are transferable over long distances almost instantly via electronic connections, do not require a physical location to store, are easy to reproduce because copies can be made almost instantly and each copy is exactly the same as the original. 'Manufacturers' of ebooks, like Smashwords and Draft to Digital (www.draft2digital.com), can take a single copy of a manuscript that they obtain from an author and distribute it as an ebook to dozens of online retailers across the world within a few days. Retailers like Amazon and Kobo do not need to allocate warehouse space for storage or arrange postal or courier services to deliver ebooks to their customers. Readers receive their books almost instantly and do not need to wait for their purchase to be delivered by a courier or postal service. In addition, the versatility of the electronic medium also means that retailers can be manufacturers, and manufacturers can be retailers. Amazon, which is best known as a retailer, produces many of the ebooks it sells, while Smashwords which promotes itself as a manufacturer of ebooks, also sells many of the books it produces from its website. In essence, digital distribution allows for the multiple organisations that were necessary to bring a pbook to market—manufacturer, distributor, and retailer—to be collapsed into one or two entities. And the organisations involved in the physical distribution of pbooks would need expensive infrastructure such as factories, warehouses, and delivery trucks, while the digital publishing organisations are mostly computerised and far cheaper to establish and maintain. Ebooks, therefore, can potentially provide tangible benefits across the entire publishing industry spectrum—from manufacturer to reader.

Although their place in the publishing world has been controversial of late, ebooks are not a new technology and have been in use, in one way or another, for more than fifty years. The first digital texts were created in the mid-1960s and served as catalogues in libraries (Chadwyck–Healey, 2007, p. 452). Arguably the first ebook as a standalone product was a scan of the US Declaration of Independence that was published in 1971 by Project Gutenberg (Gaigher, Le Roux, & Bothma, 2014, p. 262), a project started by Michael Hart for the purpose of providing as many ebooks as possible for the lowest possible price.

Hart's argument was that once a text was digitised, it could be replicated quickly, easily, and indefinitely

The premise on which Michael Hart based Project Gutenberg was: anything that can be entered into a computer can be replicated indefinitely ... what Michael termed "Replicator Technology". The concept of Replicator Technology is simple; once a book or any other item (including pictures, sound, and even 3–D items) can be stored in a computer, then any number of copies can and will be available. Everyone in the world, or even not in this world (given satellite transmission) can have a copy of a book that has been entered into a computer (Project Gutenberg, 2010).

Because of the Project's stated aim of keeping costs down to keep access as wide as possible, all texts on Project Gutenberg are public domain (2010) and have thus avoided the ire of publishers. But not all large-scale ebook projects have been so uncontroversial. Google's attempt to build an electronic library that contained scanned ebook versions of millions of pbooks ran into hostility from publishers because many of the books proposed for scanning were still in copyright (Gaigher, Le Roux, & Bothma, 2014, p. 461). Both of these mega-libraries began by using scanned versions of pbooks, but now include ebooks that started as word processed, electronic documents.

Word processors allow writers to create their documents as data, much in the same way that ebooks allow readers to store their books as data. The normalisation of word processors as the key tool for writers, which began in the mid-1980s, means that a generation of writers have been routinely using the core technologies of ebooks in their work (Maxwell, 2013, p. 29). Manuscripts that are created as data have greatly enhanced the production and proliferation of ebooks by removing the physical component of the creation process. Scanning a pbook to make an ebook is a physical process that takes time to scan each page (Google, 2017), while converting a data manuscript into a data ebook is a completely digital process. Even though a screen is needed to both read and write electronic documents in order to give the data physicality, screen reading has proven to be more problematic for people to accept.

One of the main arguments deployed against the use of ebooks was that reading from a screen was not as enjoyable an experience as reading from paper. Even Bill Gates, noted technophile and founder of Microsoft, admitted that he preferred reading from paper (Darnton, 1999). The early generation of ereaders, produced in the 1990s, did very little to alleviate this problem and were more a result of dot com speculation than an attempt to make reading from a screen more acceptable (Maxwell, 2013, p. 34). The second wave of ereaders, beginning with Sony's release in 2006 and including Amazon's Kindle (Maxwell, 2013, p. 34), were far more successful. These new ereaders abandoned backlit LCD screens, which were difficult to read in direct light, and adopted epaper screens (sometimes referred to as e–ink), that reduce eyestrain and have a higher optical contrast in sunlight (Heikenfeld, Drzaic, Yeo, & Koch, 2011, p. 129). Amazon's Kindle proved especially popular and its wide-scale adoption created a situation where ebooks could service a market—owners of electronic reading devices—that pbooks could not.

Ebooks began their development well before the wide scale adoption of sophisticated computer networks and were initially distributed predominantly via physical mediums. The most popular of these physical media were Compact Disks (CD–ROMs) and, at their peak, almost every major publisher had a multimedia department to publish CD–ROMs (Chadwyck–Healey, 2007, p. 457). Using a physical medium to distribute ebooks, however, encountered many of the manufacturing and supply problems that beset pbooks, and so their adoption and use were limited. It was the widespread and global adoption of the internet that finally freed ebooks from physical constraints and saw the rise of digital distribution systems that took advantage of the ebooks non-physical nature.

Digital Distribution Systems

Journal articles and reference books were the first digitised texts to be delivered online, which made it possible for university research staff and students to connect to library resources from anywhere with an internet connection (Chadwyck–Healey, 2007, p. 458). Because students and academics are intimately connected to their libraries, the growing use of ebook resources encouraged academic libraries to provide more electronic sources of information. In turn, the growing demand for digital resources changed the relationship between library publishers, who switched to providing many academic journals and texts in electronic format. From the late 1990s onward, academic libraries no longer needed to own copies of most academic journals. Rather, they could buy access to journal databases maintained by publishers (Chadwyck–Healey, 2007, p. 459) and which library members could access remotely. However, the wide-scale adoption of ebooks and electronic texts outside the academic world did not happen until Amazon released the Kindle ereader.

Amazon's move to expand the ebook market could be seen as a tactical move against Barnes & Noble (B&N), its major competitor in 2007. By eliminating the need to keep a physical inventory of books to distribute to its customers, Amazon stood to gain a substantial advantage over its competition (Maxwell, 2013, p. 34), which also included global book retailer Borders and national bookstores like Books–a–Million in the USA (Ramrattan & Szanberg, 2016, p. 8). Besides the back–room advantages, digital distribution of ebooks gave Amazon the ability to offer their customers the opportunity to read a book within minutes of purchase and every ebook published on their platform would never become out–of–print.

The popularity of online pbook sales meant that readers were already comfortable with buying books online well before Amazon opened their ebook publishing platform,

Books have distinguishing characteristics that makes them great candidates for online sales. They are inexpensive, varied, easy to ship, cheap to warehouse and inventory, easy to review and rate, can be test read, and can be easily searched. We may also emphasize the advantages of the internet that are compatible with book selling, including its wide reach, exhaustive product selection, little infrastructure requirements, unlimited opening hours, and a high degree of scalability (2016, p. 121).

The online bookstores that were established to distribute pbooks—which were also pioneered by Amazon—were the same ones that retailers used to distribute ebooks. So popular were book sales on the internet that a survey published in January 2008 showed 41% of those surveyed had bought a book online (BBC News, 2008). Readers had therefore become comfortable with online retailing, and patterns of buying and reviewing online were well established well before ebooks became popular. While pbooks are amenable to being sold online, ebooks are even better suited because they require no transportation and storage. And because they are data, ebooks can be 'manufactured' using software applications rather than with printing presses.

The pre-existence of online retail systems for pbooks made it easier for organisations like Amazon and Barnes & Noble—which were not print publishers—to move into ebook publishing, as well as for new digital publishing companies to emerge,

After some serious thinking, it dawned on me that the traditional publishing model was unable to serve the interests of all authors. I starting imagining the utopian publisher of my dreams, and I viewed such a publisher as one that could publish everything, and then would let the readers decided what was worth reading. In other words, put the slush pile out into public view and may the best books rise to the top. With digital publishing technology, such a system is possible. So I decided to build it. The underlying technology behind Smashwords is actually much more complex than I describe because we go out of our way to shield the author from the technology. Our goal was to make it possible for anyone, anywhere to publish a multi-format ebook in five minutes or less (Coker, Interview with Smashwords Founder Mark Coker, 2014).

Smashwords, founded by Mark Coker in 2008, is one of the companies that emerged to take advantage of online book retailing technologies. At inception, Smashwords was an ebook retailer, but the low volume of sales prompted Coker to move to an aggregator model in 2009 (Colao, 2012). He opened up the Smashwords platform to self-published authors, and established a premium catalogue that contained only ebooks that met a good standard of formatting, content, and presentation. He then offered this premium catalogue to existing online book retailing organisations with the cover price of the ebook being split 3 ways—10% Smashwords, 60% author, and 30% retailer (Smashwords, 2017). Within a short space of time, Smashwords made ebook supply agreements with several online retailers including B&N, Apple, and Scribd, as well as several libraries. By 2016, Smashwords was distributing more than 300,000 ebooks produced by over 100,000 authors or publishers (Reid, 2016).

Smashwords took advantage of existing online retailing systems for pbooks to find a market for the self-published ebooks they produced. The popularity of Smashwords premium catalogue was due to several factors. First and foremost, ebooks are ideal for the online retailing environment because they are stored on existing computer networks and, once delivered by the supplier, never need to be delivered again. Second, the requirements that Smashwords placed for entry into the premium catalogue—including formatting, content, grammar, and cover art—meant that all the books they supplied were of a moderately good standard. Third, self-published ebooks were cheap and plentiful, especially when compared to traditionally published ebooks. In general, ebooks were a boon to retailers because they removed the uncertainty of whether a book sold well or not. With a single copy of an ebook file on its network, a retailer could service any level of demand for a book. And if there was no demand, they were not left with warehouses full of unsold stock. The success of Amazon and the Kindle ereader caused problems for the industry because for the first time in history, its products were subject to competition.

The Industry Response

The success of the Kindle ereader and the number of ebooks sold through the Amazon website drew an extraordinary response from the publishing industry. Of most concern to the publishers was the explosion of sales that followed Amazon lowering prices of industry published ebooks to $9.99. Publishers were concerned that the triple-digit sales growth of ebooks on Amazon, which was a direct result of the lower price, was a threat to their business model and that ebook sales were cannibalizing hardcover book sales (Kirkwood, 2014, p. 9). Despite their misgivings, the publishers were powerless to compel Amazon to raise the price of their ebooks because of the wholesale supply system they had in place. It gave the retailer the discretion to price an ebook however they wished, as long as they paid the publisher a fixed royalty—often greater than the sale price—for every ebook sold. It was not until the entry of Apple into the marketplace that the publishers were able to make a decisive move against low ebook prices on Amazon.

In 2010, the Big 6 corporate publishers came to an agreement with Apple Inc to supply books for the iBookstore app, which was to be a feature included with the upcoming Apple iPad tablet computer. The agreement was based on the agency model of retail sales, where the publishers set the price of their products in the iBookstore and received 70% of each sale. In addition to the agency provisions, the agreement also contained a Most Favored Nation clause (MFN), where the publishers agreed to not set the price of their products any higher on the iBookstore than other ebook retailers. The MFN clause was problematic because Amazon was selling ebooks for US$9.99 or less, even though they were paying publishers up to $13 per sale. If publishers matched that price on Apple's iBookstore, they would receive a royalty of $7 per sale (Flood, 2016, p. 887), which they considered far too low.

To solve this problem, five of the then Big Six publishers—led by Macmillan and in conjunction with Apple Inc—tried to force Amazon to abandon their wholesale agreements and adopt an agency agreement instead. Using their collective bargaining position, and reinforced by the retail heft of Apple Inc, the publishers succeeded and Amazon accepted agency agreements in June 2010. Consequently, most industry published ebooks rose in price from $9.99 to $14.99 to match the iBookstore prices,which, in turn, precipitated a drop in sales of ebooks of 14.5% (Flood, 2016, p. 887).

Unfortunately for the publishing industry, their collective action in forcing Amazon to raise ebook prices caught the attention of the US Justice Department and, in 2012, they filed two antitrust suits against the five publishers and Apple. The publishers settled before trial by agreeing to not curtail Amazon's ability to set or reduce the price of an ebook (Flood, 2016, p. 888). Apple, on the other hand, opted for a trial and was ultimately found to be in violation of Section One of the Sherman which prohibited the practice of 'horizontal' conspiracy—producers agreeing amongst themselves to set the price of a product rather than negotiating a price individually with a retailer—to fix the retail price of ebooks (2016, p. 888). Apple and two publishers—Macmillan and Simon & Schuster—appealed the decision of the trial, arguing that their agreements with the publishers were purely vertical and that their entry into the ebook market was beneficial for retail competition (Flood, 2016, p. 889). The Second Circuit Court of Appeal disagreed with Apple and upheld the original judgement (2016, p. 891).

Despite their loss, the publishing industry continued to work towards higher ebook prices on Amazon, and those attempts came to a head in 2014 in a dispute between Amazon and the Hatchett Book Group. The very public brawl over agency pricing drew in The US Author's Guild and saw more than 900 authors publish an open letter against Amazon tactics (Peet, 2014). The two parties settled their differences in November 2014, and Amazon accepted and accepted agency pricing, which allowed Hatchett to set the price of their ebooks in Amazon's store (Streitfeld, 2014).

The high prices that the publishing industry charged for ebooks was a huge boost to the growing ranks of self-published authors selling their products in direct competition with industry offerings. It helped fuel the success of Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program (KDP) program and companies such as Smashwords. These successes encouraged other online retailers, such as B&N, to include self-published books in their catalogues.

The Rise of Self-Published Ebooks

The success of Amazon's KDP for self-published authors was the catalyst for a spate of online book retailers to follow suit, the most notable being B&N and Apple. B&N released the Nook—an epaper ereader—in 2009 and signed a deal to accept premium catalogue ebooks from Smashwords in the same year (Coker, Barnes & Noble, 2009). In 2010, B&N launched PubIt!, their own digital publishing platform. Apple launched iBooks with its iPad computer tablet in 2010, and also teamed with Smashwords to distribute their premium catalogue (Colao, 2012). They tentatively opened their platform to self-published authors in 2012, but it was conditional and proved controversial (Bogle, 2012). Smashwords also found themselves subject to competition, first when Draft2Digital (D2D) launched their digital publishing aggregator service in 2012 and distributed to many of the same retailers as Smashwords (Rooney, 2014). But it was not just the retailers that benefitted from the abundant supply of self-published ebooks or ebooks in general.

Ebook producers, writers, and readers were all able to take advantage of the versatility of ebooks sold through digital retail networks, and the abundance of self-published work was able to meet the demand for fresh content while traditional publishers focussed their production on pbooks. Producers benefited because they had no manufacturing costs once they had produced the first file, and transportation costs were minimal because they needed to supply each retailer with only one copy of an ebook file. And the abundance of self-published products meant that they always had fresh content to send to retailers. Readers benefited because the ebooks they purchased were available to read almost instantly, there were no shipping costs, and the abundance of self-published content meant that there was always something new to read. Self-published writers benefited because they had a viable path to the public sphere for their work, which never went out–of–print, and became available to buy within days of being finished and uploaded to the producer. All of which explains why, by late 2016, ebooks had captured 39% of the total book market in five English–speaking nations: USA, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In each of those markets, self-published ebook sales accounted for well over 20% of all ebooks sold and, in the USA which accounts for 65% of the global ebook market, 34% of ebook sales were self-published (Author Earnings, 2017). The competition created by the proliferation of ebook retailers and the versatility of the ebook format sparked innovation in the retail environment.

In 2013, Oyster launched an ebook subscription service that allowed users to borrow and read ebooks through a software application available on Apple computer and telecommunication products. For a flat US$9.99 monthly fee, users could access 100,000 titles, including books from Smashwords' premium catalogue (Greenfield, 2013), and could borrow as many books as they wished but had restrictions on how many they could borrow concurrently. Scribd quickly followed suit and launched a similar service, but included a web interface and charged a slightly lower $8.99 monthly subscription. Their library had 200,000 ebooks to choose from, and also included Smashwords' premium collection (Zax, 2013). But it was Amazon's entry into the ebook subscription market in 2014 that caused the most controversy.

Amazon's Kindle Unlimited (KU) subscription service differed from all other because it required that authors grant Amazon exclusive distribution rights for any ebooks they place in the library,

Exclusivity is great for Amazon, but it's not necessarily great for authors and readers. Exclusivity starves competing retailers of books readers want to read, which motivates readers to move their reading to the Kindle platform. This is why Amazon has made exclusivity central to their ebook strategy. They're playing a long term game of attrition (Coker, Is Kindle Unlimited Bad for Authors?, 2014).

The success of the subscription services has been patchy, however, and Oyster closed their service in 2015, citing problems acquiring content from traditional publishers and competition from publishers (Mance, 2015). And while Scribd remains in business, they switched to a limited model where subscribers can borrow up to six ebooks and one audio–book per month depending on their length of subscription (Hoffelder, 2016). Even Amazon has struggled, and has changed its author payment model to counter 'scammers' who gamed the system (Christy, 2016). Coker's argument that Amazon has an ulterior motive for maintaining the KU subscription service would suggest that it sees value in keeping self-published authors off competing retail platforms.

The unique traits of ebooks, in conjunction with digital publishing and distribution, have been able to ease the problems faced by the three stakeholder groups. The incorporeal nature of ebooks means they are cheap to produce and reproduce, easy to store, and easy to transport. The online publishing and retailing systems that were established to distribute pbooks proved ideal to distribute ebooks. However, the two needed to act in conjunction to create a system that could fulfil the creation and distribution functions that the traditional publishers perform for pbooks.

The history of both ebooks and digital distribution proves that each on their own would have been inadequate to solve the stakeholder problems. Ebooks, for example, have been in use for several decades but aspiring and out–of–print authors largely ignored them because they were all but useless without a viable path to the public sphere. Nor were digital distribution systems on their own capable of filling the void. Print on demand (POD) services for pbooks have been available for many years through online retailers, but the cost for using those services were high and the books created using them were expensive. Only the combination of ethereal and cheap ebooks with digital publishing and distribution systems could ease the stakeholders' problems and the disruption of the publishing industry occur.
Chapter 3: Readers, Genre, and Bestsellers

This chapter will examine how ebooks and digital distribution were able to fill the needs of the three disaffected stakeholder groups in the publishing industry. Its central argument will be that the problems these groups faced could only be solved through the paradigm shift brought about by the disruptive digital technologies associated with digital publishing. The business model favoured by the publishing industry—most of which is controlled by corporate interests (Wirten, 2007, p. 397) that have a responsibility to maximise profits for shareholders (Poitras, 1994)—focussed on creating bestsellers. This focus was the main contributor to the problems of the stakeholder groups because it precluded smaller markets and niche audiences. The digital publishing channels, on the other hand, could accommodate countless books of all genres, and most self-published authors are individual actors who are not bound by the corporate responsibility to maximise profits for their shareholders. Rather than chasing profits, many self-published authors gain satisfaction from the publishing process and its end result (Baverstock & Steinitz, 2013, p. 281).

The profit motivation—which is central to the multinational corporations that dominate the publishing industry (Wirten, 2007, p. 399) and are bound to the responsibilities they have to their shareholders (Poitras, 1994, p. 131)—is the primary reason behind the creation of disaffected readers who could not find industry-published books to meet their needs and thus turned to self-published products. The bestseller focus of the industry is predicated on the fact that a single book that sells well is more profitable than several books even when their aggregate sales equal that of the single bestseller (Hecq, 2012, p. 47). The importance of bestsellers to the profitability of the industry is reflected in the number of bestseller lists that are published regularly in various news and trade periodicals, including The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and The Bookseller, and by retailers including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Dymocks.

Despite the many lists of bestsellers that rank books by sales over a period (weekly, annually, and all time), actual sales numbers are rarely revealed (Colbjørnsen, 2014, p. 1102). These lists are not just for industry consumption, however, and can influence the purchasing decisions of consumers (Sorensen, 2007, p. 716). A book needs to generate sales in order to appear on a bestseller list, but once it earns bestseller status, it would generally generate more sales than an equivalent book that did not appear on a list. This makes bestseller status more than just a simple aggregation of sales numbers for the publishing industry, because attaining bestseller status by appearing on a list would generally create more sales and therefore increase profits.

The definition of a 'bestseller' in the publishing industry is not simply a book that sells well,

... the bestseller is not just the bestselling book, but rather a book which is allowed to feature as a bestseller. A more elaborate definition would need to include that the bestseller is a book in a recognizable format, preferably newly published, which sells comparatively well through certain recognized outlets over a short period of time, within what is determined by publishers and list makers to be a given genre or target group (Colbjørnsen, 2014, p. 1113).

While sales numbers are still a significant element of what defines a bestseller (2014, p. 1102), other factors also contribute, including whether a book is allowed onto a list in the first place. For example, The New York Times bestseller list only included ebooks from 2011 (Bosman, 2010) and self-published works without ISBNs are not counted at all. Many lists are also broken down by genre, which is an important element of the marketing strategy of a book because it defines the target audience. Genre categorisation as a marketing tool began in the early twentieth century and became consolidated with the development of paperback books and mass marketing of fiction (Hecq, 2012, p. 45) A genre is defined by the conventions of the literature included within it. For example, the romance genre is defined by stories that have an emphasis on love and the formation or reformation of a couple (McWilliam, 2009, p. 138).

The importance of genre cannot be underestimated because it allows the publishing industry to make a calculated guess as to the potential of a book's readership, and writers are often asked to forgo experimental or boundary-pushing work in favour of what is tried and tested,

Do you write in a specific genre with a specific target audience in mind? Do you want to expand your potential audience to readers who don't normally read that genre? Do you intentionally set out to create a story that will appeal to specific market segments so you know how to pitch the novel to agents, editors, publishers, and publicists?

Maybe you've decided to write a Christian YA contemporary literary high fantasy detective paranormal romance with crossover appeal to upmarket multi-cultural women and MG boys who love steampunk. Let me know how that works out for you. (Grindstaff, 2011).

The publishing industry tends to favour popular genres, such as mystery or romance, that have a wide appeal and can generate large sales, while marginalising or ignoring completely less popular genres like literary horror that are more niche and generally have more modest sales figures (Hantke, 2008, p. 56). Genres that do not have wide appeal are often overlooked by the publishing industry, and readers who prefer these niche genres, such as horror or historical fiction, are often left with few choices to read. The profit imperative that drives much of the corporate-dominated publishing industry, therefore, dictates what genres are published, which means that writers are railroaded into writing in those genres and readers are often deprived of reading material in unpopular genres.

With the exception of literary fiction, the success of marketing genre fiction has made publishers wary of tinkering with the conventions of particular genres and the way they are published as physical, paper books (Hecq, 2012, p. 45),

This consolidation of production around a limited number of trademark authors, and the simultaneous elimination of mid-list authors, contributed largely to the decline of literary horror. In other words, fewer publishers published fewer books by fewer authors. The genre suffered both quantitatively, falling out of favor with large audiences who would occasionally make forays into the horror genre, and qualitatively, as the disappearance of so many authors from bookstore shelves brought with them a loss of variety and internal differentiation (Hantke, 2008).

The decline of horror as a genre was a direct result of publishers taking the 'safest' option when deciding what to publish in the genre. The focus on marquee authors excluded all the others, and with the lack of diversity in authors came a lack of diversity in content. The desire to maximise profits through creating fewer books with higher sales (Hecq, 2012, p. 47), as happened in literary horror genre, has meant that the publishing industry invested more in proven performers to the exclusion of newer or less popular writers, and also encouraged those proven authors to stick to a narrow, established formulae and not experiment or innovate in their writing (2012, p. 45). The bestseller profit motivation defines what publishers look for when selecting manuscripts to publish, which means that certain genres— such as mystery and fantasy—are favoured over others and even within genres, particular plot lines and characters are preferred.

A study of bestseller lists reveals a concentration of genres, authors, and publishers that highlights the publishing industry's activity as gatekeepers for written work in the public sphere. In 2005 in the USA, the genres of mystery, romance and science fiction featured heavily in the mass market bestseller lists, and celebrity biographies took almost 15% of weekly non-fiction hardcover spots (Maryles, 2006, p. 25). In that same year, just 10 publishers filled 96.7% of the hardcover bestseller slots, and 12 publishers monopolised 93% of paperback bestseller lists. Just 5 publishing companies—Random House, HarperCollins, Time Warner, Penguin USA, and Simon and Schuster—occupied 82% of hardcover bestseller lists and 77.6% of paperback lists (2006, p. 25). These statistics indicate that bestseller lists—which can increase sales of a book and therefore profits for the publisher and royalties for the writer—are dominated by the five global publishing houses, all of which are privately owned and are obliged to maximise profits for their owners. The lists reflect the cautious approach these companies have to publishing, and their focus on producing books in genres that have widespread appeal. Less popular genres. such as horror, are unable to find their way onto these lists and thus miss out on the extra sales they generate, but the inability to generate a bestseller is not the only reason some genres are overlooked. Fads within the industry also play a part, and can even impede the publication of books in popular genres.

Fashions in the publishing industry are another problem which robs some genre readers of their favoured reading material, such as the plight of the science fiction genre in the recent past,

The noted Australian scholar and editor of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction Peter Nicholls claims that 'Australia has always been rather snobbish about the popular genres'. By this he means not that science fiction is unpopular in Australia, but that there are social forces at work within publishing companies that prevent them from supplying the market themselves. Garth Nix, who was an editor at HarperCollins, where he tried to start a science fiction and fantasy list in the late 1980s, puts it more bluntly: 'the people who actually had the power to decide what we published weren't interested in [science fiction]. It was as simple as that (Golding, 2011, p. 68).

Fashions and fads within the publishing industry can influence what genres are published, especially for genres that are on the periphery and have smaller, niche audiences. The complete lack of science fiction published in Australia in the 2000s appears to have been a bias within the industry in Australia because the genre had a large and thriving audience (2011, p. 65). Another such anomaly was for the romance genre in the United Kingdom where, despite the romance genre's international success (McWilliam, 2009, p. 138), romance books rarely featured in the British original fiction lists from 1998–2005 (Feather & Woodbridge, 2007, p. 215). Complicating an already complicated situation, the length of a story is also an important consideration when trying to bring fiction into the public sphere.

Ephemeral fiction, short stories, and novellas—once a mainstay of popular culture through genre periodicals and pulp magazines—are now marginalized and rarely make their way into the public sphere except in some niche paper and online publications such as On Spec magazine. Publishers struggle to find space in magazines for short stories, and novellas (stories between 8,000–40,000 words in length) are seen as unprofitable (Davis, 2012, p. 11). The quest to maximise profits in the publishing industry, therefore, caused short fiction to wither as a form of literary expression in the public sphere, and readers who enjoyed the shorter form were hard pressed to find a steady source of literature to meet their needs. The lack of short fiction, niche genres, and unfashionable genres being published into the public sphere all had their origins in one of the defining features of corporate publishing—the industry was controlled by private interests.

The problem for the publishing industry was that it was dominated by large corporations who have a responsibility to maximise profits for their shareholders (Poitras, 1994, p. 131). It could not publish every manuscript produced by an aspiring writer because many (if not most) would never be able to generate enough sales to cover their cost of production. Nor could it service the handful of devoted fans of every niche genre because they were not numerous enough to buy enough books to cover the expenses that creating such books would generate. To publish every manuscript and service every market would be unprofitable and therefore against the best interests of shareholders who owned the publishing companies. Therefore, the corporatisation of publishing companies and the associated obligation to generate profits meant two things. First, the publishing industry could not help but create disaffected readers who were unable to find books in their preferred genres because to service every market would be unprofitable. Second, the publishing industry could not help but create frustrated writers who could not monetise their completed manuscripts because to publish every manuscript would be unprofitable. The industry requirement to maximising profits, therefore, meant that its paper-based business model could not solve the problems of the three disaffected stakeholder groups.

The inability of the publishing industry to profitably cover every genre of fiction left 'gaps' in the market made up of unsatisfied readers eager to find literature outside the usual industry offerings. It was into these gaps that the disaffected writers inserted their self-published books, using the digital publishing platforms created by the disruptive digital technologies. These self-published authors were predominantly individuals without corporate responsibilities and thus answerable only to themselves (Baverstock & Steinitz, 2013, p. 213). Whether a reader was pining for a steady stream of literary horror or a Christian-young-adult-paranormal-romance, there was a self-published author with an offering that would suit, published through newly created digital platforms. Self-published authors could produce books of any length, on any topic, and although many would find only tiny audiences—or no audience at all—their books were available for purchase where the publishing industry could offer nothing at all.
Chapter 4: Writers and Publishing

Driven by an imperative to profit, the corporate dominated publishing industry was limited in the readers it could service and the authors it could publish. The number of self-published books that have sold since 2007 indicates that there were many readers who were not satisfied with the products the publishing industry produced. And the number of writers who have decided to self-publish in that time indicates that the publishing industry could not accommodate all of the manuscripts that were almost ready for publication. The scale of self-published books created and sold was unclear until Author Earnings published its first report in 2014 because the publishing industry cannot count self-published sales.

The statistics Author Earnings publish often deviate substantially from those gathered by the publishing industry because many self-published books usually have no ISBN, which makes them invisible to industry accounting systems (Author Earnings, 2017). The number of non-ISBN sales made online are substantial—43% of ebooks sold on Amazon, for example, have no ISBN (Author Earnings, 2017) and Amazon accounts for 70% of ebooks sales in the USA (Author Earnings, 2016). The metadata technique used by Author Earnings is a standard technique used in the gaming industry for gathering statistics of online sales and works by capturing sales rankings in real time. These rankings are converted to unit sales numbers, and then multiplied again with the list or sale price of the book to arrive at dollar values (Author Earnings, 2016).

In 2017, an Author Earnings report showed that 69% of all US book sales in 2016—regardless of format—were made online (Author Earnings, 2017). Table 3.1 shows the numbers of units of adult fiction sold in the USA by genre as gathered by Author Earnings, and a breakdown of that number into self- and industry-published [source: (Author Earnings, 2017)].

The number of books that self-published authors sold show that the gap between what readers wanted and what the publishing industry provided was very wide in some genres. That self-published authors were able to sell more than 85 million copies in the romance genre—which is well supported by the publishing industry—indicates that the industry's narrow focus and dependence on marquee authors to create bestsellers is not satisfying to a large number of romance readers. But even in the mystery/thriller genre, where the industry had 60% of unit sales, self-published authors still managed to sell more than 10 million books. The dominance of some genres in the bestseller lists, therefore, does not exclude self-published books from selling well.

In an earlier report published in 2014, Author Earnings found that the genres of mystery/thriller, science fiction, fantasy, and romance accounted for 70% of Amazon 100 bestselling ebooks, and over half of the top 1000 (Howey, The 7K Report, 2014). In those genres, self-published authors accounted for 35% of titles in the top 7000 books on Amazon's list, and 39% of unit sales (Howey, The 7K Report, 2014). That means that in February 2014, nearly 2500 of the top 7000 bestselling ebooks on Amazon were written by self-published authors. The findings by Author Earnings regarding genre sales by self-published authors are supported by the statistics reported by independent ebook aggregator Smashwords.

The growth of Smashwords as a self-published publisher/aggregator is itself an indication of how deep self-published authors have penetrated into the publishing industry's traditional market. In 2008, Smashwords had 90 authors using their service, and they had published 140 books between them. By 2016, that number had grown to 127,500 authors who had published 437,200 books (Coker, 2017 Smashwords Survey, 2017). Smashwords operates on a global scale, although the majority of its sales (69%) are in the USA. Although no specific sales numbers are given, the statistics are based on US$25,000,000 ebooks sales from April 2014 to March 2015 across the entire Smashwords distribution network, including Apple Inc and Barnes and Noble (Coker, 2015 Smashwords Survey, 2015, p. 17). During the survey period, 89% of Smashwords sales were fiction, and the top genres for unit sales were romance (50%) and erotica (11%) (Coker, 2015, p. 30), while the bestseller list was dominated by the romance genre which accounted for 87% of the top 100 (Coker, 2015, p. 35). The Smashwords statistics show that the low price of self-published books gave them a competitive advantage over industry-published books, with 82% of books sold through Smashwords in the survey period priced at less than US$5 (Coker, 2015, p. 57). The low prices are possible because a self-published author publishing through Smashwords earned the same royalty from a $3.99 book that an industry-published author would have earned from a $9.99 priced book (Coker, 2015, p. 60). From the statistics provided by Author Earnings and Smashwords, it is clear that self-publishing became a viable path for many authors to attain the goals that were unattainable through the profit-driven publishing industry. The statistics do not tell the entire story, however, and it is the personal stories of individual writers that expose the full extent of the disruption of the publishing industry.

The disruption of the publishing industry was author driven because they provided the products that appealed to the readers who were disaffected by the limited products offered by the traditional publishing industry. One such author is multi _New York Times_ bestseller H. M. Ward who has had success with shorter form fiction,

This battle is about so much more than the length of the book. It's taking a market segment that's been ignored for decades. They were marginalized. These readers have been made to feel inferior because their desired attributes didn't line up with what New York Publishers were dishing out. No one wants to consume the same thing, the same size, every day at every meal, so why would we think readers should? Reading is a way to feed the soul. It ignites the imagination and sparks hope within weary hearts. It's a lifeline that's been denied to far too many, largely because bigger books mean bigger profits in the traditional world (Ward, 2016).

Self-published writers such as Ward were able to find gaps in the market that the publishing industry could not fill and create books with plots and characters that readers wanted to read, or that were shorter or longer than the industry usually published. Beside the spectacularly successful Ward, there is Gail McHugh who self-published _Pulse_ , a story with an unlikeable central character that challenged the norms of the romance genre (Palmer, 2013, p. 5). It reached the top of the Amazon bestseller list within two days of release and had sold 400,000 copies within the first month. The success of _Pulse_ led to McHugh signing a distribution contract with Atria Books (2013, p. 6), a division of Simon & Schuster. Another example is Robyn Covington, who wrote romance novels for publisher Entangled Publishing, an independent division of Macmillan Publishers (Macmillan Publishing, 2017), before turning to self-publishing. She began self-publishing for the freedom it gave her in her writing, and to protect herself against the chance that the industry would shift and she would find her manuscripts no longer accepted for publication (Lefferts, 2016). While McHugh and Covington were both romance writers, other genre writers also found success.

Thriller writer Mark Dawson had two books published by Pac Macmillan in 2002, but he abandoned writing shortly after because he felt that he got no marketing support from the publisher once the books were released. He began writing again in 2011/2012 with a plan to self-publish through Amazon. He now writes full time as an independent author (Spector, The Thrill of Going Solo, 2016, p. 30) and had sold 300,000 books in his John Milton crime series by mid-2015 (McGregor, 2015). Crime/thriller writer Vincent Zandri says he makes more money as a self-published author than he did as an industry-published author, when he struggled to make ends meet between advance payments (Spector, The Thrill of Going Solo, 2016, p. 31). All of these examples show that writers in popular genres were able to self-publish, but writers that specialised in genres that were often underrepresented within the publishing industry also benefited from digital publishing, such as horror.

Horror writer Jason Ridler turned to self-publishing because he was told by literary agents that his books featuring multi-racial characters were not marketable,

None of the major houses at that time, in 2011, were regularly publishing books with multicultural casts. I thought I could dodge all those bullets by not dealing with publishers at all. My understanding is that it's starting to change, but back then the culture was reacting negatively against that stuff (Spector, Horror Authors, 2016).

The small readership of the horror genre meant that many horror writers have had trouble finding a traditional publisher for their work, and thus turned to self-publishing (Spector, Horror Authors, 2016). Self-published horror writer Martin Kee says that the genre has a small but enthusiastic fan base, and that authors who write in the genre tend to be 'rabid' (Spector, Horror Authors, 2016). While J.E. Meyer argues that self-publishing has saved many horror authors the problem of trying to convince publishers that their 'hard to sell' ideas for books are worth publishing (Spector, Horror Authors, 2016). But not all self-published writers write genre fiction. They, like the traditional publishing industry, create products that cover the entire digital marketplace (Baverstock & Steinitz, Who are the self-publishers?, 2013, p. 217). The writers who were able to take advantage of digital publishing came from diverse backgrounds and wrote in a multitude of genres, but they all had one thing in common—they could not find an avenue into the public sphere or monetise their manuscripts using the processes and systems provided by the publishing industry.

Digital publishing acted as a bridge that allowed frustrated authors to connect with readers searching for books outside the usual fare offered by the industry. In May 2016, Author Earnings estimated that more than 3,300 self-published authors who had published their first book in the twenty-first century were accumulating sales that corresponded to an annual income of US$10,000 or more through Amazon.com (Author Earnings, 2016). All of these authors who self-published have one thing in common—the publishing industry could not meet their needs when it came to providing an avenue into the public sphere and monetising their work. And all fall into one of two groups of disaffected authors: writers who had never been published, and writers who had been published but found that the publishing industry could no longer meet their needs.

Unpublished writers

There was a realisation within the publishing industry even before digital publishing had started to cause major disruption that there were not enough new authors being published, a problem articulated by Michael Barnard who was executive director of Macmillan UK in 2005,

Like a lot of mainstream publishers, we haven't in recent years been accepting unsolicited manuscripts, but only ones sent through agents. And we are not discovering as many authors as we need [Michael Barnard quoted in (Grau, 2005/2006)].

Barnard's comments were made during a period in which the traditional publishing industry was pouring immense resources into established, brand name authors while many unpublished writers could not break into the industry (Grau, 2005/2006, p. 61). It was this imbalance of supply and demand with regard to the number of unpublished manuscripts seeking publication and the number of manuscripts actually published that created the business conditions that allowed self-published ebooks to gain a market share and disrupt the publishing industry.

By ignoring new authors, the publishing industry created the environment for digital publishing to flourish because there was no other way for an aspiring writer to monetise their work. Self-published author Amanda Hocking had such a problem,

When I finished, I edited and revised, then I sent out queries. A few agents said that wanted it[sic]. They ultimately rejected it, but they gave me good advice about the story which I implemented. (The biggest one was that Wendy was too unlikeable. She needed to be tough without being rude, and I did work on softening her.)

I queried again. Nobody was interested. I worked on the sequel to _Switched_ anyway, and another vampire book. The series wasn't done, so I had to finish it even if no one bought it. I edited, revised, and gave them out to a few more beta readers.

I started following [literary agent] Ginger Clark on Twitter, and I decided I liked her. She posted an article about trends in YA urban fantasy, and she said dystopian is up. I was going through a zombie phase, and I wanted to write a book where a girl kicked a lot of ass. I like damsel in distress, but after MBA I wanted the girl to take care of herself. So I wrote _Hollowland_ in 21 days.

I edited, revised, edited, beta'd. I queried only about 5 agents with that one. I was getting burnt out on being rejected. But these five agents rejected me. Again (Hocking, 2010).

Amanda Hocking had tried to monetise her work through the publishing industry for several years with no success. In 2010, she was desperate for money to attend a Jim Henson Muppet exhibition so she self-published several titles on Amazon. By 2012, Hocking had sold more than one million books through Amazon (Pilkington, 2012). Hocking's rejection by the publishing industry is not uncommon (Grau, 2005/2006, p. 61) and demonstrates that the industry's neglect of writers with completed manuscripts forces them to search for other methods to monetise their work.

There have been many authors who, after being rejected by the industry, had turned to self-publishing. Thriller writer John Locke was the first self-published author to sell over one million books on Amazon and has signed a distribution deal with Simon and Schuster for paper versions of his books while remaining the publisher and retaining ebooks rights (Gaughran, John Locke, 2011). Hugh Howey had been working in a university bookshop before becoming a full-time author on the strength of his self-published ebook sales (Howey, A Stranger Year, 2013). His science fiction _Wool_ series, which was initially released as a series of novellas, was an astounding success that led to his signing a print-only deal with publisher Simon & Schuster. David Dalglish also scored an industry publishing deal with Orbit Books (a division of Hachette Book Group), after he self-published his dark fantasy _Half-Orc_ series (The Orbit Team, 2013). However, not all self-published authors are successful enough to garner interest from the publishing industry and be offered contracts that solve one of the few problems associated with self-publishing, namely a lack of presence in physical book shops.

Some self-published authors are not chasing revenue from their work and are more interested in disseminating information or expressing their creativity in a public forum. For example, Matthew Colville works as a writer for a gaming company, but has self-published a two-book series of 'hardboiled fantasy' fiction through Amazon (Colville, 2014). He promotes his books on his YouTube video channel that is aimed at _Dungeons and Dragons_ players (Colville, 2006) and, according to the website NovelRank (<https://www.novelrank.com/asin/B003OIBG44>), had sold nearly 200 copies of the book _Priest_ during the month of July 2017.

Authors such as Colville who choose to write niche genre fiction, have no choice but to self-publish because they are writing for an audience that is far too small to support a profitable industry-published book. Experimental fiction such as Colville's—and Howey's and Dalglish's—push the boundaries of a genre in unexpected directions. Colville's books are high fantasy, while Howey (and H. M. Ward) succeeded with shorter form fiction, and Dalglish writes dark fantasy with horror elements. None would have been considered a good prospect for the publishing industry but all managed to sell a good number of books and two of the three were able to secure favourable industry contracts after successfully self-publishing.

While many aspiring authors consider acquiring an industry contract as an end in itself, it is no guarantee that a book will remain in the public sphere or that the industry will publish any subsequent work. As discussed previously, the profit imperative that drives the corporate dominated publishing industry impels it to drop authors and products that do not sell enough units. In addition, some authors who have published through the industry had become disillusioned with the process (Bingham, 2015, p. 530).

Published writers

Some published authors found themselves disaffected by the business practices of the publishing industry and turned to the self-publishing opportunities offered by digital publishing technologies as an alternative. Literary fiction author William Kowalski, for example, found that the poor sales in Canada of his newly released book _The Hundred Hearts_ meant that it would not be released in the USA,

But really, when I got my last royalty statement and realized that the number of copies sold in the last sales period was lower than my shoe size, and when I got on the phone with my agent last week and further realized that the chances of an American publisher putting this book [ _The Hundred Hearts_ ] out any time before my children become parents themselves were about equal to Sarah Palin's chances of being made an honorary member of Monty Python, I knew with a great and mighty knowingness that the time had come. If anyone outside Canada was ever going to read this book, it would have to be self-published (Kowalski, 2014).

Despite Kowalski having had nine books published through the industry, including an international bestseller, and despite _The Hundred Hearts_ having had favourable reviews from readers and critics (Kowalski, 2014), the industry was not prepared to risk spending resources to publish a book that had not generated even moderate sales in the Canadian marketplace. This left the author with no choice but to turn to the emerging digital technologies if he wanted to release the book to an international audience. Kowalski's was not an isolated experience, and other published authors were similarly given no choice but to self-publish if they wanted to continue their careers as authors.

Romance author Claire Cook was the victim of changes in the industry which saw her falling from favour with her publishing company, a situation that could have spelled the end of her writing career had she not turned to self-publishing,

It didn't happen. I think they tried hard with the first book, but the things that used to work for traditional publishers trying to break out a book weren't working so well anymore. I wrote the second book I owed them. And then I found out that their entire plan for this book was to do all the things that hadn't worked for the first one. Even I couldn't find the glass half full in that. So I spoke up, verbally, and then in writing, and then in writing with lots of detail, even some bullet points.

Let's just say it didn't go over so well. And then my editor went off on a three-month maternity leave that would end just before my book came out, leaving her assistant, a very nice young woman a couple years out of college, responsible for the care of my novel. Less than a month before my publication date, I received an email from this very nice assistant telling me she was leaving publishing to start a takeout food business with a friend.

What a coincidence, I almost wrote back. I'm leaving publishing to start a takeout food business, too! (Cook, 2014).

After being abandoned by her publisher and being forced to take the self-publishing route in order to continue her career as an author, Cook found that the literary agency that had represented her during her industry publishing career were less than enamoured with her move to self-publishing. While they did offer some editorial advice, that is where the extent of their help ended. And she was being asked to forgo her freedom to publish where she liked as well as a sizable chunk of her royalties just to remain a client of the agency (Cook, 2014). Understandably, Cook declined the agency offer to take her money and, through self-publishing, was able to continue her career as a fiction author despite being abandoned by the industry. It is this power, to make or break a career, that the publishing industry had over writers that had some looking for alternatives.

Multi-genre author Joe Konrath detailed his frustrations with the publishing industry in his blog,

Traditional publishing is a game where I'm not allowed to win.

I suppose this is rather obvious. There are too many factors involved—luck being one of the biggies—that are out of my control.

But if I look at my writing career, I've done my best to have as much control as possible. I was the guy who sent out 7000 letters to libraries, who visited over 2000 bookstores, who blog toured over 100 sites in a single month, who gathered 10,000+ names for his newsletter, who talked about social networking before anyone knew what Facebook was.

I think all of this has had a positive effect on my career. I've made some money. I'm still selling books.

But even with my best effort, and with all I've learned, I'm not allowed to win.

Winning involves big print runs and marketing campaigns and distribution. No matter how hard I try, or how well I play the game, those things aren't up to me (Konrath J. A., Amazon Kindle Numbers, 2009).

Konrath detailed his move from an industry-published to a self-published author by releasing his Amazon sales numbers. In a six-month period during 2009, each of his five industry-published books earned him an average of US$803 through Amazon, while each of his four self-published books earned an average of US$3430 (Konrath J. A., 2009). Less than 12 months later, in March 2010, Konrath sold nearly 6000 self-published ebooks and made over US$4000 in a single month. He contrasted this with his first industry-published novel— _Whiskey Sour_ —which was published in hardcover, had several paperback editions, was released in several audio formats, and as an ebook. In the six years since its release, _Whiskey Sour_ had earned him an estimated US$50,000 but was out of print and no longer earning him anything (Konrath J. A., March Kindle Sales, 2010). From Konrath's perspective, staying with the industry model for publishing would cost him considerable income in the years to come and that the best financial move would be to self-publish. The move was a success, and Konrath's royalties from self-published books were so high that in a three-week period that spanned the end of 2011and the beginning of 2012, he earned over US$100,000 from Amazon for his self-published books alone (Konrath J. A., $100,000, 2012).

For writers with completed manuscripts, the disruption of the publishing industry has solved the problem of monetising their work by breaking the stranglehold that the publishing industry had over access to markets. For writers who were not able to secure an industry publishing contract, digital publishing became a viable alternative to monetise their work. For writers who had previously secured a publishing contract but who had become disillusioned by the industry, it allowed them to continue to pursue a writing career outside the industry. However, while digital publishing has solved one problem for writers—namely access to viable markets—it introduced new problems, the most pressing of which was how a self-published writer could fill the roles that the publishing industry fills for industry-published writers?
Chapter 5: The Digital Author

The rise of digital publishing has changed the relationship between authors and the publishing industry, because authors are no longer beholden to the industry to monetise their work or to release their manuscripts into the public sphere. Joe Konrath argues that this change in the author-publisher relationship caused by digital technologies has thrown the industry into a state of flux, which is not new to publishing,

During my decade of blogging, I've gone from pro-publisher, to pro-indie, to anti-establishment. I've championed Amazon and criticized the Authors Guild and Authors United, and then went on to doing a panel for the Authors Guild and watching as Authors United disbanded.

I got my first rejection in 1989, got my agent in 1998, signed my first book deal in 2002, self-pubbed in 2009, and got my rights back from three publishers in 2010. Now, in 2016, I'm signing with a publisher once again [Kensington].

The only consistent thing about this business is change. And make no mistake; this is a business. It isn't an ideology. It isn't a philanthropy. It isn't a hobby (Konrath J. A., Konrath's New Year's Resolution for Writers 2017, 2016).

Konrath's argument is that, in the three decades since he received his first rejection letter from a publisher, the industry has been in a constant state of change. The way new authors enter the publishing industry, for example, had changed considerably. The slush pile was the primary way that new writers were 'discovered' by the industry in the late 1980s, a situation that saw many authors miss out on monetising their work because of the limited resources and profit incentive of the industry. In more recent times, literary agents began to vet manuscripts on behalf of publishers, but this did not increase the number of manuscripts published so it left authors with the same problem. Digital publishing has allowed new authors to circumvent publishers and literary agents altogether and sell directly to readers through digital publishing platforms like Amazon's KDP, which has meant that, for the first time, authors have been able to effectively monetise their work through channels outside the publishing industry.

Therefore, the rise of digital publishing as a viable avenue to the public sphere means that authors now have two methods to get a publication ready manuscript into the public sphere. The first is through the publishing industry by submitting a finished manuscript to a literary agent or a publisher and hoping it will be accepted for publication. The second is to self-publish through the widely available digital publishing platforms. But while the new digital platforms provide an alternative path to monetising a manuscript, they present writers with new problems that industry-published writers do not have to face.

From a writer's perspective, the two methods of publishing a manuscript are very different and both have positive and negative aspects. If an author decides to publish with a publisher, they are expected to forfeit the majority of the monetary gains of their work and can take as little as 14.9% of the list price of a book (Gaughran, Let's Get Digital, 2011, loc 235). In return, a publisher would normally organise the editing and formatting of a manuscript on behalf of the author, take care of the cover art and distribute the completed product to physical retailers as well as digital distributors. This means that an industry-published author would not normally be faced with upfront costs of publication (Penn, 2017). On the negative side, publishers can take a long time to distribute a book, many clauses in the contract can restrict what an author can publish in the future, royalties are low, marketing is often left to the author, and the author loses ownership of their work (Konrath J. A., Unconscionability, 2012) (Penn, 2017). Self-published authors, on the other hand, have a less formal arrangement with digital distributors.

Self-published writers must also share the monetary gains of their work with the organisation that is distributing their work, but because production costs of ebooks are lower than pbooks, and the distributor does not usually offer anything other than distribution, the share they require is far lower. Author royalties from digital distributers can be as high as 70% of the list price of the book, which means an author can make three or four times as much per sale than a comparably priced industry-published book. This earning differential allows a writer the freedom to offer their books at a lower price point than industry produced books without sacrificing earnings, or to service niche markets because their share of earnings are much higher. Self-published authors also retain complete creative control of their work, including cover art and title, as well as retaining ownership rights (Penn, 2017). On the negative side, self-published authors struggle to get their books distributed as pbooks to physical bookshops, must organise and pay for their own support services such as editing and cover art (Penn, 2017), as well as organising marketing for the finished product.

An author with more than one completed manuscript is not restricted to using just one method of publishing,

There are many authors who have trade deals but are also self-publishing other titles. There are also plenty of authors who are self-publishing but are pursuing trade deals. Some authors with long careers in trade publishing (which they don't intend abandoning) are also publishing reverted backlist titles (Gaughran, Let's Get Digital, 2011, loc 740).

Unless an author has a contractual obligation with a publisher, then the decision about how they wish to publish is their own. An author could self-publish their first book, sign an industry contract for the next book, then self-publish a third. There are many 'hybrid' authors who have both industry-published and self-published books on the market (Penn, 2017) and this includes authors that have been included in this discussion including Hugh Howey, Joe Konrath, and Amanda Hocking. The reason that authors can mix-and-match publishing methods is that there is little that differentiates between well-presented self-published ebooks and industry-published ebooks. This is because of the growth in online, independent, freelance author services—such as editing and cover art—for self-published authors (Gaughran, Let's Get Digital, 2011, loc 652), which was triggered by the popularity of self-publishing.

The rise of self-publishing as a viable avenue into the public sphere has been the catalyst for a parallel rise in freelance services for authors. In August 2017, the freelance services website Fiverr (www.fiverr.com) listed over 2000 individual freelance cover artists and a similar number of editors and proof-readers. These freelancers are located all over the globe, operate in a variety of languages, and offer affordable services that begin from as US$6.33 for a 2000-word edit or a rudimentary cover. Another such online listing of freelance writing services, but on a smaller scale, is hosted by Kboard's Writer's Cafe (https://www.kboards.com/yp/)—a forum for writers that is well patronised by self-published writers. The interactive nature of the Writer's Cafe means that writers can rate and discuss their experiences using freelance services, as well as interact directly with potential editors or artists. The publishing industry had made a tentative step towards offering freelance publishing services to writers through the Pronoun website. Pronoun was an independent aggregator until it was acquired by Macmillan publishers in 2016. It offered, amongst other services, a range of freelancers for hire by writers that use their other services (https://pronoun.com/build-your-team/). Pronoun allowed authors to search freelancers by genres specialisation, which allows authors to build specialised teams to work on their manuscript. However, the industry push into online publishing was short lived, in November 2017, Macmillan announced the site would close in January 2018.

The digital disruption of the publishing industry has freed authors from the dictates of the publishing industry—if publishers were the gatekeepers, then digital publishing was the bulldozer that knocked down the fence—and many authors took advantage to start or further their writing careers, such as hybrid author Claire Cook,

I now own seven of my twelve books. I control pricing and promotion, and I can balance my need to earn a living with making my books available to my loyal readers at the best price I can offer them. I can add fresh content and switch excerpts and change covers any time I want. By the time I have ten indie-published books, I think Marshbury Beach Books [Cook's own publishing label] and I will be doing just fine (Cook, 2014).

The freedoms of self-publishing are not just mechanical and financial. They also include the freedom to pursue goals that are not dictated by the industry's requirement to turn a profit for their owners and shareholders. Self-published authors have the creative freedom to publish books that fall outside the mainstream in length or content, or that tackle difficult subjects, or that service niche audiences. A writer is also free to pursue a writing career within the industry while at the same time self-publishing artistic or creative projects that fall outside industry requirements.

Conclusions

The digital disruption of the publishing industry has created unprecedented opportunities for writers. For the first time in the modern age, it is possible for a writer to bypass the publishing industry and publish their work directly into the public sphere. The higher royalties and reduced production costs associated with digital self-publishing, coupled with the lack of shareholder pressure to maximise profits, means that self-published authors can publish books that service the small audiences associated with niche genres. The statistics provided by Author Earnings and Smashwords provide evidence that self-publishing is a viable path to the public sphere and the monetisation of an author's work, even in genres that the publishing industry favours and populates with books produced by marquee authors. The disruption was possible because the structure of the publishing industry, which created a power imbalance in the industry, prevented many writers from publishing their work into the public sphere.

An analysis of the history of the publishing industry prior to the disruption revealed that the publishing industry's structure and business model made authors beholden to publishers if they wanted their manuscripts published. The power imbalance favoured industry interests and authors who failed to comply would not have their manuscripts published. In addition, structural restrictions associated with the industry's paper-based business model meant that publishers could only publish a fraction of finished manuscripts. Coupled with the restricted number of manuscripts that the industry could publish, the industry power imbalance created the conditions for the disruption to take place because it created a pool of finished manuscripts that were ready to undergo the publication process. The emerging digital publishers and distributors could draw upon this pool of manuscripts in order to create the products (ebooks) with which to infiltrate markets that were once exclusive to the industry.

The exclusive structure of the publishing industry was a direct product of its historical development—from small publishing companies owned by families or individuals to an industry dominated by multi-national corporations beholden to shareholders—and created a content problem for both writers and readers. The industry's obligation to maximise profits for its shareholders is the cause of its exclusivity because it meant that it could not service every reader or publish every manuscript. This led to the formation of three disaffected stakeholder groups in the industry: unpublished writers with completed manuscripts, published writers with out-of-print books, and readers who wanted access to literature that fell outside the industry's favoured genres and formats. The publishing industry could not solve these problems without the paradigm shift offered by digital publishing technologies.

Comparing the business practices of the publishing industry with those of the emerging digital publishing sector revealed that the disruptive technologies did not suffer from many of the structural restraints of the paper-based publishing industry. Digital technologies allowed for the publication of nearly every manuscript, it eliminated the limited 'shelf-life' of pbooks in brick-and-mortar bookstores and allowed for all ebooks to be available in perpetuity, and it all but eliminated costs associated with production, storage, and transportation of physical inventory. The freedom associated with self-publishing is largely due to the elimination of these costs, which had proved to be an overwhelming cost-of-entry prior to digital publishing. However, self-published authors found that there were other costs that industry-published authors did not need to cover.

A self-published author, publishing through digital publishing platforms, is usually responsible for the entire publishing process. They must either do all their own proofreading, editing, cover art, formatting, and marketing or hire others to do it on their behalf. The popularity of self-publishing has seen a parallel growth in the online freelance author support services market. It is now possible for a self-published author to find affordable, freelance publishing professionals to help with the processes involved with bringing a book into the public sphere. Because of this, authors are now free to choose to self-publish or industry-publish because there is no difference in the available support systems, and well-presented self-published ebooks are indistinguishable from well-presented industry published ebooks.

Finally, I will confess to having self-published several books in a variety of genres. Under my own name, I have published several short study guides on philosophy, political science, and accounting that would have been far too short for industry publication. My disillusionment with the way that Hollywood and popular culture treats the legend of Herakles led me to self-publish a reworking of the myth that I believe was more in keeping with the spirit of the original (under a pen name because a book about Herakles by Hercules would seem odd). And the result? In the 6 years since I released my first self-published book, I have sold over 20,000 books, given away countless more, and earned over AU$20,000 in royalties. While not quite in the league of Howey and Ward, that is still 20,000 more books than I would have sold had the publishing industry been the only viable method into the public sphere for writers.
Appendix 1: Literature Review

This book started its life as an academic text and I spent researching what others have said about the disruption of the publishing industry. This is a brief overview of that research.

Influential business management thinker Clayton Christensen was one of the first to define disruptive technologies and examine how they affect incumbent industries (Christensen, Raynor, & McDonald, 2015). He argues that there are two types of technological innovations that affect industries, the most common of which are the sustaining innovations that improve products in line with market expectations (Christensen, 1997, p. xviii). For example, the technological advances that allow mobile telephone producers to release a new product every year are sustaining innovations. Less common are the disruptive innovations, which often lead to worse product performance in the near term, but which can lead to products that have several traits that a segment of the market finds desirable. For example, the disruptive technology that led to digital photography products that affected the manufacturers of silver halide photographic film (1997, p. xxix).

According to Christensen, sustaining innovations only rarely lead to the collapse of major firms, while disruptive technologies often precipitate the demise of leading organisations in an industry (1997, p. xviii). Together with Wessel, Christensen also argues that disruptions are not single events, but a process that plays out over time. Some disruptions, they argue, occur quickly while others can take decades. Nor do all disruptions completely obliterate the incumbent industries and sometimes products from both industries can co-exist (Christensen & Wessel, 2012, p. 58).

Adner argues that, while disruptive technologies can upset incumbent industries using inferior products, not all inferior products are a result of disruptive technologies (Adner, 2002, p. 667). He argues that there are three identifiers that can determine if a technology will be disruptive, as well as the magnitude of that disruption. First, the magnitude of the disruption of an incumbent industry will be influenced by the preference overlap between the two technologies—the features that the competing products share. Second, the magnitude of competition for emerging markets is determined by the preference asymmetry of the products—the market segment's desire for the features that the competing products do not share. The final extension—and critical to the disruption process according to Adner—is the price of the products created by the disruptive technology (2002, p. 685).

Most commentators agree that there has been a degree of disruption in the traditional publishing industry caused by digital publishing and distribution technologies. Mierzejewska argues that the transformation of the publishing industry fits the criteria identified by Christensen as being under attack by a disruptive technology (Mierzejewska, 2010, p. 58). She argues that there were already elements of the publishing industry, such as academic journals, that drew a substantial percentage of their revenue from electronic publications (2010, p. 57). Ramrattan and Szanberg strike a similar note, and argue that online bookselling and publishing has forced the publishing industry to change its practices in order to keep pace with the internet and communication sector (Ramrattan & Szanberg, 2016, p. 132).

Although the role of writers is often overlooked when considering the recent turmoil in the publishing industry, Gilbert argues that publishers are fearful that self-publishing platforms established by Amazon and other digital publishers could compromise the relationship that the industry has with authors (Gilbert, 2015, p. 182). He adds that the traditional publishing industry is struggling to find an equilibrium between paper and electronic books, and that the innovative digital technologies are putting its business model under pressure.

Thompson initially offered a dissenting opinion and, in the first edition of his book _Merchants of Culture_ , argued that there was little demand for ebooks and that they made up only a fraction of total book sales (Thompson, 2010, p. 319). However, his tone had changed by the time the second edition was published in 2012, where he argued that '...there can be no doubt that we are witnessing major changes that could have profound consequences for the industry as a whole' (Thompson, 2012, loc 6727). It was most probably the large volume of sales of self-published ebooks that caused Thompson's about-face, as well as the warm reception that they received from readers. The number of ebooks sold grew quickly after Amazon launched the Kindle ereader in 2007, and by 2014, ebooks accounted for more than 25% of all online book sales in the USA (Howey, The 7K Report, 2014).

Flood argues that the pressure of disruptive change caused several large corporate publishers to collude with Apple Inc in order to keep ebook prices high. The activity was illegal in the USA and eventually led to their prosecution (Flood, 2016, pp. 879–880). His analysis of the legal defence mounted by the publishers exposed their frustrations with the way Amazon was pricing ebooks and the fear that, unless they could increase ebook prices, the sales of their paper products would suffer (2016, p. 885). Flood concluded that, although the publishers were able to successfully raise the price of traditionally published ebooks, it would succeed only in slowing the pace of change caused by disruptive digital technologies (2016, p. 904).

Kirkwood took issue with the publishers' reasons for their illegal behaviour, which was that Amazon's predatory pricing and monopoly position in the ebook market would stifle innovation by robbing the publishing industry of profits that would usually fund research (Kirkwood, 2014, p. 4). He argues that new entries into the ebook market had diminished the probability of an Amazon monopoly, and that Amazon's pricing of ebooks was loss-leading rather than predatory (2014, p. 63). The legal proceedings did not curb the hostility between the publishers and Amazon, however, and tensions flared again when the court-directed two-year freeze on agency pricing—which is agreement between a publisher and a retailer where the publisher sets the retail price of a book—had expired.

Gilbert argues that the 2014 dispute between Amazon and Hachette Books was particularly acrimonious, with Amazon using its market power to its advantage by disallowing pre-orders of Hachette books through its website. The agreement between the two, which came after protracted negotiations, could be described as 'agency-lite' because, although they allowed publishers to set the retail price of ebooks, Amazon included measures that encouraged Hachette Books to deliver lower ebook prices for readers (Gilbert, 2015, p. 180). The return of agency pricing, Gilbert argues, led to a rise in traditionally published ebook prices as both publishers and retailers wanted to take higher profits (2015, p. 182).

While the traditional publishing industry struggled with the disruptive effects of digital publishing and distribution technologies, authors were using those same technologies to break free of the restrictions that the publishing industry had placed on the publishing and distribution of their work. Prior to the rise of digital publishing, writers with finished manuscripts were often forced to submit their work to publishers or literary agents for assessment. Unfortunately for the writers, the number of finished manuscripts ready for publication far exceeded the number of publishing contracts available. This led to the creation of 'slush-piles' of unsolicited manuscripts that often grew much faster than publishers could assess them. According to Sarah O'Keefe, senior editor at Orion Books in 2007, the fiction department received 60 unsolicited manuscripts every week, while literary agent Camilla Horby said the Curtis Brown agency received 10 unsolicited manuscripts every week (Bury, 2007).

While there had always been tight competition for publishing contracts, changes in the latter half of the twentieth century exacerbated the problem by prioritising profits. Wirten argues that it was the corporatisation of the publishing industry, which began in the 1960s, that turned the focus of the industry from producing quality literature to maximising profits (Wirten, 2007, p. 398). In turn, the hunt for profits led to an increased emphasis on books with wide appeal, such as celebrity biographies and cook books, as well as works of fiction that would become 'bestsellers' (2007, p. 399).

The hunt for bestsellers—identified by Wirten— meant that publishers became increasingly particular with what they would and would not publish, which frustrated writers because of the way it forced them to write to market. Writer J.A. Konrath argued that unless a writer tailored their work to fit publisher expectations, then their manuscript would never be published (Konrath J. , Shelf Space, 2010), while editor Stephen Corey lamented the many works that he had to reject because the competition for publication was simply too fierce (Corey, 2016).

Konrath, a published author who had an extensive back-catalogue of out-of-print books, argued that the disruptive technologies of digital publishing had a liberating effect on writers, who no longer needed to curry favour with the publishing industry in order to monetise their work (Konrath J. A., Unconscionability, 2012). Using his own sales figures from both traditionally published and digitally published books, Konrath was able to demonstrate that a writer could earn equivalent or better royalties for their work using digital publishing technologies rather than using the traditional publishing industry (Konrath J. A., Shelf Space, 2010).

Writer Hugh Howey argued that Konrath's experience with digital publishing was not an isolated case, and in 2014 published data derived from Amazon's Kindle bestseller list to back his contention. He argued that the data showed that the industry-accepted figure of 25% of overall book sales being comprised of ebooks was incorrect because it did not account for self-published books or those from Amazon's own imprints (Howey, The 7K Report, 2014). In addition, Howey said the data showed that self-published ebooks accounted for 39% of unit sales in Amazon's combined genre bestseller lists (the combined categories of mystery/thriller, science fiction/fantasy, and romance) (Howey, 2014). The increase in ebook sales shown by the statistics, and the proportion of those ebooks that self-published authors produced, indicate that the digital disruption of the publishing industry has changed the relationship between authors and publishers. Digital publishing channels have provided authors with another path into the public sphere, as well as a method to monetise their work that circumvents the publishing industry.

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