Electronic Publishing

According to a recent article in Forbes, the romance genre is single-handedly saving the electronic book industry from extinction. Seems ebooks have been around for about a decade, and account for less than 1% of the $24 billion book market. (Keep in mind, though, that romance novels, with all their many sub-genres, account for over 50% of mass market book sales.) Romance readers love the instant gratification and, for those who love steamier books but are a little shy about asking their local bookseller to order the books for them, they have a certain amount of anonymity by ordering a book electronically and then downloading it via a link to the publisher.

One of my publishers, New Concepts, was one of the first to see the potential in this medium. They're right now the oldest e-pub out there. The explosion, though, came when Tina Engler (Jaid Black) started Ellora's Cave (another of my publishers). Hotsa motsa was here, and it was here to stay. In 2006, EC had $6.7 million in revenue, up 11% from 2005. And this is a company that's only been around about 7 years.

To give you a clearer picture, Harlequin, arguably the biggest publisher of romances, only digitized 10% of their books a year and a half ago. Now they upload nearly all their books as soon as they're released in print.

(BTW, EC's model is to wait a few months before releasing their books in print because their bread and butter is still by and far their e-sales.)

The biggest complaint I had about this Forbes article? It's titled "E-Bodice-Ripper."

Come on, folks. Can we please get past this? If the book market had $24 billion in sales last year, and over 50% of that was romance novels, that's over TWELVE BILLION DOLLARS.

Give us some respect. I think we've earned it!

If you want to read the entire Forbes article, go here.

And I'll have more about Ellora's Cave tomorrow.



"I think knowing what you cannot do is more important than knowing what you can do. In fact, that's good taste." ~Lucille Ball