julesjones | Preliminary acceptance on L&M 2

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Just had a note from my editor saying that she likes the Lord and Master sequel. It still has to go to senior management for approval before I have a firm acceptance, so not absolutely guaranteed yet. No idea when it will be slotted into the publication schedule, of course, though I'd expect not for some months unless they have a slot they need to fill at short notice.

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From:

growlycub.livejournal.com

We are keeping our paws crossed (all the gazillion millions here, he he).

I'm curious, how far out does LI schedule their books? I've read some commentary of late that makes it sound like time from manuscript delivery to publishing at e-pubs is approaching the time it takes NY print pubs instead of the few months it used to.

And while I'm at it. Prices lately seem to inflate, too. As I've mentioned elsewhere. 5 bucks for 25k is just not comparable to print. All those arguments on how e-books are cheaper are just not true. And disguising lack of word count with nebulous categories just makes me annoyed and I decide not to buy the pig in the poke or however the saying goes... grumble

No matter, I'll but L&M2 just as soon as they make a buy link available. Can't wait! :)

From:

julesjones

There are a couple of things going on -- one is the time between receiving a manuscript and giving a yes/no, and the other is if they say yes, how long it then takes to get it on sale. People have been complaining about both.

The top tier epubs have deliberately pushed out the time between receiving the manuscript and the publication date to give themselves more flexibility on getting the books through production, and to tackle things like some review sites refusing to review books unless they get ARCs well in advance of the publication date. In the long term this is actually a good thing if it means that the book gets proper attention and we get our edits back with plenty of time to go through them, though authors are always impatient and want it published nownownow. Whether it will really result in getting edits with a couple of weeks to go through them, rather than a couple of days -- we shall see...

Whether it's pushed out to NY print times, I can't really say, because I'm in the slightly odd position of coming from the sf side of cross-genre, and thus most of the industry gossip I hear from print publishing is in that genre. So I know how long it takes to get books through Tor's process, but not Harlequin's. My turn-around at LI is still months faster than my friends in print sf get, but you're not really comparing like with like there.

Prices -- meh. As I wittered on at length in Teddy's blog a couple of months back, there are two opposing factors here. One is that ebooks don't have the cost of printing and shipping. But that's a much smaller portion of the cost of an individual copy than many people not in the industry realise (I certainly didn't until I started hanging out on sf publishing forums). The other is that you have fixed costs per *title*, which have to be spread over a much smaller number of copies on small press books (which all epublishers are), and thus cost more per copy. The two roughly balance, so you end up with small press ebooks costing about the same as a mass market paperback.

That I think is fair enough. If you're buying a book that the big publishers won't touch, for whatever reason, if it's the same length then the same price is reasonable. But this new trend of charging more for a single novella in ebook than you'd pay for a Harlequin category in dead tree format is *stupid*. It's put me off writing something at that length to be published as a standalone, because I think it will damage the sales of my full-length books if people feel cheated. I really need to get back to the website update to put the word counts on the individual book pages, for exactly this reason.

From:

growlycub.livejournal.com

"If you're buying a book that the big publishers won't touch, for whatever reason, if it's the same length then the same price is reasonable."

Upon consideration I agree. I guess I'm cheap and I haven't kept up with current pricing because pretty most of what I read in paper these days is backlist that is no longer available new, so it really hasn't sunk in that 8 bucks is the norm for a paperback now (I'd guess those are somewhere between 75k and 100k and 300-350 pages, correct me if I'm wrong).

One thing I've noticed overall is reduced length. Somewhere I read that it is the publishers' response to reduced attention span in readers. But then they said they took the history out of historical romances because us bon-bon eating housewives were too dumb to get it, so I'm not sure it's a reaction or a way to sell less for more...

I do wonder if e-book length is a reaction to that perception (so many of the 'novels' are woefully shorter than you'd ever see in print). I know I cannot read on screen for hours on end without starting to skip and losing some of the impact of the story and a lot of the enjoyment) and I actually caught myself yesterday thinking that Sheila Simonson's Bar Sinister was too long (at less than 80k), which I clearly relate to the screen thing more than the story itself.

I know that I want to print out the e-books I really like and that's where buying from places like Fictionwise gets really annoying because pretty much all of theirs are print-disabled, even if the books aren't at the e-publisher's website.

I think part of the insane pricing of novellas comes from the fact that so much erotica and erotic romance is sold in trade. I hate trade, it doesn't fit on my shelves and it irks the hell out of me to have to pay $15 for less than 250 pages (around 50-55k I'd suppose). I don't want lines like Aphrodisia to fail, because I do like a lot of what their writers put out, but at the same time I feel I'm being extorted. They seem to be selling like hotcakes though and very rarely show up in used bookstores, so I guess the format is here to stay.

I'm starting to feel like a grumbly old cat so I'll repair to my den and won't come out till I get over myself. :)