What Digital Means for Writers

I read e-books regularly. The benefits they hold for me are that they tend to be cheaper and physically easier to take care of. Though they don’t quite hold the emotional appeal of a well-worn and well-loved paperback, and e-books don’t as successfully store memories of where you were the last time you read the story, I am increasingly buying books in a digital form. I have unlimited space to store them, and I am running out of room on my physical bookshelves.

The digitization of books offers a benefit to writers as well. Just as we’ve discussed how there is almost no cost in digitally publishing music or a movie, there is no cost in digitally publishing a book. “E-books and the Digital Future” pointed out the negative impact of this in terms of piracy. However, there is also a positive in that there’s basically no reason why someone who writes a book can’t get it published. Services like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, which make it easy for a self-published author to make their books available, reflect this. According to Amazon, 25 of the top 100 most popular in 2012 were self-published through this service.

The long tail means that the digital makes it easier for a new author to make an impact. We hear of more stories of self-published books becoming bestsellers. The most of these is probably 50 Shades of Grey, which started as a piece of Twilight fanfiction and became one of the best selling books of all times, and its movie adaptation is one of the highest grossing R-rated films of all time. I doubt 50 Shades of Grey would have become so successful if it hadn’t become popular online first. Would bookstores have even given it the bookshelf space to get there?

Self-publishing is not new by any means. One example is The Joy of Cooking, a cookbook self-published in 1931. Today, The Joy of Cooking has sold over 18 million copies. However, author Irma Rombauer paid to have the first 3,000 copies printed. With digital technology, it is possible for books to only be printed after an order has been made. This means that a writer does not have to pay significant amounts of money to have their work published and then have to find a place to store those books until they are sold.