Epublishing - why China & Sherlock are right

During the course of the recent Edinburgh International Book Festival, the academic and multi-award winning fantasy & weird fiction author China Miéville came in for some criticism during a debate on the future of the novel when he predicted that just as music fans remix tracks and post them online, so readers will recut the novel. "Be ready for guerilla editors," he said, as there is a "blurring of boundaries between writers, books and readers, self publishing and the fanification of fiction."

Miéville added that the effect of the internet and digital distribution on fiction would not be about creating enhanced ebooks, which he called "a banal abomination". Rather, the effect would be to heighten the openness of texts. "Anyone who wants to shove their hands into a book and grub about in its innards, add to and subtract from it, and pass it on, will … be able to do so without much difficulty." (You can read a full report on the debate here on Guardian Books:

Guardian Books

Sounds far fetched? Not really. Authors have been experimenting with interactive fiction since at least the 1930s (there were some crime novels published in that era that provided readers with a folder of clues so they could try to work out who-dunnit for themselves) and more recently there have been the choose your own adventurebooks for children. And these were all experiments with conventional print format books! Miéville – perhaps because he is fantasy author - is clearly willing to think the unthinkable and also recognises the unthinkable is now thinkable. In fact not just thinkable but eminently realisable in today's digital age.

Miéville's attitude is in marked contrast to the opinions I heard expressed at a recent conference panel session on Publishing Today where the panellists might charitably be described as an author in denial, a publisher in denial and an agent in denial – and they then all managed the neat trick of burying their heads in the sand while simultaneously defending the status quo.

For example, the author's main concern was that being published in an ebook format on SmashWords would impress their friends a lot less than their book being seen in Waterstones. (We'll gloss over the fact the ebook parade has moved on and Amazon Kindle is now where all the action is.) They all laboured the point that self-publishing was a bad thing because there were so many poorly edited ebooks out there. True but have they seen how many poorly edited 'proper books' there out there – particularly those from smaller independent publishers?

This didn't stop us from being told that independent publishers were the future of genre publishing because they were prepared to take risks. But independent publishers face very big problems getting their books distributed and into chains such as WH Smith, Waterstones and, of course, the supermarkets. And then we were told that Waterstones was not a major factor (one panellist cited a colleague whose book was taken up by Waterstones, only to discover that the bookshop had ordered just 500 copies for its entire network) as there were all those independent bookstores out there. Those would be the same High Street bookstores that have become an endangered species thanks to WH Smith, Waterstones, the supermarkets and Amazon!

The more they went on, the more they revealed themelves to be out of touch with current technological, market and demographic trends – or at least in denial of them. The agent concluded with words to the effect that the ebook trend would revolutionise the publishing industry "but nobody knew when it would happen". Sorry guys but you are wrong. The revolution is already here and now all this is left to do is mop-up some of the Old Guard reactionaries and refuseniks. 

I'm with the SF&F author Mark Chadbourn who, talking at another SF&F publishing industry conference earlier this year, had no doubts that...

* Booksellers and publishers are going to struggle as epublishing gains momentum. In 2009 just 2% of titles were ebooks. By 2013 they will be 60%.

* Within five years the majority of authors will self-publish – but if you go this way, you need a good editor.
 
* Paperbacks will be dead in two years and agents, publishers and bookshops are all facing extinction.
 
* Be wary of the advice of agents, they have a vested interested in rubbishing ebooks and self-publishing. In two years time you won't need them.
 
To paraphrase another authority – Sherlock Holmes, a character who has had a whole new lease of life since he went out of copyright and other authors, writers and TV and movie scriptwriters began to reimagine, reboot, mash-up and (in Miéville's words) recut the Conan Doyle cannon: "There's an east wind coming... It will be cold and bitter and a good many will wither before before its blast... But a cleaner, better, stronger land will lie in the sunshine when the storm has cleared."
 
It is going to be a bumpy ride but the ebook and self-publishing trend is here to stay – and anyone who thinks otherwise is either being a fool to themselves or else trying to fool the rest of us!