![]() ![]() Any changes in the market for popular fiction will be felt first and most strongly by those of us who write genre fiction. I believe that the market is maturing, which means that the traits that have characterized the digital book market for the last few years weren’t new standards but anomalies. It’s evolving rapidly, which is interesting in itself, and this year, there have been some very big changes. What is changing is the digital book market. They might have e-readers now, but their tendencies are exactly the same as ever. In the old days of print books, those readers went to libraries, used book stores, church sales and bought stripped books at flea markets. It’s not by any means a one-sided transaction or a simple issue. Some are enthusiasts who press books on other people. My point is simply that these readers have always been around and that’s just fine. It could be that they’re avid readers and price becomes a concern when you consume a lot of any product. It could be that they believe books should be free. The thing that’s not changing here is that there are readers who want to read books for free. Chicken Little had his claw on a fundamental human trait. What people are responding to here is change. For as long as I’ve been a published author (and probably before that), there’s been a big bad wolf out there (there I go, mixing my metaphors and folk tales!) gobbling up all the opportunity for writers and publishers to make a decent living. Before that, it was Amazon, or maybe Wal-mart, or big box stores, or other retailers whose roots weren’t in the business of selling books. In the years before that, it was self-published authors flooding the marketplace with unedited books. ![]() This year, the guilty party might be seen to be 99-cent digital boxed sets. The fact is that there is always something or someone destroying the book market, at least if you believe what you read in the industry trades – yet the book market keeps on keeping on. Spending time in the publishing industry means becoming familiar with its tropes and patterns. This is clearly a trend with huge implications for authors. The notion here is that 99-cent boxed sets are destroying the market, because readers will become so accustomed to getting books cheap that they’ll stop paying for them at all. Twenty-five centuries!) There has been a lot of chatter on author loops lately (well, on one loop in particular) about 99-cent boxed sets and how their prevalence is affecting the market for books. ( Turns out that this is a very old story about mass hysteria and its effects. Remember Chicken Little? He was the one who ran around, certain that the sky was falling. The old ones are still over at Alive & Knitting if you want to catch up on the discussion. This is the first Wild West Thursday post on my new blog. Deborah Cooke & Her Books USA Today Bestselling author Deborah Cooke writes paranormal romance and contemporary romance she also writes medieval romance as New York Times bestselling author Claire Delacroix. ![]()
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