By Mike Shatzkin
There are two aspects of the business that ebooks should really change.
One is that ebooks can really enable increases in sales of the backlist.
The other is that ebooks will really enable sales outside the publisher’s home territory.
The second piece of this hardly even requires much effort. At a conference called Camp Coresource hosted by Ingram two weeks ago, Mary Cummings of Diversion Books, which last year launched a romance-only eBookstore app, EverAfter Romance, reported just short of half of EverAfter’s app users are coming from outside the “home” (US) market. Of that 49 percent, only about 6 percent come from the UK and Canada.
Of course, Diversion owns world rights on many titles. And the rest of the world has far more than half the people, even far more than half the English speakers, in the world. So the US is still responsible for far more users per capita, but that’s really of secondary importance. Getting half one’s customers from markets that would have been very hard to reach ten years ago — without any extraordinary efforts — is a very new thing. Read more…