The Backlists are coming! June edition

In my continuing 'series' to debunk the meme that there is some natural upper bound to ebook market share, A bit on a company that mass formats ebooks.

“Accurance has had orders/agreements for e-book conversion of 2,000 titles, representing just initial backfile orders, from more than 50 publishers in just two months. “

My comment: One company is processing 1,000 backlist titles per month! We've seen numerous authors blog about finally dusting off their old text and putting it on Kindle.

Now for my favorite pulp fiction to make it to ebooks, please! (Hey, we all have something we want to re-read.)


Side comment on the AAP numbers, from a post a month ago:

"When print books sell well, the AAP sales numbers hit the web as early as the 8th of the month. The worse the print book sales, the later the numbers are released. Bad pbook sales are released the 14th through the 17th."

I'm not expecting March pbook sales to be any good. If the news was an improvement, the AAP would have announced early. With ebooks, we could see the seasonal dip... or they could continue their rise. I'll graph the numbers once we have data.

Conclusion on backlist:
20% is a tipping point for multiple reasons; with backlists it motivates all to re-enter the market. As those backlists enter the market, it will motivate more to try ebooks and that, long term, is a great thing for indie/small pub authors. Its a good thing for established authors and customers too. What it isn't a great thing for is those whose business model is based on limited shelf space.

At this point, follow JA Konrath's advice, every minute your book isn't available for sale is a minute of lost income. Don't put out crap, but go and build that audience.

Got Popcorn?
Neil

ps
I anticipate indie author releases far more than big6 releases at this point. That is probably an artifact of allowing good authors to publish more than one book a year!