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Why Should Authors who’ve got Paper Books be Issuing E-Books?

Because like the nautilus, we are capable of change in changing circumstances…and the New York market is changing.

In the old way of the book business, a publisher printed 50,000 copies, planned to ship 40,000 out to the distributors, to take back the stripped covers on unsold copies and trash what didn’t sell…well, it was extremely wasteful, but it worked. And there sat the 10,000 copies in warehouse, ready to fill orders for re-supply. There they could sit for years, or—if needful, they could print another 10,000 and keep them sitting there, shipping out nearly continuously for decades.

Nowadays the IRS taxes anything in a warehouse, and taxes it annually, no matter if it’s been taxed before, so along with the rest of the industrial world, publishers suddenly want low stock, almost nothing in warehouse, and everything sitting in someone else’s hands. This means they print only what’s ordered, and that means if, say, a big house like Amazon decides to cut its order of a book to near zero, the book can actually be canceled after all the work of writing it, doing the cover, etc.

Even so, print runs are more like 10,000, or smaller, now, with the notion of printing just as many books as absolutely necessary to fill orders and have about 500 copies left on hand. So rather than being, say, 40,000 shipped and 10,000 in warehouse, they’re shipping low numbers, and keeping maybe 500 in warehouse. The model isn’t working well for anybody. The distributors are now telling the publishers what they’ll take, ergo what the publishers can buy or print, and the distributors first want to look at the cover—if they don’t like the cover, no sale. If they see a movie angle, or a newsy title, they buy more. If they don’t like the title of the book, they cut their order in half, or force the publisher to change the cover or title.

So the publishers are no longer in control of the market they’re selling to, and, being the ones who actually know books, they’re losing money and trying to squeeze in a good book where they can. They’re obliged, however, to play it safe. They have to pick books that satisfy the crazy demands of the distributors. And they can’t sell backlist any longer. The distributors, who are, after all, business majors, not writers, don’t want ‘old’ books. They want something new-new-new—but just like that vampire movie that’s big right now. Think it’s crazy? It’s crazy.

Closed Circle is us. Three authors who are tired of this craziness, who don’t want to spend their careers writing formula dictated by a distributing company, and who are determined, first, to get our backlist (older titles) back into readers’ hands, not priced sky-high and sold on Ebay as rarities. Second, if that gives us the funds to live a decent life on while we do it, we’re going to experiment with some brand new items, fiction going directly to e-book.

Our policy is—Closed Circle itself makes no money at all. Every penny you spend on a Closed Circle book goes directly to the author. Who’s doing the writing, the editing, formatting, even the covers? The writers are. We’re working ferociously long hours, but we’re loving it. For the first time in our careers—it’s us. It’s our way. It’s the editing we want. If we want to spell ‘grey’ as ‘grey’ instead of ‘gray’, we can. If we want a comma there—we can. And if we have a notion how our cover should look—we can do it. And we can write stories you’ll get to read that would never sell in the current New York Market.

Because this is our income, piracy hurts us directly. We are the source: we are the only source of the e-books we offer: we do not franchise them out to anybody, so if you spot them offered anywhere else, that’s a pirate. Don’t patronize them. If you spot titles of ours that are offered by companies that do not look to be the sort to deal officially with our paper publishers, those are pirates. Avoid them, and warn others. For one thing, and just to make it hurt that much more, the quality of a pirate copy is usually really, really bad. You just don’t know when a critical paragraph is going to be flat missing.

Our best defense is your loyalty and the quality of what we put out. We’re proud of both.