Is This the Face of Michelangelo?

One of the first historical novels I read, at about the age of 13, was Irving Stone's The Agony and the Ecstasy. This biographical novel of the life of Michelangelo Buonarroti spawned my lifelong interest in the Renaissance and all the great artists of the age: Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, and a host of others. Michelangelo created David, Moses, the Pieta, and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

In 1999, a carved marble tondo was identified as a possible sculpted self-portrait of the master himself. Check out the story on Discovery.com to learn more.

ePublishing As We Once Knew It

A little over a decade ago, someone got the bright idea of digitizing books that could be downloaded onto computers and hand-held devices like the Palm Pilot. The advantages seemed enormous: no cost of paper, or of ink, or transport of heavy volumes across the country. No need to print a large quantity of books and pray that they would all sell. Now, finally, the big publishers would welcome us aspiring authors with open arms. With lower costs comes higher tolerance for risk, right? Well ...

I was in the first wave of published e-novelists. My first novel, The Seed of Joy, a historical novel about South Korea, was picked up by Online Originals, one of the very first epublishers, in 2000. I wrote a monthly column for an epublishing website called KnowBetter.com. My publisher even invited me to London to give a talk about the author's view of epublishing. I got my picture and a blurb about my book in The Bookseller, a publishing trade magazine in the UK. We were poised for a literary renaissance, a springtime of new writing, new voices, new media. The world looked bright. Bluebirds chirping and all that.

[Sound of a needle scratching across an LP record...]

Then something happened. Epublishing got off to a bad start; it was ahead of its time. Andrew Starling, a UK writer, wrote a piece in 2006 that partially explained why. Remember, this is from five years ago:

Money. Internet users are notorious skinflints, they expect everything for free. The MP3 business got off to a flying start with the old free Napster and similar Peer to Peer sharing of illegal music. Young punters liked free MP3s and many have been happy to move with the times and progress to paying for them. The same will probably apply to literature. My fiction on www.foxglove.co.uk now gets over 100,000 readers a year. This is a higher readership than many traditionally-published writers get, but the key is that it's free.

Technology. Who wants to read a book on their laptop or PDA? The answer is in the paragraph above – lots of people, as long as they don't have to pay for it. The move from cathode ray screens to flatpanels has made reading on-screen easier, but it's still not as comfortable as reading a book. The question is, will the Sony Reader change this? In the medium term, I think the answer is yes. You have to remember that when the MP3 format first appeared, lots of people said it would never work because there'd be no sleeve notes and covers, no added value in the emotional experience. They were wrong.

Nervous traditional publishers. Sometimes I wonder if traditional publishers want ebooks to succeed, or whether they would prefer to drown epublishing at birth. My main reason for saying this is their pricing policy. How can anybody justify charging $7.99 for a regular ebook? The distribution costs are minimal, there's no printing charge. At a stroke, 80% of the costs of publishing a book have disappeared. Bear in mind that books are sold to retailers at around 50% of cover price, and printing might be 10% of cover price, and distribution costs a bit more. Epublishing is dirt cheap, yet mainstream publishing houses are often charging just 25% less than they would for a hardcopy book. Only the specialist ebook publishers get their pricing right, at less than $6.

 Andrew was right about some things and wrong about others. Ebooks don't have to be free to sell well, but a common price point these days is around $2.99. That's with independent epublishers, not the traditional publishers who do ebooks on the side; it's cheap enough for readers to take a chance on a book without risking much. He was right about the Sony eReader (and similar devices later) making reading easier, but he didn't see the coming of the Kindle, Nook, Kobo, and other ebook readers that are helping spur the growth of the industry. Here's what he said about the future of epublishing:

As things stand, I'm not convinced that epublishing has a great future. Legal music downloads account for about 2% of music sales, and it looks like ebooks are going to account for a similar miserable percentage of book sales, at least in the short term. The main problems are screen-reading and digital rights management (DRM).

A lot has changed since then. I rarely buy CDs anymore; I get most of my music (legally) through MP3 downloads. Likewise, if I want to buy a book, I favor ebook versions unless I know for certain that the title I want is available only in print.

If we learn anything from Andrew's take on epublishing, it should be this: Five years ago, he was wrong about a lot of things. Five years from now, we stand to be just as wrong.

 

Authors I like

It's been said that people know you by the company you keep. When it comes to the authors I admire most, I don't presume to be in their company; rather, I've set up a little shrine in my office where I burn votive candles before their images. Not literally, of course. But here they are:

Leo Tolstoy. War and Peace. Need I say more?

James A. Michener. A tireless researcher, a first-rate writer, and the man who put massive, meaty, satisfying historical novels on the top of the bestseller lists. I've read Tales of the South Pacific, The Source, Hawaii, Chesapeake, Centennial, and The Novel and loved them. Poland, Alaska, and Mexico, not so much. I didn't like The Bridges at Toko-Ri at all because in 9th grade English I was forced to read it; maybe I'll pick it up again. His writing style is workmanlike and nearly transparent: it never gets in the way of the plot or the characters. You breeze through his books by wanting to read just a few more pages at each sitting.

H. Rider Haggard. Author of King Solomon's Mines, She, and dozens of other books, Haggard invented the 'lost world' genre of fantasy fiction. His writing combines rip-roaring action with Victorian uprightness and British colonialism, with a huge helping of the supernatural thrown in. Men everywhere owe him a debt for coining the moniker 'She-who-must-be-obeyed' in reference to our significant others.

More to come later: Pearl S. Buck, Charles Dickens, Boris Pasternak, and others.