I have a feeling the young adult fiction area (where this author is focused) is where much of the ebook money is coming from in general(but it's going to balloon everywhere). I can see how serial authors who get kids hooked on their series can have a nicely incrementing revenue stream. I'm sure you can think of a couple examples of traditionally published YA fiction that have long lines of fans loyally paying top dollar for hardcover versions of the newest volume.
"At HarperCollins, for example, e-books made up 25 percent of all young-adult sales in January, up from about 6 percent a year before — a boom in sales that quickly got the attention of publishers there."
And that's from the publishing 'house' example.
The NYT article also observes that a lot of kids are getting ebook readers as gifts. When a grandparent/aunt/uncle can't think of a specific book to give a kid for their birthday or whatever, rather than give them a piece of junk toy or unwanted clothes, they can buy an ebook reader, maybe with a small Amazon gift certificate or a DVD full of formatted Gutenberg texts.
I can only imagine it will be a short time before the author's age falls even further for some of these stories of young writers making money. I could see the clever goth girl in junior high pounding out a thin book a month and self-publishing for $.99.[1] Ebooks have disconnected the feeling of "value" and "heft" of a book, which publishers have been inadvertently reinforcing for years with the hard/soft cover versions of books.
As with the Twilight (although, not so much with the Harry Potter) books I mentioned earlier, our idea of "quality" isn't necessarily important to hook kids. If it's escapist literature with a character with whom a kid can identify, you could pull a George Lucas (oh look, another one) and use Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces as a money-printing machine.
[1] What a perfect time, too: take the last few years of your livejournal blog, put it into chapters, and format it for the Kindle.
If it's escapist literature with a character with whom a kid can identify, you could pull a George Lucas (oh look, another one) and use Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces as a money-printing machine.
This is quite similar to the formula which prints money in urban fantasy, whose core market is grown women. They're often shlocky, but that is part of the appeal.
Anecdotally, from reading reviews prior to purchasing, a lot of my fellow Plucky Mechanic Dating Brooding Vampire Lord readers love their Kindles to death, despite being neither juvenile nor obviously tech savvy.
Hah, you just described my wife, who is a very well educated attorney and international policy expert. If it has a vampire in it, she'll read just about any book.
Before, by some strange twist of fate, she finds me talking about her online, she did not read or endorse the Twilight books. She did want to watch the movie "with the vampires fighting the werewolves" but was rather put out that the fight was so short, cramming seventeen seconds of action in a twelve-hour movie.
Any HN readers who like books with vampires in and also enjoy "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" might want to be aware of Luminosity (http://luminous.elcenia.com/all.shtml) and Radiance (http://luminous.elcenia.com/all2.shtml), which bear something of the same relationship to Twilight as MoR does to Rowling's Potter (and are written by another prominent LessWrong'er). They contain both vampires and werewolves, and a certain amount of fighting. I haven't read the Twilight books myself, but my understanding is that although most of the characters are taken from Twilight canon the plot and style are distinctly different.
There was an article earlier this month in the NYT (web version: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/05/books/05ebooks.html) with some observations on children consuming ebook content.
"At HarperCollins, for example, e-books made up 25 percent of all young-adult sales in January, up from about 6 percent a year before — a boom in sales that quickly got the attention of publishers there."
And that's from the publishing 'house' example.
The NYT article also observes that a lot of kids are getting ebook readers as gifts. When a grandparent/aunt/uncle can't think of a specific book to give a kid for their birthday or whatever, rather than give them a piece of junk toy or unwanted clothes, they can buy an ebook reader, maybe with a small Amazon gift certificate or a DVD full of formatted Gutenberg texts.
I can only imagine it will be a short time before the author's age falls even further for some of these stories of young writers making money. I could see the clever goth girl in junior high pounding out a thin book a month and self-publishing for $.99.[1] Ebooks have disconnected the feeling of "value" and "heft" of a book, which publishers have been inadvertently reinforcing for years with the hard/soft cover versions of books.
As with the Twilight (although, not so much with the Harry Potter) books I mentioned earlier, our idea of "quality" isn't necessarily important to hook kids. If it's escapist literature with a character with whom a kid can identify, you could pull a George Lucas (oh look, another one) and use Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces as a money-printing machine.
[1] What a perfect time, too: take the last few years of your livejournal blog, put it into chapters, and format it for the Kindle.