REVIEW: Warner Books Answers the E Publishing Question
Publishing Newsdigital publishing / Ebooks / Warner5 Comments
After I moaned and wailed about not finding Annie Solomon’s books in e-format, I contacted the publisher as to what Warner was doing about getting its books into e-format. Here’s the answer I received from the man in charge, Mr. Neil De Young, Director of Digital Media.
Generally speaking, we try to get as many romance titles on the list as possible, it's a top selling category in eBook form. However, we are currently limited to about 15 total titles across all publishers and imprints a month due to limited resources (that's about as much as our conversion house can do and we can accurately traffic in any given month). We are slowly ramping up production and think we can push the list to about 20 titles a month by the fall, which will allow us to publish more Forever titles in eBook form.
If you have any questions for Mr. De Young, he did indicate that he would be willing to answer some so go and post. It probably won’t be until this week that he will answer them.
15 ebooks a month seems like such a small number to me. On the “AboutUs” page a twbookmark.com, it mentions that HBG publishes 500 adult and 180 YA and children’s books annually. This would meant that about 25% of the titles are released as ebooks. Is this calculation correct or am I comparing apples and oranges?
Mr. DeYoung – What is the requirement to submit my romance novel to you for publication?
Thank YOu
Etha
Sorry it has taken me so long to respond. Yes, 15 eBooks a month is a small amount compared to the total amount of titles Hachette Book Group (we are no longer part of the Time Warner Company, TW sold us to a company called Hachette Livre, which is a French based book publisher) publishes each year. However, not every book we publish makes sense as an eBook. For instance, graphic heavy titles and books with side bars do not convert well into the eBook formats such as Adobe, Micorsoft, and Mobipocket. If you minus those titles from the overall list, we are closer to 50% (we recently upped our production to 20-25 titles a month) of the front list titles and hope to get to 100% of the list in two years. Two of the things that will help us get to the 100% goal are: 1) a common eBook format and 2) for that format to be flexible enough to render graphic heavy titles well. One common format will make eBook production simpler, which will allow Publishers to publish more eBooks. In addition, if the common format is flexible and sophisticated enough, it will allow Publishers to publish titles that are graphic heavy, have maps, side bars, etc. HGBUSA is supporting initiatives within the industry that are tackling these challenges. We are making strides on both of these challenges and I'm confident we will be publishing all our titles as eBooks in the near future.
Dear Neil,
How long does it take a title like When You Are Engulfed By Flames to tranisition from print to e-format?
Arden