I should say right from the start that the ebook revolution has been wonderful for me as an author. I’ve made more money out of my self-published ebooks than any of my twenty-plus children’s books that have been conventionally published, have enjoyed the process enormously and gained a new, and entirely unexpected, audience. And yet despite this modest success, I’ll be looking for an agent and a traditional publisher for my next book.

Ten years ago, I had the idea for a trilogy of stories aimed at young teens, set in a large English country house through three generations and featuring the servants who lived and worked there. My first heroine would be a fifteen-year-old housemaid in 1890 (country house parties, Edwardian decadence, shadow of the workhouse); her daughter a reluctant kitchen maid in 1914 (male servants leaving for war, the house becoming a hospital, women taking on men’s work); her granddaughter would arrive at the house in the spring of 1939 (impending war, the house on hard times, Jewish children fleeing Germany). And so the ‘Swallowcliffe Hall‘ series was born, before Downton Abbey was even a twinkle in Julian Fellowes’ eye. An editor signed me up on the strength of three synopses and a few chapters and everyone seemed filled with enthusiasm. I wrote the three books over the next three years, but by the time the second had been published, it was obvious they weren’t going to be bestsellers. My editor went on maternity leave, the covers were dreary, there were hardly any foreign rights deals, reviews or promotions from the bookshop chains. Even my bookmarks had typos.

When Downton Abbey became such a success a few years later, I suggested reissuing the books with more enticing covers, but the proposal was vetoed by the publishers because ‘children don’t watch Downton’. I knew, though, that I would spontaneously combust if I had to watch another episode without doing something for my poor languishing stories. So I got the rights back, because hardly any copies had been sold over the last few royalty periods, and set about turning them into ebooks. This was in 2011 and my publishers seemed unaware of the potential of digital rights; they hadn’t previously released the stories in ebook format and had no plans to do so in the future. To be fair, children aren’t such great consumers of ebooks, and the trend for adults reading YA fiction hadn’t reached its peak.

My first formatting steps were tentative but, encouraged by guidance and enthusiasm from fellow children’s authors (thank you, Sue Price and Katherine Roberts), I persevered. The timing was perfect: suddenly there were thousands of readers, particularly in America, all desperate for English nostalgia; thanks to Kindle, I could reach them. Michael Boxwell’s ‘Make an Ebook‘ explained the mysteries of metatags, so I shamelessly added Downton Abbey tags wherever I could.

I had no idea what to expect, but sales of the ebooks began to build, helped by a well-timed paid promotion through Kindle Nation Daily. Several factors were on my side, although I didn’t fully realise that at the time. My books had already gone through the editing process, and the original printed versions (under different titles) had attracted reviews on Amazon which I was able to link to the ebook versions. I’d worked as an editor in children’s publishing myself, so had some experience of commissioning covers and an idea of the importance of marketing. My stories were ready to go – they just had to be formatted. Although they had first been published for children, they were carefully researched and historically accurate, and adult readers seem to love them too. Ebooks aren’t limited to a particular shelf in a bookshop; they can be enjoyed by anyone who comes across them and likes the look of the free sample. An author no longer has to worry whether bookshops will be – understandably – reluctant to take subsequent titles in a series if the first has been slow to sell.

To date, I’ve sold over 40,000 copies across the series, roughly two books in the US to every one in the UK. I have readers from Alabama to Alaska and, although the Downton Abbey effect has probably peaked, I’m still getting new reviews and daily sales. One woman said these were the books she’d enjoyed most on her Kindle so far. She gave me five stars! And Wuthering Heights one! (OK, that is a bit odd, but I’m not complaining.) I’ve been able to control pricing and check sales on a daily basis. Because I receive 70% of the cover price, I’ve been able to keep it low and still earn twice as much as I did from my print book royalties. Equally important, self-publishing made me feel like an author again. I wrote and released another story in the series, aimed less specifically at children – ‘Eugenie’s Story‘, told from the ‘upstairs’ side of the house – and a teen ghost romance. And yet…

It can be lonely, thrashing about in the self-publishing pool. I realised that ‘Eugenie’s Story’ was different from the other Swallowcliffe Hall books: less straightforward, with a comically unreliable narrator. I seemed to be heading in a new direction and wasn’t sure whether to continue. And if I carried on self-publishing, who was to say whether my books were any good or not? By the time sales declined, I might be too far off course. So I trod water for a while, beginning and abandoning a Bridget-Jones-hits-the-menopause type comic novel, before surrendering to a need for structure and advice. I’ve just finished the first draft of a novel for adults, written for a Creative Writing MA at City University under the guidance of tutors and external markers. I’m not going to self-publish it because I want someone to help make the book as good as it can be, telling me to keep working at this aspect or that, and telling me finally when to stop tinkering: a disinterested arbiter who also knows the publishing world and can offer me impartial advice. And when the novel’s ready, I don’t want to be the only one announcing my brilliance to the world. It feels better when someone else has a hand on the marketing tiller.

I love the control that self-publishing brings: being able to check sales figures daily, to adjust prices instantly and see the effect that has on sales. And I love my beautiful and personal new covers, with a photograph of my great-uncle Norman featured on ‘Grace’s Story‘ and my mother on ‘Isobel’s‘. Self publishing has given a new lease of life to a series that would otherwise have sunk without trace. For my next project, though, it’s time to call in the professionals. I want someone else to judge whether my writing makes the grade before it goes out into the world – just because you can self-publish, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you should.

It’s a little tricky trying to recall just how ‘The Kills‘ developed. The books were pitched as a series of inter-related novels, and in the first discussion with publisher Paul Baggaley and editor Kris Doyle, it became obvious that Picador, if they took on the project, would want to do more than publish the novel as a straight forward publication. It’s my good fortune that these two people were enthusiastic about the project, and very open to offer and consider ideas. At that point there was no specific plan to have multimedia elements or digital publication: it was a project of four books.

The progression from text to image is natural for me. I trained as an artist, and worked with a group called Haha in the 1990s where we developed public art projects, which differed from piece to piece (a lipstick slathered blimp in France, a series of camera obscuras in Italy, an HIV/AIDS resource in Chicago). The process of creating work with a team, so that the work changes through its development is something I value, highly. One of the questions I ask is about form: what is the most suitable way to represent these ideas? What would be the optimum way to encounter and experience the work? So there’s plenty of fluidity, and I like to keep the possibilities open throughout the entire working process.

The idea to publish digitally first came from the publisher. A highly sympathetic idea about how to stage a work, which needs to be read in sections. Releasing a work (The Kills is four novels in one), one book a month for four months, handsomely referred back to serialisation – which suits projects that are large and dense.

In developing the third book, a self-standing crime novel, I had produced a series of treated photographs, where I reconstructed the faces of the principal figures in the novel from images found online. These composite faces were deliberately darkened and blurred, and I had the idea that they should be presented before each chapter or section in which that character featured. The problem is, I didn’t want them to last. I liked the idea that you would turn a page and these faces would dissolve as you looked at them. In writing this book I was also interested in genre. What, exactly, makes a crime novel a crime novel – not just a body, a murder, a crime – but what, structurally, is it about the form that makes it what it is? I’d worked on an earlier novel, where the story was, pretty much, only a premise, and hoped that the reader would continue the story beyond what was written. Potentially each reader would have a different notion about what might and should happen (I’m not sure that worked). In printed-form books are somewhat absolute. There is the possibility that you can read chapters and sections in different order, if you wish (as with Cortazar’s ‘Blow Up’), but the very physicality of the book means that there’s an authority to the way it is presented to you, as a reader, and to be honest, flicking back and forward through a book, while a minimal effort, is still, an effort.

The digital elements aren’t just the ‘extras’ – and this is where my thinking is developing – I liked the idea that text can be reorganised, presented in shifting hierarchies, orders, to change emphasis. For the moment, digital texts are a stream, a continuous chain of words without heft. Location, for most of us depends on the weight of the book in your hands, and memory is acute enough for us to remember the placement of sections and events physically within the book. Think about Sebald’s images and how they work as anchors. These anchors are important; they let you know where you are. There are expectations in reading, given how much of the book you have physically on your left side and on your right side. The less you have on the right, the closer you are to some kind of resolve. With a digital book I have only a slider to indicate that shift forward, or a counter to tell me (worryingly) how many hours and minutes I have remaining. I’m thinking that images can be anchors to help with navigation, as well as providing content. Alongside this there’s another crucial relation, which is also increased by having the book physically in your hands, and this has to do with how time passes within the narrative you are reading, alongside how time synchronously passes in your life, as you read. It isn’t that this doesn’t happen with ebooks, but there’s less of an awareness (because of habit: we don’t only use our devices to read but for business and play, which can make for a certain kind of attention). There’s also less of an examined history and analysis about the processes and functions of reading digital work. With a physical book a great deal is taken for granted. With digital texts we are still, happily, figuring it out. As a writer, that slight indeterminacy is intriguing.

With ‘The Kills’ we decided very early that none of the films, extra texts, or audio, would effect change in the main narrative. They might inflect, but they wouldn’t deliver significant plotted elements, which would transform the text. This, mostly, was to recognise that not everyone who might read the book could be supposed to have an expensive digital device. I also wanted the short films to be free standing, if possible. We also bumped into technical limitations very early on. Some things just weren’t possible. The technology keeps changing, adapting. It isn’t stable – and this is a very significant difference between physical and digital texts. It’s possible that a digital text can be fugitive, impermanent – which contradicts our expectation as writers that when you publish you enter into permanent record. Each ‘extra’ was to be a taste, a sense of a place or a person, a piece of history, and as far as could be managed, self-standing. We didn’t want them to look like illustrations. Optimally, they appear at the ends of chapters, so that you can pause, if you want, and not feel that the main narrative or flow is being interrupted (that’s a nice feature of having different media side by side).

I’m a big fan of performance, 8mm film, and early video – particularly works that were developed in transitory periods when artists were finding their way around ‘new’ media. William Wegman and early video; Sadie Benning with Fischer Price toy cameras; Stan Brakhage playing with basic film elements; the comedian Ernie Kovacs amazing live transmissions; et al. They all met these new technologies with a kind of innocence and curiosity, which keeps the work honest and direct. I’ve tried to keep to that sensibility with a deliberately lo-fi approach – it’s no different to me than writing, where you build a narrative through simple accumulation. At the moment we are in a transitory period, the challenges for publishers are acute, no doubt, but the opportunities for writers are open. You don’t need a huge amount of know-how to enter this arena, and while the debate often sticks on certain subjects (self-publishing; the demise of printing), we are developing a discipline that is, by its nature, unfixed.

Germany is the second largest market in Europe after the UK for books in English. Barbara Thiele, Chief Product Officer at Berlin-based print and ebook publishing platform, epubli, gives us the lowdown on the German market and offers  her top tips for writers hoping to crack it.

5 things to know about German readers and the German book market

1. The German book market is becoming more and more important internationally

In times of digitistion and ebooks, international markets are merging and the German market is becoming increasingly attractive for American and English publishers.  According to the Export Sales Report of the Association of American Publishers, Germany is the second biggest European market for sales of American books in print, after Great Britain; and the third biggest global market for sales of American ebooks after Great Britain and Australia. In 2013 Germany was also the market that saw the biggest year-on-year growth in e-book revenue. All this makes Germany a key market for writers and publishers of books written in English.

2. Germans love all things from Britain and the US

This love goes beyond Apple products, Burberry clothing and TV-series such as Downton Abbey or Homeland, Germans love books by English and American writers in  both original versions and translated versions. Both English and German language editions of Dan Brown’s Inferno hit the German bestseller lists – the German edition reaching #1 and the English edition reaching #9.

12 of the top 20 books on Lovelybooks, the biggest German social reading network, are by writers writing in English, and includes the usual suspects: Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games, Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series, Ken Follet, Cecilia Ahern, J.R.R Tolkein and J.K. Rowling.

3. Germans can be a little conservative

Germans like established frameworks and tradition, they can be risk-averse and shy away from things that require a lot of self-confidence. Some say this is to do with the fact that our society is rooted in a system fixed by governmental decisions.

Traditional publishing houses are part of the good old, trustworthy, establishment,  consequently many German writers haven’t yet cottoned on that new and disruptive ideas such as such as self-publishing are not necessarily risky and can very much be worth the effort. This represents an opportunity for writers from elsewhere: there are still gaps in the German self-publishing market – enter it, now!

What’s more, a cursory look at the Amazon.de ebook bestseller list reveals that German readers are keen on self-published books -on any day between 50% and 80% of the top 10 ebooks on Amazon.de are self-published titles.

4. The German book market is easier to conquer than the UK book market

There are fewer competitors in the German market and this is especially true of the German self-publishing market – for now, at least! Cathy McAllister, a German indie author, recently cited fewer competitors as the key difference between the German market and the English or American book market. She should know, Cathy was born in Germany but has lived in England for the last four years, and publishes in both languages.

5. The German book market is regulated by “Buchpreisbindung”

This tongue twister translates as ‘fixed book price law‘, which states that a book cannot be priced differently on different platforms. You couldn’t, for example, price your book at 99p on Amazon but £7.99 in the local book store (or vice versa). The fact that retailers cannot freely determine the price for books – and that pricing is not linked to consumer demand or production costs – is designed to support small local bookstores. Without Buchpreisbindung big online retailers would offer deep discounts on most books and local stores would lose customers. Of course publishers and authors can set the price for a title as high or low as they see fit.

5 1/2 tips on cracking the German market

1. Keep your British name and be as British as possible

Female audiences reading romance respond really well to stories set in England and many female German authors, such as Poppy J. Andersen and epubli author Mathilda Grace, have taken on English pen names for this very reason.

Romance novels are often set in the British countryside whilst American romance tends to feature plucky, modern day heroines. German readers consider these settings to be somehow exotic. Germans also love the British Royal Family – perhaps there’s a good story opportunity there!

2. Write Romance, Erotica, Fantasy, Crime or a How-To

Popular genres in Germany are similar to popular genres in other territories, especially when it comes to self-published books. Romance, Erotica, Crime and How-To’s are particularly especially popular.

While Germans are sterotypically portrayed as unyielding and humorless they have no problem with nudity and sex. FKK (Free Body Culture) is an old tradition and this openness crosses over into their reading tastes.

Germans also love their “Krimi“, as exemplified by the Tatort phenomenon. Every Sunday night millions of Germans tune into Tatort, a police procedural drama set in different cities across Germany. Don’t try and call a German crime fan between 8.15 and 9.45pm on a Sunday because chances are they’ll be glued to their TV!

German readers are also big fans of self-improvement and how-tos, from how to stop smoking – at epubli we’ve had at least six books on that topic in the last two years – to parenting, finding exciting Berlin hot spots or how to work.

3. If you’re an independent author, don’t expect too much from the traditional sector to begin with.

Germans are rightly proud of their literary heritage: Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Fontane etc. and this sets the bar high for new and upcoming authors or authors doing things differently. What’s often overlooked is that  many of these literary luminaries did things differently: Goethe, widely considered the best German poet ever, self-published some of his work.

Even if your self-published book is a top seller, it probably won’t be listed in the bestseller lists in traditional newspapers. Old school journalists are wary of non-traditional publishing – don’t be angry with them, they’re simply afraid! As in other territories, journalists love a good human interest or rags-to-riches story, don’t be afraid to mine this.

Just as in the US and the UK reviews from bloggers can be really effective, especially for indie authors, plus, most bloggers are more receptive to new books by new writers. Do some research into which German book bloggers might be interested in your book and get in touch with them.

Should your traditionally published colleagues throw haughty looks at you it is most probably because they’re jealous of your royalties!

4. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket

Don’t focus all your efforts on Amazon.de, you’ll miss out. The UK ebook market might be dominated by Amazon, but in Germany other channels, such as Tolino or iBooks, have significant market share.

Tolino, a sales channel and e-reader set-up by the German book retailers Hugendubel, Thalia, Bertelsmann and phone provider Telekom, accounts for over 37% of e-books and e-reader sales in Germany – ignore them at your peril!

5. Use social reading platforms

Your German readers use them, and you should too. Goodreads is growing fast in Germany – according to the most recent figure (November 2013) Goodreads has over 200,000 German users and CEO, Otis Chandler, identified Germany as the most important European territory after the UK. The same holds true for Wattpad.

Apart from the international social reading giants there are also some really exciting native platforms. lovelybooks is currently the largest and others, such as Sobooks, are growing fast.

Since the  community language is mainly German, we’d like to make one final suggestion …

5 ½ Learn German

But that, of course, is optional!

***

About epubli

epubli is a print and ebook publishing platform located in Berlin-Kreuzberg. Part of the Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, epubli offers an alternative to traditional publishing and makes it easier for writers of all kinds to publish their work. Exberliner named epubli one of the most important publishing platforms for Berlin’s international scene.

Responding to the high demand among German readers for English books, epubli launched its English language version in April 2013. As well as expanding its publishing and distribution services to the UK, epubli.co.uk serves as a connection between Germany and the English-speaking world and over the last ten months   has helped a wide range of English authors, including Keith Tilbury and Steve Elseworth and Jim Rose, to enter the German market.

epubli has also been embraced as a publishing platform by the growing community of English bloggers in Germany who have readerships in both UK and German markets. Among them are Paul Sullivan from Slow Travel Berlin, who has published his alternative guidebook 100 Favourite Places; and Zoe Noble and James Glazebrook from uberlin who have published What I know about Germans.

In 2014 epubli will be extending its collaboration with British literary agents, starting with two books in Spring.

The publishing industry has undergone many changes over the last few years, many of which can be attributed to the disruptions brought about by digital technologies. Alongside the rise of self-/ indie- publishing we are also seeing new types of publisher emerge, publishers who are turning traditional models and methods on their head and finding new ways of doing things.  In our ‘New Publisher’ series we interview some of them about their approaches and what they hope to achieve by doing things differently.

Ramon Dodd  speaks to Nikola Richter, founder of the Berlin based digital publisher Mikrotext. 

New platforms, new distributors, new genres … digital publishing has redefined the way we create and consume literature in the twenty-first century. Not only has the ‘how’ been redefined, the ‘what’ has too: what we read and write and what we define as literature are evolving.

Based in Berlin, Mikrotext has found their niche publishing shorter works of contemporary fiction and non-fiction in eBook format. It’s first publication featured Facebook updates from Aboud Saeed – described as the ‘Syrian Bukowski’ – who was posting from Syria in the midst of the turmoil.

Mikrotext’s founder, Nikola Richter is an author and editor and curator of the Net Culture strand of Berlin Festival. We caught up with her to find out more about Mikrotext and to get her views on the state of digital publishing in Germany.

1. When did you decide to start Mikrotext?

I’ve always been into blogging and publishing but in 2012 a British Council scholarship gave me the opportunity to dive deeper into digital publishing. Soon after, in January 2013 I set up Mikrotext and the very first edition came out in March that year. We published an essay by philosopher Alexander Kluge, and status updates from the young Syrian writer, Aboud Saeed. It was so successful we edited a print version of his eBook and published it in English: The Smartest Guy on Facebook.

2. Which genres of work is Mikrotext publishing?

New forms of writing that develop on or with the web – unique digital realities. I’ve mentioned Aboud Saeed’s Facebook status updates. Aboud does not regard himself as a Facebooker, but as a writer, and his works are considered to be literary short texts and prose. We’ve also published an essay on genesis (The Magpie Experiment by Jan Kuhlbrodt) which started as a blog. The most experimental eBook so far was a collection of spam mail received by the Munich essayist, Thomas Palzer, Spam Poetry. But we’re also interested in other short prose, such as short stories, novellas and essays. The eBooks we publish are in our editions are thematically-linked, and contemporary issues such as ‘freedom on the web’ and ‘how to deal with creation and autonomy’. The upcoming topic is surveillance – and will comprise a novella and an essay.

3. Why focus on shorter works?

Reading habits have changed dramatically in the digital age and at any one time we can be reading several articles in multiple open browser windows, switching from text to text, device to device. Often when we open a new page, we scroll about looking for keywords and to check how long the articles is. Sometimes we read only part of an article or sections that are not necessarily connected. With Mikrotext, we wanted to recreate a proper concentrated reading experience on the screen, and I think the eBook allows this: it’s not browser-based and there is nothing to distract you from reading. Some of the available eBooks however don’t offer quality shorter texts, and by this I mean, texts that are longer than a newspaper article but shorter than a novel – shorter works of prose and non-fiction that can be read on a journey, on the tube, or while waiting at the doctor, that can be carried around and are available when you want or need them.

4. What’s happening in the German eBook market? Does it reflect the experience of other European countries such as the United Kingdom?

I think it is very difficult to compare reading habits in different languages and countries. Germany is one of the biggest book markets in the world with a huge number of books being published each year per capita. There is a vast readership and a prolific landscape of bookshops, despite Amazon. From what I know, the developments in the US and Great Britain are strongly linked due to language, economics and politics. The epublishing situation in other European countries is totally different. At a book fair, a Polish publisher told me that the eBook is virtually non-existent, though some are experimenting with access-free education online. In France, publisher Moyen-Courrier, has started to publish new journalism from American magazines. Here in Germany things have been moving very quickly since the start of 2013. In Berlin, you’ll now find ten or more epublishers, plus several epublishing start-ups, and my guess is that Berlin will become Europe’s international epublishing city. Amazon recently launched its Amazon Kindle Singles in German – pretty late timing considering the number of domestic publishing houses which are already up and running. I think the indie publishers had good timing!

5. What’s the future of digital publishing in Germany?

We still have a long way to go. The readership is still very traditional. Smartphones, tablets and ereaders are quite common, but only the latter are used for reading. There is a big lobby in Germany defending the ‘Haptik’ of a book (loosely translated as look and feel), and promoting the belief that text is only readable (and valuable, for buying and reviewing) when it is printed on paper.

6. What does epublishing offer writers and readers of short fiction and non-fiction that traditional publishing doesn’t?

Due to its nature, epublishing can react more quickly to topics and developments in current affairs. Also, a text can be reworked much more easily without throwing away tons of paper. Then there’s the distribution – once it goes online, an eBook is global. It’s also important to say that epublishers also care about the texts they publish and they choose and edit with the same care as traditional publishers might. Epublishing is proper publishing but it is using the ways of the web.

7. What should authors know about epublishing before they decide to publish?

Just read eBooks and see what’s out there! You’ll find out all you need to know about just how professional things are becoming, and the possibilities in typography, distribution, multimedia, social reading and more.

You can find out more about Mikrotext on their website: www.mikrotext.de; Twitter: @mkrtxt; and Facebook.

Other interviews in our ‘New Publisher Series’:

Tom Chivers of Penned in the Margins 

Matthew Crockatt of And Other Stories

Scott Pack at The Friday Project

I don’t remember learning to read, but I clearly remember the day I learned I could read. I was entrusted with a note for my lovely kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Hicks. The note asked that I be excused from school for a doctor’s appointment. As I – quite possibly for the first time in my life – read something I shouldn’t have, I discovered something that made me the person I am today: a reader.

The words on the note were not individual items. I mean they were, but the words, placed in a particular order and accented by punctuation, conveyed a message. They told a story. Granted, the story being told was one of torture and pain (one must read between the lines) because an evil doctor was going to insert a thin, sharp needle filled with who-knows-what into a little girl’s body. Happy ending: lollipop for being brave!

You couldn’t – you can’t – stop me from reading.

I’ve been reading digital books since 1998. The last print book I bought was This Charming Man by Marian Keyes. I bought it at Waterstones in Piccadilly. I was staying at a hotel right across the street, and I could not resist the lure of paying a higher price to obtain a book I couldn’t yet get in the United States. Also, I am addicted to buying books. Since I switched to ebooks, doing so has become even simpler. Link from Twitter, buy the book, read the book, be happy.

I am an author’s and publisher’s dream. If you are a certain type of author and a certain type of publisher. I read, mainly, fiction.

Okay, that is not true. It’s not true at all. For pleasure, I read mainly fiction. In reality, I read news, email, contracts, news, Twitter, Facebook (sigh), news. All day long. I read constantly. I read so much during the day that I, yes, take a break by watching “Breaking Bad.” Or sometimes “Walking Dead.” Or just really bad television. Even I need a break from reading sometimes. A short break.

I am also, I am sorry to say, an exception to the reading rule. I read a lot, I read constantly, I read multiple books simultaneously. Readers like me define torture as “being without a book.” We can be hanging from a cliff by our fingernails, but as long as we have a book, we’re cool.

Unfortunately, most people don’t break out in hives if they don’t have reading material tucked away in their pockets, purses, cars, desks, bathroom drawers…. Most people buy less than five books per year (U.S. readers, I should note). I buy at least that many in a month.

What Do You Mean By ‘Reading’?

If you are a member of the digital publishing circuit, you develop a jaded attitude toward the latest studies and breathless headlines (or, at least, I hope you do). Others, not so much. Just a few weeks ago, we endured much hand-wringing over the notion that girls — those stalwarts of the reading world! — were reading less. Civilization, as we know it, was surely coming to an end.

This same study, to the surprise of nobody, found that most U.S. children have never read an ebook. The horror!

Whenever I encounter studies like this, my first (and only) reaction is “define your terms”. What do we mean when we say “read”?

Right now, I am reading Twitter. I am writing this piece. I am reading email. I am multi-tasking, with reading — always reading – at the center of my day. When I’m out in the world, I observe kids reading and writing obsessively. Now, it may not be your idea of proper reading (or proper writing), but it is reading and writing. I believe today’s kids read and write more than any generation before.
I think we tend to define terms like reading to suit our own beliefs. I certainly am guilty of this. Way too guilty.

At a long-ago dinner party, a new acquaintance was razzing an old friend rather cruelly, “But you don’t even read books.” My friend, who prefers audiobooks for various reasons, had, earlier in the conversation, described how he and his oldest daughter had listened to the Harry Potter books. In my mind, this counts as reading a book. Some of my favorite memories of my mother come from the months she read King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table to the four of us while we ate dinner.

I’ve read those KING ARTHUR stories, but maybe not all of them with my own eyes, and not in the way that some pundits define ‘reading’. Think about it: when a blind reader chooses audio or Braille are they ‘not reading’? Why do we insist that one type of reading is superior to another?

Likewise, who are we to say important news conveyed to a reader in 140 characters is less important than news conveyed in 500 words? Or text messages between two friends are inferior to chatty letters of days gone by? Is a story written by a teenage girl and posted online necessarily worse than something published by Penguin?

It is very important that we do not define ‘reading’ by our own standards. It is very important that we broaden our definition of reading, as reading itself shifts and changes, because real readers are rapidly creating their own definitions of ‘reading’.

So Who Are You Targeting?

Readers are not all the same. This is surely as obvious to you as it is to me. Yet there is a sense of an idealized reader, someone I call the Platonic Reader. He (though in the real world, it is more likely “she”) reads the best of the best of current (literary) releases with perhaps a smattering of high-brow non-fiction. He attends book signings on a weekly basis. He participates in literary discussions and, if we are lucky, poetry slams. He personifies the New York Times bestseller list — a list that is notoriously, rigorously skewed. Think about it: some NYT “bestsellers” have only moved 5,000 units. Some have sold even fewer.

This Platonic Reader only exists in marketing meetings. Remember this.

Real readers are messy people with messy lives. I noted the friend who only reads audiobooks. What I’ve discovered is there are many readers like this in my world. So often they are mothers with full-time jobs. Mothers blessed with annoyingly long Los Angeles commutes. Our lack of widespread public transportation means we so often spent two, three hours a day alone. Locked in the loving cocoon that is our car.

We have some choices to help entertain us while we sit still on the freeway: godawful radio, public radio, our own music, silence, long phone conversations with friends and family, audiobooks. I am proud that so many I call friends choose the audiobook option.

Then there are vacation readers. They fall into three categories. The first surely warms any publisher or author’s heart: they choose from the current bestsellers, somewhat randomly. The second category? This reader grudgingly, somewhat angrily chooses a book from the shelves, something they feel they have to read. Vacation is as good a time as any to suffer through this book. Then there is the final group. This reader borrows something from a friend or sister, a ‘vacation read’.

The emerging reader, be it a child or someone learning to read for the first time, is a wide-open reading class. I mentioned above there is a perception that most children have never read an ebook. Is this really true? Do we have a real definition of ebook? I can assure you my two-year old niece is devouring ebooks, only they are more along the lines of animated picture books with sounds. Her mother doesn’t consider them ebooks, but her grandmother and I certainly recognize the species for what it is.

I believe the biggest opportunity for creativity in reading will come in the children’s book sector. There isn’t much the industry can do for a reader like me, a reader who lives and breathes linear narrative text (call it traditional fiction). Make a better e-Ink device. Make books cross-platform so I can transition between devices without missing so much as a semi-colon. Make prices better. Make proofreading a priority. For me, it’s all about improving on what already exists.

For my niece’s generation, a generation growing up with amazing technology (and the ability to use it seemingly encoded in their DNA), what we find ground-breaking, they will find normal. Just like color TV. Or iPods. They won’t see books in the same way we do; this is not to say they won’t devour narrative fiction or non-fiction with great zeal.

The readers closest to my heart, for so many reasons, are those who have some sort of a disability. So much of what is discussed when it comes to reading and accessibility focuses on blind or vision-impaired readers, and, as I grow older, I quite understand this focus. However, consider the mobility-impaired reader. This reader, who may suffer from arthritis or the loss of limbs, may be physically unable to manage the seemingly simple act of turning pages.

Years ago, when the controversy over the Amazon Kindle’s Text-to-Speech functionality emerged, I was flabbergasted. Truly. While the Author’s Guild – an organization I often find at odds with its rank-and-file membership – blustered about audiobooks and rights and whatnot, I kept saying, “This is an accessibility issue.” Granted, the TTS functionality was rudimentary — anyone who has ever worked with blind readers know they “read” at a speed that leaves the fastest sighted reader in awe — it was a great boon for those with vision problems. Not to mention those readers with learning disabilities. Sometimes, the idiocy of entrenched thinking makes me want to punch holes in walls. Usually common sense wins out.

(I should mention at this point another use of TTS that is widely overlooked: some parents use it as a tool for reading to their children or helping their children learn to read.)

The deaf reader must also be considered — especially for those authors and publishers who, smartly, see multi-media as the right way to tell a story.

What Readers Want

Each person who reads something does so with one purpose: to get something out of it. For me, it is a good story, important information, and/or the answer to one of life’s pressing questions (example: what time is it in Singapore right now?). I think this is true for just about every other reader I’ve ever encountered.

Once upon a time, we relied mainly on booky-books to achieve our goals. Now we rely on a variety of sources, some more sound than others. Yes, books, but also random articles on the Internet. Complete strangers on the Internet. Good friends on the Internet. Carefully targeted Google searches. Rumors.

What readers want – really, really want – is content that makes sense to them. We don’t want to buy an entire book on the history of electrical lighting to learn how to change a lightbulb. We want a chapter, a section, an illustrated how-to guide. We’re happy to pay for this information…as long as the price makes sense in the context of what we’re getting!

Readers want quality. Yes, we may abuse the English language (or any other language!) horribly in our private and semi-private communications (I am at war with spellings like “nite” and “realz”), but we know quality from junk. We notice bad conversions in ebooks. I have a habit of highlighting conversion errors in my Kindle books. And I am not alone. It’s a sad commentary on the state of digital publishing that I can open a book and discover 101 other readers have highlighted the same error I noted.

We also want good metadata. I joke that no reader is out there saying “give me some of that good metadata”, but this is what readers want. Metadata is data about data. It’s the least sexy part of the publishing culture, and it is the most critical part of publishing culture. Metadata includes a work’s title, the author, the publisher, the ISBN, the genre, when published, description, awards, format, and every other thing you can think up to describe the book. All of this metadata combines to connect readers with your work. It tells those readers why this particular story or article or book is important to them.

It’s the little things, like linked table of contents and indices. It’s the big things like accurate descriptions of what a book is about…not some weird, clever cover copy that doesn’t give me a true picture of the story. There is a big difference between a “romance novel” and a “Regency romance”. There is a further difference between a serious war story and a light-hearted comedy.

Publishing possesses the capability to offer so much more information about a book, from specific descriptions to comparisons to like-minded authors to awards bestowed. I recently read a Twitter exchange between a publisher and a (ebook) retailer where it was made clear that metadata updates can be made daily. Think about the power you have to get more information — better, more useful, smart information — to readers!

Readers also want a world without friction (seriously, we’d much rather keep wars between the pages of books!). For us, this means the ability to shift seamlessly between devices and books. This is largely happening, but we’d be even happier if the world settled on a single standard (stink eye toward Amazon right now – whose Kindle-only format restricts ebooks purchased from Amazon to Kindle devices only; this anti-reader approach makes me crazy because I want my books available to me in a universal, open format). Maybe we want print and digital bundles, but probably we don’t. For most books.

Finally, we would like a world where publishers, authors, app developers, reading system developers, and parties I haven’t mentioned consider the end user, the reader, rather than the perspective of the publisher/author. We want to know what’s in it for us. Think of my text-to-speech example above. Think about the disastrous introduction of so-called enhanced ebooks into the marketplace. Some were augmented with what can only be described as marketing materials (seriously, you want me to pay more for an interview with the author?). Others simply made no sense (I like Vook as a company, but some of the early experiments done by publishers were ill-conceived).

The truth was nobody knew what readers wanted, but it was clear they didn’t want what publishers were offering. Yet, as is obvious to all, the web and app worlds are filled with examples of people giving readers “enhanced” content they want and need. Now the book world needs to figure out how to do this with content that formerly only occupied booky-books.

So often I encounter a lauded new publishing start-up, something that will change how we read or discover books. So often I note an excess of publishing-speak, while at the same time, a lack of a clear purpose for readers. The selling point for new publishing ventures should not outline why it’s great for publishers (hey, we’ll save your YOU from piracy!), it should be all about how readers will benefit! Sure you want publishers involved, but if it turns off readers….

Unless you are only marketing to publishers. They read books, too. Readers outside of publishing will be fine, you know. They’ll find what they want, at the price they want, in the format they want, on the device they want. No worries there.

Readers are like water, they will find their own way.