Counting Beans at the Water Cooler

Generally, I try to get a blog posting up every week but I've been a bit tardy this year. Not to say that there haven't been some interesting developments worth chatting about.

It seems that at Pulpwork Press, the publisher of my novel length works, there has been some talk around the water-cooler about adjusting the company's focus. No, the company is not ditching all pulp-style fiction in favor of publishing paranormal romance--but there has been some bean counting and the beans are saying that the print copy portion of the company is barely breaking even while the digital books (available at Fictionwise) are selling ten times the copies with a much, much larger margin of profitability.

Being fairly practical when it comes to the bottom line, Pulpwork is planning a greater emphasis on ebooks come 2010-- with more frequent releases and fewer books released in hard copy.

Though I freely admit that I'm still a print copy junky, I can see the writing on the wall. As technology like Amazon's Kindle comes down in price and the memory capacity grows I think more and more people will be moving away from print and into less expensive digital reading. In my science fiction book, Dire Planet, I envisioned a "clip-pad" device that was capable of storing books, movies, and music. Only a few years later the I-Pod is de rigueur wear for high-schoolers and joggers--capable of storing weeks worth of music and even a few movies. Another five years or so and the price of the Kindle or a similar product could be reasonable enough that it moves into the mainstream, and that people will be capable of toting around entire libraries on screens that provide comfortable reading.

So what does Pulpwork's readjustment of focus mean for the planned 2009 releases of Through the Groaning Earth and The Nuclear Suitcase? Fortunately, they are still on the docket. I'll keep you posted when I get a firm release date.