eBook Authors: Surefire Book Publishing Announces New Opportunity

For Our Little Books guest post Wednesday we are pleased to have return guest blogger, James Moushen. James is an author who has written extensively on the connection and correlation between the eForms industry in the 1990s and the current eBook industry developing now. He created a blog to motivate and challenge authors to take advantage of the great opportunity the eBook industry offers them. He also feels that the other players in the industry must also take action or someone else will.

Photo by Donna Grayson via Flickr

Surefire Book Publishing announced today the formation of a new eBook division.

Surefire CEO Jim Satire said, “Our publishing company is going to take a new direction because we recognize the large opportunity of the immerging eBook industry. We have been a typical publisher for a long time. We have about a 5% throughput rate (submission to publication) including fiction, non-fiction and reference books.”

“Because of the eBook opportunity, we are going back and researching our turndowns and the reasons for them. We are looking at the top 10% of the books rejected and creating a new breakeven point, starting with the low cost to bring an eBook to market. Then we are categorizing the turndowns into profitability, quality of content and longevity of content.”

“The reasons for the rejections have ranged from predicting whether the book would be profitable to the brand of the author. We will take into consideration the reader’s acceptance of the topic, the genre, regional appeal, the author and other basic concepts. Then we will convert the content to an eBook format and publish it through online channels.”

“This makes sense to us because we have already done the homework on the submission. The shelf life of an eBook is considerable longer than the paper version so over time the income from the eBook has the potential to outweigh the paper version which has a shelf life of about six months tops. Plus the eBook shelf is not a physical one which has to be rotated out for new books.”

“SPR is a medium sized publishing company with about 100 active authors. We publish about 20 books a month. Our forecast shows that to start with we will convert about 25 books a month at a higher margin for Surefire and a larger royalty for the authors.” 

“Our goal is to reach a 100 eBooks a month next year. We recognize that if we have a hit with the eBook only, we will go back and publish it in paper because we have already converted the book to digital.”

“That cost is considerable less to take the book from a Word document by Surefire Book Publishing to an acceptable eBook format (mobi or epub), store it on a network and sell it online. We have no second hand market to deal with and no middlemen.”

SPR is a hypothetical company created to illustrate the future of a proactive publishing company.