Most of you know by now (or at least by RIGHT NOW) that I am the CEO and founder of Crossroad Press. This started out as simply me wanting to get my old, out of print books into the hands of some new readers through Kindle and other e-reader formats. It was a slow start. There's a lot to learn about e-BOOK formatting, and there are a lot of pitfalls along the way. I persevered, and as I started to "get" it, others asked for my help with their own work. That spawned the initial effort – Macabre Ink – which soon had to evolve into the more generically named Crossroad Press because I found myself publishing books in genres other than just horror.

Next came audiobooks. I am a long-time lover of audiobooks, and I have always wanted to see my own books produced in that format. I put out a query on my blog, Glimpses into an Overactive Mind, and hooked up with my (now) partner in audio, Jeffrey Kafer, a fine voice talent, and a very good producer with his own studio. We set to work.

And this is where my background information burst stops, and my column actually begins. You've heard a lot over recent months about the demise of publishing "as it has been," and I'm here to add one more voice to that. I agree, the old guard is crumbling, though not as quickly as others seem to think.

The problem is that things happen too fast on the Internet. Almost overnight e-BOOKS went from a bad word people shunned to something viable and profitable. In audio, the CD and even the DVD gave way to Audible's crushing popularity, and the MP3 download won the top spot. Paradigms are shifting all over the place.

Publishing, unfortunately, has been much slower to follow suit. On one hand successful authors like J. A. Konrath have shown that, if you have a following, you can take it with you and take control of your publishing career in new ways. This, of course, doesn't translate to an unknown author publishing their work electronically and having the same success, but that's a topic for a different day. It does chip away at the base of publishing, as we know it. The first time an author of Stephen King, or John Grisham's status diverges from the mainstream, all hell is going to break loose.

I don't believe that the answer is for authors to rush out and start publishing their own books. No matter how much more available electronic editions are, they are still "work" to produce. They require formatting, copy-editing, good solid cover art, and distribution. These are all functions of the traditional publisher. The problem is that even a lot of the newer publishing ventures can't get that old model out of their head. Authors, at this point, still seem prone to go along with what looks on the surface like a new thing, but is really just an electronic version of the old thing – but that too must pass.

In the new model, as I see it, the money will take a huge shift back to where it belongs – the hands of the authors, and the creative talents behind the work. Publishers will continue to make money, but there is no reason in the world an author should be getting only a traditional royalty on their work when it comes out electronically. Some publishers have increased this, but not, to my mind, enough. Here's how it stacks up.

If you format your book yourself, or get it formatted for you and put it on Amazon.com you can get back seventy percent per sale. If you go to Smashwords, where there are fewer sales and other headaches to format your books, you can get a good chunk of the money yourself as well. These, in my mind, are setting the standards. There is a certain amount of expense up front to produce an electronic book (I'll get to audio in a bit). It takes time (sometimes hours) to format a book properly from a clean manuscript. Then, since there is no such THING as a clean manuscript, the book has to be copy-edited, usually more than once by different sets of eyes. It then has to be converted to all of the proper electronic formats necessary to distribute it. Cover art is not free, in most cases. We've been remarkably fortunate at Crossroad Press in this particular area, but artists, like authors, need to be paid for their hard work.

And that's the bottom line of what I'm doing at Crossroad Press. Yes, what I'm doing is a lot of work. Most people don't realize that the bulk of the novels we have published, reprints, in general, from the 70s, 80s, and 90s, have nearly all had to be scanned back into the computer, the files re-arranged and recovered using OCR text recognition, and extensive re-construction techniques that my associate editor, David Dodd, has nearly down to a science, just to get the book back into a document file we can begin to convert. This takes a lot of time, and other places on the web you can find that will perform this service (usually minus the copyedits) cost in the hundreds. We perform this service for free and give the author back a clean copy of their book.

The real improvements in our service came with the advent of Crossroad Press audio. I developed a new business model that allows narrators, authors, and publisher to share risk, and success in new ways. Narrators actually get a royalty on their hard work (it takes at least two to one hours for the time spent recording to produce a clean book, and usually a good deal more than that, not to mention the equipment involved). Traditional publishing companies buy audio rights, pay the narrator an up-front fee and the author about ten percent (if that) against an advance, and take all the rest of the money. We do not. We give a much higher royalty to the author, and we give a decent royalty to the narrator as well. It's drawing in some major talent, and the finished audio that we already have in place has been our ticket into better distribution channels for both audiobooks and e-BOOKS.

We now distribute through Overdrive.com, for instance. Overdrive provides downloadable e-BOOKS and audiobooks to libraries, schools, and a wealth of retailers we would otherwise have missed. Our audiobooks are on Audible, Overdrive, and soon on Simply Audiobooks. We compete, in other words, with the big boys. The difference is simple.

I'm an author first. I see that the future of this business is in creative talents taking more of the profit from their own work, while taking on more responsibility for distribution, marketing, etc., in a world flooded with new levels of competition. The traditional publishers are trying to gobble up electronic rights, but they refuse to concede their huge profit margins, so they still pay crappy royalties, and their over-priced produces are – for the most part – beginning to fail under the assault of torrents of reasonably priced products from lesser known creators who will probably prove to be the next wave.

The middle-man setup with publisher, distributor, and author is dying. There is literally no reason to pay publishers who seem bent on reproducing past successes and ignoring any risk to produce works that have as good, or better chance with either a smaller and fairer publishing system, or in the hands of their creators. It's a new day.

This also speaks to pricing. There are way too many opinions on this. I'm going to say, we price how we feel the books will move, and readers will find us. New, original novels we put up around $4.99 ... reprinted books at about $2.99 ... with some exceptions. That is how I price our books, and I respect and all differing opinions. I just don't share them.

The fact is, more people read back when you could get a three dollar paperback – at least it seemed that way. Also, despite the hollering I hear all over, once we have formatted a book and distributed it, there is not much left to do but split up sales when they come in. We don't have to make $7-10 a book. There is little or no shipping cost, no warehousing is necessary beyond several gigabytes of web space. I understand that if a book just came out in print, you don't want to drive down the cost of that book by offering cheap digital, but that's just not the case with any of our titles, and an author making 80 percent of a $2.99 sale at Crossroad Press is making a lot more than he did from his seven dollar paperback at ten percent.

There has been a lot of fuming and infighting over digital pricing. People can experiment and price where they want – I just expect the same consideration in return. Some markets require you to not sell your book anywhere cheaper than you do with them – and I get that. The problem is, when you diversify, you have to be able to provide sales, discounts, package deals – it's just not practical to tie yourself down to one spot on a huge Internet full of potential readers. We keep as much control of pricing as we can, and we distribute as widely as we can. What works, we do, what doesn't we drop.

I'm not out to make a lot of money on anyone's books. I want Crossroad Press to be a success, but not at the expense of those who do the work. We pay 80 percent of everything we make to the authors. We distribute widely, and our marketing efforts are just gearing up. We are getting a lot of great books into audio that weren't high-profile enough, or in some cases was not still in print, when audio started to become popular, and we are keeping the profits for those projects where they belong.

I'm not going to proclaim myself an expert on e-BOOKS or audiobooks. I'm not going to say my way, or the highway, or any of that crap. I've worked hard to build something that I'm sharing with a growing number of others. I have the expertise to make a quality product, the team to produce and distribute that product, and I'm here as much to help as to make money. I see it more as a team effort, and the team is growing.

If you don't believe it, check out the catalog over at http://www.crossroadpress.com/catalog - watch the upcoming Halloween specials for some very recognizable and popular names. Heck, you can even find your favorite Chizine Publications authors there in digital. We didn't publish them, but we help sell them. Check out this year's Audie Awards and see if we manage to snag one of those – we're certainly under consideration. In short... the growing success of the company, and the increasing number of those who are joining the team, are an indication something big is in the works.

I'm happy to be a part of it.

From the Shadeaux,

David Niall Wilson