Hello,
My book, "Serpent's Chronicle" has just been published in three formats by Abbeville Press: a $5.95 iBook with audio/video content, traditional hardbound book at $29.95 and a boxed, limited Collector's Edition at $650. That is quite a price spread! As we all know, the commercial market for printed books today is difficult; this is an attempt to use the iBook as a marketing tool. The publisher said to me that it is very hard to place new books in display in the remaining physical bookstores or to get good placement for art-books in online venues. The cost of placing these copies to browse in stores was borne by the publisher. His idea here was to use the iBook for "browsing" purposes, but to offer it at the price of "a cup of coffee": here the customer pays for privilege of browsing, but at a very minimal price. The hope is that this will eventually promote sales of the printed book. In this case, we have also added the Collector's Edition, which has been selling longer & relatively well since it's introduction. The iBook just went "live" a couple days ago so it remains to be seen how people will respond. You can see it here and download the preview to your iPad:
https://itunes.apple.com/us/book/serpents-chronicle/id643419564?mt=11The publisher's site is here:
http://abbeville.com/booksinsubj_new.asp?subj=newYou have to scroll down a bit to see the three editions of "Serpent's Chronicle" under the newly published offerings. Note that Abbeville has now published many of their books in various e-book formats.
Should anyone here actually be interested in the print editions, I would appreciate it if they use my site:
http://www.visiongallery.com/index.php?tPath=1_3_184_220You can see more of the images from the series here:
http://www.visiongallery.com/index.php?tPath=1_3_184_218_314_357Kind reviewers are welcome!
I could have easily published the iBook by myself, of course, and this was what I was initially planning on doing. Abbeville has published four of my books in the past and to my pleasure took this one on as well along with the print versions. The problem is as we all know one of distribution: how do you advertise and distribute? In the distant past I did some of this myself, but this has become much harder especially with print editions. The problem with the iBook was on which "bookshelf" do you put it where it can be seen; Apple's iTunes - iBookstore is in my opinion not well organized for finding art books. if you already know the author or title you can find anything, but if you want to look at the category of fine art or fine art photographs as opposed to the how-to stuff you're going to have trouble finding them. I am hoping that being on Abbeville's bookshelf would help overcome this problem.
All said, there are more ways to reach a larger audience today but the question is one of commercial viability. Even with a commercial publisher, you still need to do a lot of self-promotion and I really don't yet know how to do this effectively. Comments and suggestions are appreciated.
If anyone here is in Israel this summer, this series of images will be shown at the Rubin Museum in Tel-Aviv, opening July 21, 2013 and running through the end of September. The announcement is attached.
Many thanks to all for looking or commenting-
Neil