header_01.gifPublishers Weekly says that mass market romance publisher Dorchester Publishing will drop print publishing and go 100% to an ebook/print on demand model.

According to Dorchester, retail sales are down 25% and it is getting harder and harder to get its titles into stores because shelf space for mass market books has been reduced. They even had to let their field sales force of seven go.

The ebook business, however, has had “remarkable growth” which he expects to double again in the next year. Still, digital sales accounted for only 12% of total revenue prior to the company making the transition to the e-book/pod model. Prebich conceded that Dorchester will have lower revenues, but he expects margins to improve. He said the company is working out a new royalty rate with authors that he expects to announce next week. Editors are talking to authors now about the changes. “We hope they’ll stay,” Prebich said. Dorchester’s e-books are available at most major vendors and compatible with most platforms at an average price of $6.99. Trade paperbacks will be priced in the $12 to $15 range.

4 COMMENTS

  1. This interesting half-truth travels around the world now with an important part of the message left out: Dorchester are still printing copies for their book club operations. It would surprise me if a mass market publisher thought they could survive entirely on ebooks and print on demand.

  2. This situation isn’t about the value of epublishing, POD, or various print formats; it’s about a publisher sliding into bankruptcy grappling for anything to save it.

    According to friends who are with the publisher, some authors have seen no money from advances and royalties for several years, and the publisher sold the contracts of many of its most successful authors to another publisher for a money infusion to pay other authors and to keep it afloat.

    The switch to ebooks, POD for some of their books, and the book club are its latest strategy.

    It’s anyone’s guess whether this will work because Dorch has the expensive publishing structure of the standard major NY publisher, and it will be competing against lean and efficient indie epub/POD publishers for authors and audience. That means its ebooks will probably be more expensive, and its royalty structure which hasn’t been announced will not be as generous as its new competitors. It does, however, have an incredible backlist of great authors in underrepresented romance subgenres like sf romance which should be a plus.

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