Angela Marsons has found huge success as an e-book author.
(Bloomberg) — Angela Marsons should be considered a great success. She has sold over 5 million books in English, and her work has been translated into 29 languages. But only a few traditional bookshops carry her Silent Scream, a 2015 book that’s sold over 1 million copies. You won’t find it at the London flagship of Waterstones, the UK’s biggest bookshop chain.
Marsons, 55, is one of a growing number of authors writing primarily for the e-book market—and forging an incredibly successful career while doing so. Her publisher is Bookouture, an innovative British digital company set up a decade ago to market primarily to people with Kindles and other e-readers; physical books are printed to order. Since 2017, Bookouture has been owned by Hachette UK Ltd.
“The paperbacks pay for the electricity, but it’s the e-books that pay the mortgage,” says Marsons on a Zoom call from her home in the Black Country, an industrial area in the West Midlands. Just a few months after signing with Bookouture in 2014, the author was making enough money to quit her security guard job. Since then, she has published a total of 21 e-books, and sales have allowed her and her partner, Julie Forrest, to moved to a bigger house.
“Their focus on digital publishing across the board – from the publishing itself to packaging, marketing and metadata — produces impressive results,” said David Shelley, chief executive officer of Hachette UK, over email, about Bookouture. “Thanks to their input at Hachette, we have grown e-book sales across our lists and solidified our position as number one publisher in the UK e-book market.”
Although it’s difficult to compare Marsons’s success to a print book author’s because of the way sales numbers are collected, consider this: After Sally Rooney’s Normal People—the critically hailed 2018 novel about a millennial couple in Ireland falling in love across a class divide—hit sales of almost 770,000 copies in hardback and paperback in the UK, the numbers were considered to be a barnstorming achievement, and a “cult of Sally Rooney” was declared. During the peak of Rooney fever, the author appeared in as a poster campaign on public transport networks and garnered major newspaper interviews; supermarkets sold copies of her books at checkout registers, and two of her books were adapted for BBC TV series.
By contrast, besides the 5 million-plus English-language e-books that Marsons has sold, her stories have had success in translation. Her latest in Italian, Promessa Mortale (published as Fatal Promise in English), was the third-bestselling hardback in Italy in its first week of release in January, says Marsons. (Most of her translations are produced as print books.)
Still, the author is a relative secret. Most reviews are relegated to blogs instead of newspapers. There’s also the visibility issue: A bestselling hardback is easy to spot in window displays and in readers’ hands on the bus. E-books are, relatively, speaking, invisible.
Their invisibility, however, doesn’t reflect the major shift in reading caused by the rise of e-books, which is now rivaling physical books in the numbers sold. In 2021, the latest available figures, the e-book share of the adult fiction market in the UK was 43% by volume, with printed books at 47% according to Nielsen BookData. But the markets are often different, says Jenny Geras, Bookouture’s managing director, both in terms of how much and what the respective audiences purchase. Someone reading a hardback from the Booker Prize shortlist might take two months to finish a book; Marsons’s fans tend to “binge-read” several every month. Price differences make this possible. While some hardback novels retail for £25 ($30), Bookouture e-books typically cost less than £3.
Beyond the format, there are other major differences between how e-publishers and traditional publishers operate. In standard book contracts, authors are offered an advance payment, followed by royalties of around 5% to 15%. In Bookouture, the model is flipped: No advances are paid, but authors get 45% of royalties.
The success of the e-book model has surprised Marsons. For her first book, Silent Scream, she would have been “thrilled to bits if 500 people read it, but it’s now sold 1.5 million copies.” Now she is, “sharing the stories I want to write with millions of readers in dozens of different countries.” She adds, “doing e-books has made that possible.”
Part of Bookouture’s success is based on a previously underappreciated audience: the older female. Lisa Regan, a Pennsylvania-based author specializing in dectective e-books, says her typical fan is a 40-year-old-plus woman. Marsons’s books are set in her native Black Country, a working-class area not often featured in British fiction, which tends to focus on affluent areas. The “harsh, brusque and rude” protagonist Kim Stone “wouldn’t fit in the Cotswolds in a nice Midsomer Murders storyline,” says Marsons. “I get so many messages from people who recognize the locations and love that. … They say: ‘I know the road you’re talking about.’”
This is all part of Bookouture’s “democratic” model, says Geras. Instead of paying some authors huge advances along with providing them with large marketing budgets, the company lets the market choose: All books get the same amount of money and effort put in by the marketing team. “Not all become bestsellers, but they all have the same chance. They’re all put equally in front of readers,” Geras says.
Although this doesn’t result in riches for every author, it’s lucrative for the successful ones. Regan has earned a “life-changing” amount of money from her detective series. She won’t disclose the amount, but since the release of her first e-book, Vanishing Girls, in 2018, she has bought a larger home, and her husband quit his job to help with her career.
Digital publishing has other benefits, too, says Geras, including the ability respond to customer demand. If a book is not selling well, Bookouture might change the title and cover for the e-book store, an almost-impossible switch for print books. “We’re a very scientific and data-led company. We gather a lot at a very micro level on our books, so we can see very clearly in the early stages of publication if it’s underperforming,” she says.
“One of their biggest strengths is their data-driven market knowledge and their determination to understand their consumers, which informs their publishing,” said Hachette’s Shelley about Bookouture.
So why aren’t mainstream booksellers selling Marsons’s paperbacks? A spokesperson for Waterstones says that e-book sales are “not a main driver” for their stocking decisions and that some titles are “more suited to one format over the other.” They do stock physical copies of some books that have had success as e-books but tailor the offering in each shop for local readers.
Marsons has signed a few other deals with sister publishing houses within Hachette to distribute her print books in the UK and overseas, though her main market remains digital. After 25 years of rejections from traditional publishers, she’s had multiple offers since her digital publishing successes. But she says nothing could tempt her back now: “There’s nothing a traditional publisher could give me that Bookouture couldn’t do.”
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