Brandon you do a lot of interesting stuff with publishing formats like Warbreaker being free, I know you talked recently about bundling the last, the last book with an ebook and a hardcover. So what kind of stuff do you see happening as far as future and what do you like as far as formats?
I think a lot of exciting things are happening, one thing I think is happening is, is the digital revolution is changing things a lot and I think this is gonna let people like me get away with more things. For one thing, digitally our lengths don’t matter as much. Theoretically, I doubt we’d be able to pull this off but theoretically, we could do something like re-release Gathering Storms, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light reordered with their chapters in the original order as before they were split ,which i think would be awesome. You could release that as one book which in print you never could do, so length shenanigans are sort of things we can do.
I also like the idea of bundling. I think eventually I’m going to be able to convince people to do this. I would love to do something like what we’ve seen in movies and in records, where we release a really nice special edition of a book with a hardcover and an included ebook copy, with included audio book copy and like something like a book-end or a medallion or like an art book something that we release just for- and you know make it expensive like a two hundred and fifty dollar product that comes signed and numbered and all this stuff. We can do that, and at the same time release a very cheap ebook for those who just don’t have the cash for that, or don’t have the interest. I think that by doing that we can allow the people who want a really nice collectors thing to pay what they want, and people who want a dollar ebook to pay that and we actually end up at the same amount of money that we’re making, except everybody’s happier.
So I don’t see why we wouldn’t be choosing these sorts of things, there are just so many questions and the big one is we don’t want to disenfranchise retailers. A lot of particularly independent bookstores stuck with us over the years and you know a lot of these stores are wonderful in that they will grab new authors like me when I was brand new and really promote them and get behind them and do these wonderful things for them, and we don’t want to do anything where we are cutting them out of the loop. I really want there to be strong independent bookstores in the coming years because I think it’s really important for the genre, so we have to find a way to work all of this with them at the same time.
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