Hi. Brandon, I know that you’re a pretty big cheerleader of e-books.
Yes.
And you two have had some discussions over the years about e-books. Could you just take a minute to talk about how specifically the e-books for these three novels kind of . . . evolved.
Yeah. Harriet has been in publishing a very long time, and understands publishing for a very long time. And e-books have kind of blindsided all of us. As she said earlier and has talked about, I swim in the net.
Yes.
And Harriet does not.
He has gills.
Uh-huh.
He’s very much at home in the e-world.
Harriet, early on with the books, was under the impression that e-books were like the paperback: that you release the hardcover and then a year later, you release the e-book and the paperback. And she was under the impression that was how it would work, and it’s come as a surprise to many in the publishing industry that it doesn’t work that way.
And let us talk about the elephant in the middle of the room, which is the window for A Memory of Light . The e-book won’t be out until the beginning of April, a three month window. And that was my doing.
And I did it for the bookstores. I love bookstores. Bookstores are a vanishing breed. They’re just going. Even, I understand, Barnes and Noble is talking about closing half their stores. This, to a freak like me, who just really has a thing for paper and bindings, is very ominous and sad. And I wanted to give the bookstores a break. Bookstores have been very good to Robert Jordan, all his career. And that’s why there’s a window.
I have been trying very hard to find ways that we can blend this. Because I really like books, too. In fact, I’m a big fan of a lot of the independent booksellers. You’ll notice I went to them on tour. Dwayne’s bookstore—U books—is one of my favorites.
Yeah.
Borderlands in San Francisco, and Mysterious Galaxy down in San Diego. These bookstores—these are places that supported me when I was brand new—these bookstores that have a focus on genre. You know, you would call some big bookstores and they’d be like, who are you? We’re not interested. These bookstores are like, hey, a new author, we want to meet you. Come, and we will bring in our readers, and we will let you talk to them, and things like this. And it’s a completely different experience.
And for a small genre like science fiction and fantasy, these stores mean a lot to us. Because, you know, the person at Costco is not going to read our books and sell our books. But Dwayne does. And you can go to Dwayne and you can say, hey what have you read lately? Or, what are people excited about? And he’ll say, I read this, it’s good. Or, this guy came and he was really nice, and here’s what his book is about, and things like that.
And that is something in the small genres that I feel—we’re going to be clobbered by the vanishing of bookstores, when people like John Grisham are not going to have to worry about it as much. And so one of the things I’ve been trying to do is work out a ‘you buy the hard copy–either the paperback or hardcover, the print copy—and you get the e book for free’. That’s one of the things that I’m trying to do. And so my latest two . . . [applause] Oh, thank you. My latest two smaller releases last year, Legion and Emperor’s Soul , I actually will mail you the e book of those two. If you buy the hard copy, and you send me an email, we will respond with a DRM free version in multiple formats that you can just read on any e-reader that you want.
And so that’s just something I’m trying, and I’m trying to use this as data points to convince Tor to let me do this for my larger books, for which they own the e-book rights. The small books I was able to retain them on, but that’s not something viable for a big release like a Stormlight Archive book or something like that. And so it’s something I’m hoping we can convince them to let me start doing with my other books.
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