Last week, I read an interesting article in Publishers Weekly about a new e-commerce effort by Simon & Schuster to sell electronic chapters of books for a few bucks.
The chapters hail from the insanely popular "You" series by Dr. Michael F. Roizen and Dr. Mehmet C. Oz. Individuals can purchase just the chapters they want, instead of the entire book.
I can really see this as a key selling point to certain nonfiction books. Looking at my own bookshelf, I see a ton of nonfiction books that have only a few chapters marked. I don’t need the rest of the information in them, but I have to take them.
The downside to ordering just a few e-chapters is that someday, I might need that other information – especially in medical tomes. Also, electronic pages are much easier to lose. Printed pages don’t have the same wear-and-tear time as a regular book. I’d need to either keep them in file folders, or a three-prong notebook. If I purchased a variety of e-chapters, then I’d have to invent a new filing system to keep track of them both in print and on the computer. (I’m not trusting enough to believe my Mac will NEVER crash and I won’t lose anything, so hardcopies are key.)
Still, I could imagine selling chapters of a book would be a terrific marketing tactic for a business owner who is using a book to develop expert status. For example, if you are a plumber who wrote a DIY manual, some folks may just want the chapter on unclogging a drain, but don’t want the rest (until they need it, of course!). It would be cost-effective and would be a great way to track which information readers want the most – and follow up on that with blog posts, or a book entirely on that topic.
What are your thoughts on this new effort? Are certain topics easier to sell as chapters than others?
This will happen more and more in the next few months. Those authors and publishers who understAnd that we are now fully living in the attention age will own the space.
The thought of selling ebook versions of a book’s individual chapters is appealing. The problem though is that a given theme might appear in several parts of the book, as is the case in my book, Conquer Prostate Cancer: How Medicine, Faith, Love and Sex Can Renew Your Life (conquerprostatecancer.com). For instance in my book, medicine (both traditional and complementary) is found in different parts of the book that need to be collated into two e-book segments; faith is found in one major chapter, but is also addressed by men I profiled in later chapters; love and sex is described in my pre-surgical series of sex therapy sessions near the outset of my book and again in post-surgical chapters found in the middle of the book, and should be edited as a single unit if I don’t want to short-change my readers. Incidentally it’s perhaps more than coincidental that you refer to Drs. Oz’ and Roizen’s book, as it was selected for the 2009 Silver Nautilus Book Award as was my book, Conquer Prostate Cancer. But it may be that some health books are more suited for individual chapter ebook publication sales, than others!