Sword of Truth Novels Soon To Be Available As E-books

Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth novels will soon be available for the Amazon Kindle.

And on the Kindle only.  This is quite an exclusive for Amazon.  The interesting thing about it is that Goodkind has chosen to publish the electronic formats of his series with a publisher called RosettaBooks and not Tor, the original publisher of the print volumes.  I’m rather sad though.  It would have been cool to see what Tor could have done to push the electronic format of the series especially since the launch of the oh-so-fantastic Tor.com.

This situation is interesting because here we have an A-list, bestselling author choosing a smaller publisher.   With medium size publishers offering higher royalty rates to authors there is some powerful incentive out there to jump the conventional ship since the traditional distribution advantages that the large publishers held are not as relevant in the digital arena. 

Kassia Krozer at Booksquare, blogs about it, bringing up some very interesting points and questions.

“Why should an author give over his or her epublishing rights to a traditional print house? What advantage comes from this sort of arrangement? I am not asking a rhetorical question. In a new distribution landscape, what advantage does a traditional, print-based publisher offer?”

What I’m hoping we’ll see are traditional publishers really embracing digital technologies and coming up with new innovative marketing techniques, but…sometimes I don’t know how soon that’s going to happen.  I’m a student right now in a publishing program.  It both amazes and frightens me to see just how techno-phobic/illiterate some of my classmates can be. 

The large conglomerates will always have the advantage of being able to do more marketing for their big name authors than smaller houses will.  But, just because traditional publishers have the money, it doesn’t mean that the little guys can’t go toe-to-toe with them.  The internet makes it so much easier for medium-sized and small publishers to reach potential new customers, and a certain level of competition in a market is healthy.