Carina Press – the FIRST successful digital publisher!
Anyone else amused by all those blog entries and comments that toast Carina Press as the breakthrough digital publisher that shows us all that digital publishing is a money-making venture? (Here is one example, but then again, it’s AAR, the land of the dinosaurs. Here is another.)
So, where do that leave Ellora’s Cave, Samhain Publishing, Loose Id, and other successful digital publishers that have been chugging on long before Carina Press showed up… oh, a year ago?
Amusing, really, as Emily Veinglory correctly pointed out, nobody really had any sales range, much less actual numbers, to suggest that Carina is selling as well as the hype suggests. Even then, even if Carina is really that successful, it doesn’t erase the fact that it’s not the only successful player in the market. It may be, instead, the one that has the backing of the Big Blogs due to the close friendship between the top dog there and the owners of Dear Author and Smart Bitches, and therefore, miles ahead than other digital publishers in terms of online exposure and publicity.
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I simply do not buy very much from them at all.
They only sell ePub only format even if I purchase from All Romance eBooks. Lack of basic choices in format availability strikes me as a real minus next to full services provided by the top ePublishers you named.
I do not see it as much more than just hype.
To me it is just hype as well. I have read some of their books, and they are no better and no worse than the product from the true “breakthrough” e-pubs that you mentioned. Do they really sell exclusively in epub format? I thought they had their books available in Amazon.
I am reading that article you linked to, those people really ARE dinosaurs. The landscape has changed already, I wonder where are they getting their information from. That was pretty disturbing for me to read. I am like WTH, are they living under a rock? These people are doing a disservice to their community by not keeping up to date.
P.S. AS to “breakthrough”. All I am going to say is that I started reading ebooks in 2003, and I actually started reading romance when I discovered Ellora’s Cave. I have seen the whole thing evolve from the beginning. Like Teddy, I see it for what it really is: hype.
The Fast Company article acknowledges that Angela James was reading ebooks 8 years ago, and worked for Ellora’s Cave before Carina. But yes, between her active online presence, and backing from Harlequin and bloggers, Carina does get press.
When I first ran across Ellora’s Cave 7-8 years ago, they were doing a lot of heavy lifting to convey the ebook concept. E.g. their printed books seemed to keep experimenting with how to describe ebooks.
The hype, so to speak, is probably due to the Harlequin “machine” behind Carina Press. Harlequin has the clout, the resources, and the reputation to want Carina Press to be much more visible in the media than Samhain, Ellora’s Cave, etc. Also, since Angela James (and Malle Vallik) know the power of networking and how to work social media, it’s a given than she and Carina Press are somewhat synonymous with the e-publishing of romance novels–after all, wasn’t Angela James practically the face of Samhain during her tenure there (and of the ill-fated Quartet Press)? It’s just business, and for the most part, an author signing with Carina Press does so knowing their books will be aligned with the prestige and branding of CP/HQN, whether or not the hype is all smoke and mirrors.
Oh definitely hype works in this environment it’s what marketing is mostly about anyway. Then a brand is established and they think that they can go to sleep. I am only a reader, so I don’t buy their books regularly any longer, got too many duds when I bought into that hype last year and realized that it would be as with most other publishing houses/imprints: like playing the lottery. I am loyal to the authors I like, not the publishing house anyway. I continue getting their freebies when any is offered, in the hopes of finding an author new to me that I’d want to add to my list. *shrug* I don’t have anything at stake here, nor do really care for precisely that reason. It may irk me how facts tend to be distorted for the sake of “marketing” but that is how it is with any product you may try to sell and I should know, my undergraduate degree is in Marketing, though I never bothered to use it and switched to a completely unrelated field and never looked back.
The only thing about this is, though, that Carina already had the branding of HQ, there is no real need to over-hype. People see Carina is the digital division of HQ and they go ooohh and aaahhh … Unless Carina is not doing as well as people think that is. Either way, this imprint is still new. Even with the backing of HQ the economy is not that fantastic and the publishing industry hasn’t gone fully digital (yet) anyway.