Will eBooks Make Midlist Authors Extinct?
James McGrath Morris, Biographer
Posted: Huffington Post, June 9, 2010 

 eBooks are changing not just the way people read books but how they buy them. The digital book age promises to deliver an endless assortment of titles with the click of a mouse but also portends to destroy the economic foundation that supports a large class of writers known as midlist authors, the triple-A minor league players of publishing.

These authors, who sell between 10,000 and 20,000 copies of a book, are the workhorses of the industry. They earn enough to make a modest living from their writing, sell enough to keep getting contracts from major publishing houses, and sometimes emerge as best-selling authors.

However, the book-buying habits sustaining their work may become a thing of the past when printed books are swapped for digital ones. As strolling and perusing the aisles of a bookstore is replaced with a mouse and computer screen, the demise of brick-and-mortar retailers will accelerate and critically important links between midlist authors and their readers will be severed.

Consider some of the common ways books by lesser-known authors are sold everyday in a store:

    * Examining the history section of a store, a customer is drawn to a book by its eye-catching cover;
    * Picking up a book by a popular author from a table, a customer is intrigued by a novel in an adjacent stack;
    * Approaching the cash register, a customer decides to get one additional book after reading a sticky note that says "staff favorite," one of the many ways booksellers "hand-sell" a promising title.

As of yet, there is no digital substitute to this serendipitous manner of bringing readers and writers together. Furthermore an important symbiotic relationship between best-selling authors and their lesser brethren will end. Readers who buy new books by Dan Brown or Kitty Kelley frequently leave the store with another title under their arm. But it is often the invitingly deep and varied inventory of books by midlist authors that lure the reader into the store in the first place.

Digital books create a retailing bypass that diminishes the exposure of midlist books to potential readers. Supermarkets have long understood the importance of this aspect of sales, arranging their stores so shoppers have to pass through aisles filled with tempting items in order to pick up a quart of milk. So while eBooks will offer publishers an easier and more economic means to sell more works by leading authors it will increase the challenge of marketing books by others.
Full piece at Huffington Post.