Authors Bill Crider, Ed Gorman, Max Allan Collins, Harry Shannon, Dave Zeltserman and Vicki Hendricks have teamed up to create Top Suspense, a site showcasing their terrific books in e-format.
Electronic books are soon to be a billion dollar business, yet it's more difficult than ever to find a good read, especially via digital download. With more than 700,000 ebooks already on line, with a good number of them self-published, ebook stores are becoming the equivalent of publisher's past 'slush piles'. […]The Top Suspense Group plans to slash through all the clutter.
[…]"Readers can count on us," creator and acclaimed author Dave Zeltserman explains, “Every member of our group has already made his or her mark on genre fiction, whether it's noir, crime, mystery, thriller, horror or Westerns, and in some cases, several of these genres."
[…]Zeltserman has spoken before about the difficulty readers have in searching for sites that offer seasoned professionals. Top Suspense Group members make some of their finest material available at affordable prices. Many of the ebooks will contain bonus material, such as the writer’s commentary on the book that has been purchased, or the addition of a free short story.
“We believe readers will appreciate a reliable inexpensive site that continuously delivers some of the best in contemporary genre fiction,” said Top Suspense Group member and multi-award winning author, Max Allan Collins.
It's a shrewd marketing move and they are a very impressive group of established authors with a strong line-up of books. Collectively, they've got all the genres covered, from mysteries to westerns, and have made major literary contributions in all of them. It will be interesting to see how their experiment works out.
UPDATE 11/25/2010 : Full disclosure. Since publishing this post, I have accepted an invitation to become one of the authors at Top Suspense.
This sounds like an interesting attempt to create a brand, and maybe it will work and persons will buy Top Suspense Group novels based primarily on the brand.
I don’t know how accurate these stats are but I found them on the internet. It seems that 3 billion books are sold per year, around the world. Amazon will likely sell, say, 30 million ebooks in 2010. They have about 19 to 20% of the market, so the total ebook market is about 150 million books per year. That means that if ebook sales increase by a factor of 10, half of all books sold will be ebooks. But will this increase happen? And if so, how fast will it happen? And if so, how will the big six respond? And can ebooks take over more than half the market? And how will readers choose which ebooks they’ll buy?
I’m just looking into my crystal ball, here, but I’m guessing that the book/ebook confrontation is like the horse/car confrontation: one technology replaces the other, more or less, and the reason is due to cost and convenience. So I think it’s a smart move to try to establish a publishing brand online, especially if the authors themselves contribute to the site fairly frequently–this offers a form of connection for the reader that cannot be achieved in bookstores. And connection is in, it’s hip, it’s what the internet uniquely provides.