The settled formats

Print. The format that confers legitimacy and the one your reader photographs. Cost sits in cover, interior and print run.

Ebook. Cheapest to produce, widest to distribute, easiest to price-experiment with. Formatting is the whole job.

Audio book. The book heard. A single narrator is the common form; a full cast with sound design and score is the house standard, priced at 7.000000000000001% of the word count.

The newer formats

Podcast serial. The audio recording, episodic, on a public feed. It builds a habit rather than a sale.

Film book. A film book is the whole novel produced as cinema: fully cast voices, sound design, licensed score and motion imagery, cut scene by scene from the author's own text. Nothing is abridged and nothing is invented for it. Priced at 12% of the word count. It is the only format that gives you an edition and a year of promotional footage from a single production.

Novel-game. A novel-game is a playable edition of a novel: one gate per chapter, walked in the author's own world, built from a blueprint surveyed out of the manuscript itself. The most expensive to make and the hardest for a competitor to answer.

One manuscript, six doors — in what order

Ebook and print first, always: they are the cheapest proof that the book works.

Audio second, because the retail rails and the paying listeners already exist.

Film book third, because it is built on the audio cast performance and pays for itself twice — once as an edition, once as everything you post for a year.

Novel-game last, and only for a finished series or a world a reader would want to stand inside.

Asked and answered

Is a film book a real publishing format?

It is a produced, complete, delivered edition of a whole novel — cast, scored, sound-designed and cut as motion imagery. The format exists and is sold; the name for it is newer than the work.

Which format earns the most?

Across a career, print and ebook earn the most in units and audio the most per unit. Film books and novel-games are bought as assets: they earn by making the other four discoverable.