Monthly Archives: May 2011

Another good email on the publishing business from Dave Farland just arrived.

I’ve picked up a ton of new readers recently (Welcome!) who may not know about Dave. He’s a long-time prolific author and taught university creative writing courses for Stephanie Meyer and Brandon Sanderson and many other successful authors. Check the David Farland category on this blog for more words of wisdom from Dave.

It’s been interesting to watch the evolution of Dave’s thinking about traditional and indie publishing over the past few months. Originally, he was very wary of indieworld, but lately, he has become much more focused on Big Problems in Big Publishing.

Those who have read Dave’s emails over time will notice a much different tone in his latest than those of as little as 4-6 weeks ago.

Passive Guy is going to excerpt more than he usually would because what Dave writes is important and this email isn’t up on the blog where Dave’s emails usually appear. Links to everything are at the end, as usual.

Excerpts:

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the future of publishing. I’m afraid that some people felt that I was too gloom-and-doom. I really do hope that you understand that I’m not predicting a gloomy forecast. I’m telling you that things look as if they are going to change dramatically and that there are great opportunities ahead, but you have to seize them, and you can’t blithely go down the same old path we’ve always used, or you’re going to run into quicksand.

However, there are those who argue against my predictions, and I can’t say that they’re wrong. As Yoda said, “Always in motion the future is.” One author (whose works and intellect I admire) disagrees strongly with my notions, and basically said, “To all those folks who argue for the rise of e-publishing, what are your data points?” He then reasoned against my beliefs—using very outdated information. As they say in computing: “Garbage in, garbage out.” If your data is bad, it doesn’t matter how well you reason.

So let me first just reiterate my position, and then let me talk about why I think we’re headed for a massive change. I said two weeks ago that I suspect that traditional publishing is going to dwindle over the next few years, facing some very tough times, and I said that authors should exercise extreme caution when looking for agents or publishers. Instead, you should look to e-publishing and enhanced books. Specifically, you need to figure out how to market yourself at a time when every other author is also going to be out publishing his own books, creating a massive amount of white noise. (It’s already happening. According to Bokwer’s the number of self-published titles last year rose from about 1.033 million in 2009 to 2.766 million in 2010).

. . . .

My friend argued, for example, that e-books were insignificant and made up only about 1% of sales. That data is way out of date.

Four years ago in January, electronic publishing did bring in about 1% of sales. Three years ago, it brought in about 3% of sales. In January 2010, that number rose to about 13% of sales, and currently, as of May of 2011, we’re at about 27% of sales. Now, that’s an estimate. The major publishers are claiming somewhere between 22 and 26% for fiction sales, but that doesn’t count the self-published e-books. Right now, Amazon.com says that for every 100 books they sell in hardback and paperback combined, they’re selling 105 books electronically. As of the middle of May, they say that e-book sales are exactly 300% higher than they were a year ago at this time. Do you see what’s happening on the bell curve?

. . . .

How many frequent readers need to buy e-readers before we lose half the market? Fewer than 60 million people in the US. How soon will that number of e-readers be on the market? By February of 2012, the heavy readers should have their iPads, Nooks, Kindles, and so on.

Now, as the market competition heats up, we’ll see prices on e-readers to drop, and more infrequent readers will begin to buy devices. Some schools began purchasing e-readers last year instead of text books. Why? Because it is cheaper. If you give a student an e-reader and purchase licenses from someone like MacMillan for all of the student’s textbooks, you’ll most likely get a “student discount” that will make the e-books cheaper than buying textbooks. These will be lighter of weight than regular textbooks, which gives the advantage that students no longer have to lug heavy books around, and the text can change each year to keep up with the newest trends in science, history, sociology, and so on. In short, students will be trained to read off of e-readers, beginning now.

Oh, and how will those students buy books? Off the e-readers that the school provides, of course! Kids want to save money, too. Expect the YA and middle-grade e-book markets to go ballistic in four years.

. . . .

What is the future of e-books? As more people switch to e-books, then publishing paper becomes a very dicey proposition. As publishers face higher returns, they will need to raise prices. Anyone for a $12 mass-market paperback, or a $40 hardcover novel? As prices rise, even just a little, readers will begin to wonder if they should be buying electronically. After all, book prices are much lower online, even for your favorite authors.

. . . .

So we’re facing some changes. I’ve already given the data points about how this will affect New York publishers. Last month, they got hit with a 40% decline in hardcover sales from just one month to the next. Now, part of that was due to the loss of a major chain. Another part was due to incursions by e-book sales. But there seemed to be other reasons. One publisher in England went so far as to say that it may have been reflective of a “weak publishing schedule.”

The publishers lost money that month. There’s no way around it. For their big titles, they most likely ordered their copies from printers in Korea or China some five or six months earlier. So now the books sit, unsold. Worse, the publishers have pre-ordered print runs ahead for the next four or five months already, and in some cases, the books are on the ships, making their way to US ports. A lot of money is going out the window.

. . . .

So the publishers are going to have to figure out how to stay afloat, and they’ll make grabs for e-rights. Look at the blogs for Kris Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith. They’re telling you some of the news about what is going on, and there is plenty of ugly information that we can’t share without violating confidentiality agreements. As I said before, the book stores are selling fewer books, and they can’t pay their distributors. The distributors can’t pay the publishers, and so the publishers are trying to stay afloat. The only way to do that is to try to get more money out of the authors.

With that happening, literary agents are doing the same thing. Lots of them are offering new plans, in which they publish your e-books. So they’re trying to figure out how to skin their own authors.

. . . .

Bill Gates became the richest man in the world because he was selling raw information. That’s what e-books are, a commodity with very little production costs and no shipping or handling fees. If you’ve already got the files for a book sitting on your computers, then producing the e-book is almost pure profit. Now, you might not sell tens of thousands of copies in a month, but what if a title sells just a thousand copies per month—for the next hundred years?

Every e-book is a potential goldmine, and every publisher is going to demand that they get the author’s e-rights. Some publishers have already simply begun the strip-mining process, putting the books online and selling them, even though the author’s rights reverted long ago. In other cases, the publishers are claiming that they own e-rights to any book that they’ve ever published.

. . . .

But your publisher is a company owned by a mega-corp that handles dozens of other companies—movies studios, television networks, record companies, book publishers, and so on. These are entertainment empires. The empire builders have their own way of thinking, and they don’t give spit about you. You are a manual laborer in their eyes. They just want to figure out how to make as much money as possible off of your sweat.

. . . .

Because of this, you have to be very careful right now in choosing an agent. Since the publishers are refusing to negotiate on e-rights, the agents are finding that their own power base is eroding. There are NO super agents like we had in the 1970s. They can’t do for you what they once did. The agents no longer have their own private contracts on file with the major publishers. Hence, many savvy writers are leaving their agents.

I’ve heard from a number of authors that many agents “aren’t even reading works by new authors.” They don’t see the point. I’ve heard from established authors that publishing agreements are “moving very slowly.” A book that used to sell in four weeks now takes six months. Checks that would have been cut in two weeks now take an additional six months. Advances for major authors are taking a nose-dive. All of this indicates heavy cost-cutting measures by the publishers.

Agents are losing both negotiating power and money in this fight, and we can expect that to continue.

. . . .

Your agent is not your publisher. Don’t give them 50% of your e-rights.

Your publisher doesn’t deserve all the money from your e-book either. If they demand it all, then maybe your publisher shouldn’t be your publisher. Having said that, I hope you realize that nearly ALL publishers are demanding your e-rights—every major publisher in New York.

Which is why I have to warn you that ANY publishing deal that requires you to give up so much of your e-rights is a terrible deal. It may well be that this is the time to walk away from the traditional publishing model altogether.

You can sign up for Dave’s free emails here.

Here’s a link to a website that usually puts up Dave’s email newsletters, but didn’t have the latest one excerpted above when I wrote this post.

Should Paperback Books Come with a Free eBook?

There’s a provocative question from Michael Koz.

Passive Guy asks an additional question – If you have the ebook, do you really want a paperback? Another paperback? To add to the ten thousand paperbacks that already clutter up your life?

But, let’s get back to Michael’s provocative question.

Excerpts:

When you look at the movie industry you always get the digital version for free when you buy the hard copy. When you buy a Blu-ray Disk it normally comes with a free digital edition for your computer, ditto with DVD Disks. Considering that eBooks are so popular, why is it that the leather bound tomes we have come to love are not accompanied by the digital version?

. . . .

Many people often write to me and lament that they have a favorite book and in order to enjoy it on their e-reader they have to pay for the book again. While others say that when they purchase the real book and then pirate the ebook, they don’t feel bad.

. . . .

Currently we are in a battle of formats, much akin to major battles of formats before the niche took off. You look at previous wars such as; Beta VS. VHS, MP3 vs Flac, Bluray VS. HD DVD. It was not until the battles were decided did the industries really grow and more companies supported the format.

In order for the free ebook digital copy to be included in the paperback or hardcover version, a single, universal format needs to be agreed upon and compatible with ANY e-reader.

Link to the rest at Good eReader

A fascinating analysis of the effect of agency pricing on best-sellers by Dan Lubart, Principal, Iobyte Solutions.

For those unfamiliar with agency pricing, prior to the release of the iPad and the opening of Apple’s bookstore, Amazon bought books from publishers the same way physical bookstores did and Amazon set the sales prices for the books, the same way book stores do.

Being an aggressive price discounter, Amazon sold a lot of popular books way under suggested retail price. In some cases, Amazon bought market share by selling books for less than Amazon’s cost – the $9.99 prices for NYT bestsellers being prime examples.

Capitalism was just too much for Big Publishing to handle. When Apple opened its store, in order to attract publishers, Apple let the publishers set the retail prices. In this way, Apple was a sales agent for the publisher, rather than a reseller which set its own prices. Hence the term, “agency pricing.”

After what amounted to a boycott threat from big publishers and under competitive pressures to keep its Kindle growing in the face of iPad, Amazon backed down and also allowed agency pricing. Amazon highlights titles where agency pricing rules by noting the price is set by the publisher.

So, what has agency pricing done for bestseller status on Kindle and Nook? Dan has been watching Kindle and Nook bestseller lists. The short answer is that having your publisher set the price for your book makes it less likely you’ll be a bestseller.

The trend is particularly notable in Romance.

Excerpts:

If following ebook bestsellers is like announcing a horse race, then independent, self-published titles had the inside track early in 2011. The “agency-model” publishers’ share of the Kindle bestseller list from December 2010 into February 2011 declined steadily; the Nook list’s agency share held more or less firm after an initial January drop.

. . . .

But the story is much different on the Romance genre bestseller lists. Since March 1, 2011, there has been a pronounced shift on both retailers’ Romance lists away from agency titles. Looking at the second chart, you can see that the average combined share of both lists for all agency publishers is halved, from roughly 30 to 15 titles in this period.

This drop may be mostly explained by the rise in the average price of agency titles on this list, including but not limited to Random House’s changes after March 1. One item of note is that Harlequin (not an agency-model publisher) has also slowly lost share of the list as its average price climbed over the past few weeks. It is difficult to determine exactly, but self-published titles may account for up to half of the Romance bestseller list on Kindle today where exactly 50 of the 100 titles on the list are priced below $3 for an overall average price of $4.15 (as compared to 35 on the bestseller list; overall average price of $7.17).

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written another important essay on the changing face of publishing. I’ll intersperse some excerpts with my comments, but this is one you’ll want to read in its entirety. There is, as always, a link at the bottom.

As will be abundantly clear from Kris’ examples, traditional publishers and the new agents-turned-publishers are making a brazen grab for as many rights from authors as possible while reducing the amount of money they will pay authors for their books. This is the new strip mining model for publishing.

Why are they doing this?

When the ship is sinking, some of the passengers start fighting over the lifeboats.

With each passing week, the handwriting on the wall becomes more and more distinct. What does the writing say?

Big Publishing, the agents who rely upon it and the traditional bookstores that provide its lifeblood are sinking. Just like the Titanic, they’re not disappearing in an instant. The band is still playing and fashionable people are doing business on the upper decks. The good ship Big Publishing will be bobbing in the waves for some time to come, but Amazon, ebooks and indie publishing have punched big holes in the hull. Those holes cannot be patched and the ship is going down.

Does this mean the end of publishing ships? No, but it means the demise of the grand ocean liners. The S.S. Amazon is an entirely different design, crafted for speed and efficiency and it doesn’t need many sailors schooled in the old ways.

While the band is playing and champagne flows, people make brave speeches about the timelessness of their trade. But, make no mistake, a battle is underway below-decks for spots on the lifeboats. If it’s necessary to toss authors over the side to make room, well, that’s just the nature of the business these days.

From Kris:

[A bestselling] writer, more than any other writer, is in danger of losing money and copyrights, of in fact going from making a lot of money to making little or no money at all. How can she lose money when she will probably maintain her bestseller status, her sales will probably go up, and her work will go into more markets than ever before?

Simple. Her contract terms will change and she might not even notice.

At some time hidden in the mists of time, an ancient rule of contracts was formulated: When a business partner is in financial trouble and wants a change in a long-standing agreement, watch your wallet. The more “routine” the change, the more dangerous it probably is.

Kris talks about e-rights:

Another clause to beware of in the e-rights clause of your new contract is this one:

“The Author hereby grants to the Publisher…the exclusive license to produce, publish, sell, distribute and further license any Electronic Version of the Work…. ‘Electronic Version’ means versions that include the Work…in a complete, condensed, adapted, or abridged version and in compilations for performance and display in any manner whether sequentially or non-sequentially and together with accompanying sounds and images, if any, transmissible by any electronic means, method or device (including but not limited to electronic and machine-readable media and online or satellite-based transmission or any other device or medium for electronic reproduction or transmission whether now or hereafter known or developed…)” [Emphasis mine.]

Yikes! Ick! No. Never, ever, ever, ever sign this clause. Think about this: movies are digitized—they are performance, and they are often distributed online. Not only does that clause allow someone to monkey with your work, abridging it, taking it out of order, adding things to it, making it into a performance piece, adding sound effects, but it also is a backwards way of granting television rights, video display rights, and any other performance right, so long as that performance can be distributed electronically.

And don’t believe that someone in your publishing house won’t use that clause down the road. The editor you trust may leave, the publishing company might change hands, and a clause that was designed for one thing will be used for something completely different.

Gold has been discovered in ebooks. Smart people are prospecting for more gold with enhanced ebooks. Video in ebooks is a definite possibility.

While a few people sprinkled in publishers’ management positions high and low may have seen a vision of what books could become and the effect that might have on publishers’ profits in their traditional lines a few years ago, nobody bothered to tell the gnomes who tended the standard-form contracts.

Kris has seen far more publishing contracts during her career than Passive Guy has, but the ones he’s examined that are more than a couple of years old are tight where paperbacks and hardcovers are concerned and they leak like a sieve everywhere else.

Back to Kris:

Watch out for your option clause. Try to avoid signing one at all. In the past, option clauses were like job security, but no longer. Option clauses have now become a way to tie a writer to a publishing house and to prevent her from working for anyone else. So strike your option clause if possible.

. . . .

Watch your warranty clause.  Now, many publishers are reverting to an old practice. They want writers to warrant that the writer will not write anything until this particular book under this particular contract is published.

This used to be a separate clause, and very easy to find.  It existed in a lot of contracts 20 years ago, then faded away.  Now it’s back with a vengeance.  It used to be that the writer guaranteed that the book she had just contracted for would be her next book and no other book would compete against it.

Now she’s guaranteeing that she will not write another book until this one is published.  And in many cases, the publisher enjoins her from writing anything.

This clause, which has been in every new book contract I have seen from traditional New York publishers in the past six months, is buried in the warranties.  Which are the boilerplate part of the contract, the part that includes bankruptcies and acts of God.  A lot of established writers stopped reading the legal gobbledygook in the boilerplate years ago, and have been snared by this clause.

Sometimes people fighting for lifeboats don’t act in rational ways. During the fight, the lifeboat may be damaged, supplies lost and passengers capable of providing valuable assistance to the survivors prevented from boarding.

When he read Kris’ description of these provisions, Passive Guy was reminded about one of the fundamental rules of making contracts with important long-term partners: Don’t screw your partner in the contract even if you have an opportunity to do so. When your partner realizes you screwed her as she inevitably will, she’ll spend all her time and energy working on ways to get out of the contract instead of doing whatever it was that you wanted her to do when you signed the contract.

What about the clause that hog-tied the author to the publisher? PG’s already thought of a half-dozen likely ways to evade the clause. He can’t help it, that’s just the way his mind works. However, he’ll keep those under his hat for the moment because he hasn’t seen the language in the contract.

Something else also came to mind, however. As described, the hog-tying clause potentially precludes a professional author from earning a living by writing for a competing publisher. When you think of it that way, it sounds a lot like a non-compete clause.

Non-compete agreements are common in the tech world. When you go to work for a tech company or become a contractor for a tech company, you’ll be required to sign a non-compete agreement that prevents you from taking everything you learned while you worked on the Apple ebook project and taking it with you when you’re hired for the Microsoft ebook project.

As with everything else, however, non-compete agreements were abused by some employers and today a dense combination of state laws and court decisions have placed substantial limits on how much a company can restrict the post-employment work of a former employee.

One of the fundamental limitations on non-compete agreements is a public policy that people should be free to work and support themselves in their chosen profession and should also be free to move from job to job. Limitations on that freedom included in non-compete agreements must be narrowly-tailored with time limitations to protect the vital interests of the company, not punish ex-employees or former contractors for quitting.

Back to the bigger picture for a moment, hiding material limitations on an author’s freedom in obscure warranty clauses as Kris describes is an unethical business practice.

Depending upon how it’s done and what extra-contractual representations are made to the author, we may be moving into fraud territory.

This practice exploits the great mismatch in resources and negotiating power between a large publisher and an individual author. Passive Guy has no problems with bare-knuckles contract drafting and negotiations when both sides have access to good-quality legal advice, but this is over the line. It demonstrates disrespect for an author and an intention to fleece the author for the financial advantage of the publisher.

This is antithetical to a relationship of mutual respect between professional colleagues. This is destructive exploitation – strip mining – of an author’s life work.

Such behavior by a publisher gives rise to an additional inevitable question. If the publisher is willing to engage in borderline fraudulent practices in its contract with an author, what additional types of fraudulent practices may it engage in? Even hidden clauses in a contract are far easier to discover than under-reporting of sales and underpayment of royalties.

So, how do we deal with hidden gotchas in a publishing contract?

Next week, Passive Guy will unveil yet another lovely contract provision for authors. Check back to learn about the Smoke ‘Em Out Clause.

And most definitely read the entire post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. This one can make or save you some big money.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, wrote The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. The book, published in 2006, began as a Wired article in 2004, well before Kindle ereaders existed and indie writing took off.

Some of Anderson’s theories have been disputed, but authors like Joe Konrath are examples of how The Long Tail makes the business of indie publishing — creating products and selling them in an online world where shelf space is infinite — much different than selling them in a physical store where shelf space is scarce and expensive and the difference between success and failure can depend upon how much shelf space your book receives and where in the store that shelf space is located.

What about the cost of warehouse space to store physical books? When the products are ebooks, the cost of warehouse space disappears as well.

Excerpts:

In 1988, a British mountain climber named Joe Simpson wrote a book called Touching the Void, a harrowing account of near death in the Peruvian Andes. It got good reviews but, only a modest success, it was soon forgotten. Then, a decade later, a strange thing happened. Jon Krakauer wrote Into Thin Air, another book about a mountain-climbing tragedy, which became a publishing sensation. Suddenly Touching the Void started to sell again. Random House rushed out a new edition to keep up with demand. Booksellers began to promote it next to their Into Thin Air displays, and sales rose further. A revised paperback edition, which came out in January, spent 14 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. That same month, IFC Films released a docudrama of the story to critical acclaim. Now, Touching the Void outsells Into Thin Air more than two to one.

What happened? In short, Amazon.com recommendations. The online bookseller’s software noted patterns in buying behavior and suggested that readers who liked Into Thin Air would also like Touching the Void. People took the suggestion, agreed wholeheartedly, wrote rhapsodic reviews. More sales, more algorithm-fueled recommendations, and the positive feedback loop kicked in.

Particularly notable is that when Krakauer’s book hit shelves, Simpson’s was nearly out of print. A few years ago, readers of Krakauer would never even have learned about Simpson’s book — and if they had, they wouldn’t have been able to find it. Amazon changed that. It created the Touching the Void phenomenon by combining infinite shelf space with real-time information about buying trends and public opinion. The result: rising demand for an obscure book.

. . . .

[M]eet Robbie Vann-Adibé, the CEO of Ecast, a digital jukebox company whose barroom players offer more than 150,000 tracks — and some surprising usage statistics. He hints at them with a question that visitors invariably get wrong: “What percentage of the top 10,000 titles in any online media store (Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, or any other) will rent or sell at least once a month?”

Most people guess 20 percent, and for good reason: We’ve been trained to think that way. The 80-20 rule, also known as Pareto’s principle (after Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who devised the concept in 1906), is all around us. Only 20 percent of major studio films will be hits. Same for TV shows, games, and mass-market books — 20 percent all. The odds are even worse for major-label CDs, where fewer than 10 percent are profitable, according to the Recording Industry Association of America. But the right answer, says Vann-Adibé, is 99 percent. There is demand for nearly every one of those top 10,000 tracks. He sees it in his own jukebox statistics; each month, thousands of people put in their dollars for songs that no traditional jukebox anywhere has ever carried.

Link to the rest at a “manifesto” (click the download button for the PDF) containing some key concepts from The Long Tail

Livia Blackburne is a Brain Scientist and and Author.

Is that the greatest introduction ever? Don’t you wish someone could introduce you that way?

In Livia’s words: “By day I’m a neuroscience graduate student at MIT, conducting research on the neural correlates of reading. On evenings and weekends, I write fantasy stories for young adults.”

One question immediately comes to mind. Who will play secret agent Livia in the action-thriller movie? Angelina Jolie? Zhang Ziyi? Carrie-Anne Moss?

The second question that comes to mind is, what does Livia have to say about Point of View and Brain Science?

Excerpt:

Talk about how the mind interprets Point of View and narrative distance.

We are social animals, so our brains are wired to interact with other people. We are equipped with many tools to figure out what other people are thinking and feeling. Some of these tools include facial expressions, body language, our understanding of the situation, etc. As writers then, our job is to replicate these cues so the reader knows what the characters are thinking and feeling. It’s an interesting way to look at the “show don’t tell” rule — you could frame it instead as saying that a writer should use natural emotion cues rather than just telling the reader that little Johnny is sad.

One particularly challenging social task is figuring out what someone else is thinking when it’s different from what you are thinking. For example, if someone stole your friend’s lunch while he wasn’t looking, you know that the lunch is no longer in his lunch box, but your friend doesn’t. Somehow, your brain has to keep those two ideas separate. It seems very easy now, but actually, children have a hard time with this type of task. And as a writer, I sometimes have trouble with more subtle variations on this. For example, if I’m not careful, my main character will start reacting to situations in ways that are more characteristic of my personality than hers.

Link to the rest at A Brain Scientist’s Take on Writing

For those who are skeptical about Livia’s science chops, here’s a link to Livia’s science blog

Passive Guy has seldom seen a more captivating cover. He can’t tear his eyes away and finds himself constantly thinking of passion, vainly attempting to still his beating heart. Count PG as yet another Captive . . .  a Captive . . . of the Night.

Consider the sophisticated typography and the subtle interplay of color and texture. Of course, the art is le plus grand des grands as the ravished yet satisfied heroine wonders if she should return to the world of patent law or stay stoned forever.

Admit it, this cover just calls out to you to buy the book.

Here’s the story: Romance writer Loretta Chase apparently signed one of those contracts that made her agent her publisher for backlist books.

The first backlist release by the agent/publisher was Captives of the Night and romance blogger Sara Wendell thought the cover was so terrible that this must be one of those self-published books.

Commenters closely examined the cover, smelled piracy and worried their beloved Ms. Chase might be the victim of an Amazon Kindle Swindle.

Ms. Chase responded that the book’s cover was not the work of cheesy pirates, but rather the product of her agent/publisher. She indirectly acknowledged that the cover sucked, but explained her agent/publisher “had to find public domain material, and I didn’t want to drag the process out by micromanaging the design.”

Isn’t it nice for authors to have savvy agents who know all about design and promotion handling all these publishing details? That way, authors don’t have to worry their pretty little heads about micromanaging anything. And saving tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars with public domain covers! This is genius on a stick!

Link to a lovely discussion of this whole mess at Dear Author

Publishers Lunch has some more news about Amazon’s new publishing companies that has to be driving Big Publishing crazy:

Barry Eisler announced that, rather than self-publishing, his next John Rain novel THE DETACHMENT will be published by Amazon’s new mystery/thriller imprint Thomas & Mercer in both digital and print formats. “What Amazon has offered is everything that was so great to me about self publishing on the one hand, but everything you want from traditional publishing,” including marketing and distribution. “I get the best of both worlds,” he added.

Amazon is also paying Eisler an advance, one “that was comparable to what St. Martin’s was offering in the deal I ultimately decided didn’t make sense.” They also given him “control over the packaging and consultation over the pricing of the book,” with a royalty he called “much more favorable” than a traditional deal. (It’s for world rights, and includes audio as well.)

. . . .

When an audience member asked about the nature of Amazon’s contract, Eisler (who is trained as an attorney) said “I’ve never seen a better publishing agreement than what Amazon presented me. It’s readable, it’s understandable, and it’s transparent.”

Link to the rest at Publishers Lunch (may be behind paywall)

In lieu of an afternoon blog post, I will refer all of you to a comment made concerning an earlier post of mine and my response to the comment.

Go to I can see many roles agents could fill in the 21st century publishing world and read the comments for what I hope will be an educational experience concerning copyright and fair use.

Amazon keeps track of how many times Kindle readers highlight a passage in a book.

The all-time highlight-frequency winners are . . . (drum roll) . . .

1. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. (You’re supposed to know who this is. Answers are at the bottom of the post.)

2. The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.

3. Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

4. Rule #1: Avoid “white” carbohydrates (or anything that can be white). Rule #2: Eat the same few meals over and over again. Rule #3: Don’t drink calories. Rule #4: Don’t eat fruit. Rule #5: Take one day off per week and go nuts.

White carbohydrates?

Passive Guy notes a distinct decline-and-fall thing going on here. It’s obvious the wrong sort of people have been highlighting passages on their Kindles.

Where is “Call me Ishmael,” “You don’t know me without you have read a book,” and “best of times?” PG would even be mollified by “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderlay again,” but white carbohydrates?

PG can’t take it any more, so here’s a link to the rest at Amazon

You’re supposed to guess first without looking down for the answers.

|

|

|

No peeking.

|

|

|

|

1. The Magnificent Jane, of course, in Pride and Prejudice

2. Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

3. Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell (I know it’s non-fiction and it’s not Tolstoy.)

4. The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman by Timothy Ferriss