Monthly Archives: October 2011

From Savvy Self-Publishing:

Today we’ve got an interview with an Australian author, Simon Haynes. He has a number of books out and has seen both sides of the publishing coin.

Simon Haynes is the author of the Hal Spacejock Series and Hal Junior: The Secret Signal. By day he’s a computer programmer and author, and by night he’s the same only sleepier.

. . . .

You’ve got five books out and many more books planned in your Hal SpaceJock series. Do you think authors who build up a series have an advantage over those who write stand-alone fiction? Since readers will (one hopes!) want to continue on to see what happens next to the characters? 

That’s the advantage. The disadvantage is that stores look at sales of your previous book(s) when ordering new ones, and then order a smaller number so they don’t end up with any left over. Not only that, but they won’t order in the earlier series books if they were published more than 18 months ago. This means there’s a built in death spiral for ongoing series, and one which is almost impossible to break out of.  That’s why I decided to release the Hal Junior series under my own imprint. They’re not going to hit the shops but they’re not going out of print either. I’m planning at least one book a year, so in five years time there could be six or seven titles in the Hal Junior series, all of them still in print.

You also have a book out for younger readers. What are your thoughts on self-publishing middle-grade fiction? I have an ebook collection of stories for that age group, and I have to admit it doesn’t sell nearly as many copies as my adult fiction. What has your experience been like?

The difference is that middle-grade fiction sells to parents and librarians, not to kids. You don’t have young readers going ‘that’s sounds cool, I’ll buy that!’. No, instead their parents are going ‘I wonder if that book is suitable? I’ve never heard of it. I don’t know anyone else who’s read it. Hmm, safer to buy this other one.’

If they’re browsing in a store they can flick through your book and check a few pages, which might convince them. That’s why it’s vital to have a sample online.  My book has only been available three weeks so I don’t have any data yet. (It’s so recent it’s not even listed on Australian bookstore sites.)

Do you feel you face any obstacles publishing in Australia (and having to work through American companies like Amazon and Barnes & Noble), or are there perhaps some advantages? 

With the Hal Spacejock books published by Fremantle Press the goal was always to sub-license the rights to publishers in the UK and US. They would take the series on, publish in their own markets and we’d all live happily ever after. Unfortunately they weren’t interested. Feedback from US publishers was they they loved the books but because it was ‘Brit humor’ they wanted to see it do well in the UK first.

UK publishers had a different reason: They expect to buy rights for Australia as well as Great Britain, since (apparently) they sell up to 30% of their print runs to Australia. Since my books are already published here, that means I’ve effectively cut their potential sales by 30%. Plus there’s no chance of them selling foreign and other world rights because my existing publisher holds those.

That’s another reason why I decided to self-publish. I own all the rights, and by publishing via Lightning Source I don’t have to deal with Amazon, B&N or any other retailer. All I had to do was publish the book and fill out the correct data and it was automatically uploaded to all the various retailer catalogues. Lightning Source prints copies in Australia, England, France or the USA depending on where the order comes from, which means Hal Junior is available worldwide. Unlike the situation with Hal Spacejock, where we were hoping a foreign publisher would pick it up, Hal Junior was released everywhere at the same time.

Link to the rest at Savvy Self-Publishing

From Entertainment Weekly:

[Snooki's] back on the book shelves again with her follow-up, Confessions of a Guidette. It’s part memoir/part guide on, you know, how to be your very own guidette. For example: Your hair should make you six inches taller…. (How do you think I get on roller coasters? That, and wedges.)” And my personal favorite, a guidette must own hoop earrings. “And they have to be big enough to fit a Red Bull through.” The more you know, people. I read Confessions of a Guidette so you don’t have to, and here are the friggin highlights:

. . . .

• Her beauty tip—the kitty litter facial: Use clean litter, mix it with hot water, and apply it for 10 minutes.
• Fun Snooki fact: She used to collect rocks

. . . .

• A Snooki recipe, The Pickletini (it’s her own creation): 1 part vodka, 1/2 part pickle juice from a jar of pickles
• Guido juiceheads and gorilla juiceheads are two different things. Guido = guy who’s into his tan, hair, style, and dancing to house music. Gorilla = a man who’s more into the gym, tanning, his muscles, and himself. And apes are gorillas over 30.
• This quote: “I want my relationship to be just like Titanic, Avatar, and Just Married.”

Link to the rest at Entertainment Weekly

For all you authors who wanted to know what Simon & Schuster, guardian of our literary heritage, is looking for in a manuscript, there it is.

Don’t ever say PG didn’t give you great career guidance. And earring guidance.

To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and color, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile — such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve. But sometimes, by the deserving and the fortunate, even that task is accomplished. And when it is accomplished — behold! — all the truth of life is there; a moment of vision, a sigh, a smile — and the return to an eternal rest.

Joseph Conrad

From PC Magazine:

Move over, Amazon’s Kindle Fire. Kobo began selling the Kobo Vox e-reader tablet on Friday, and we received some hands-on time with the device.

The $199, 7-inch, Wi-Fi-only Kobo Vox is an Android 2.3 device, and looks it. Once you move past the default home page and apps, and into the Kobo Vox application, the experience becomes much more pleasant.

. . . .

In fact, the fact that the Vox is an Android tablet serves as a rather stark reminder that Kobo’s strength is its application. Holding the $129 Kobo Touch (or the Amazon Kindle, for that matter), a user is guided into a somewhat walled garden where appearances and content are served by the device manufacturer. Indeed, inside the Vox’s social Pulse e-reading application, I didn’t want to leave. (Rumors of the Barnes & Noble Nook 2 have also begun circulating.)

But I also wonder if users who are considering a tablet purchase might want to invest in a competitor, download the free Kobo app, and then buy books from Kobo directly.

According to Matthew Welch, the general manager from Kobo, the Kobo platform has about 5 million users, with about 2.5 million in the United States. Kobo is the dominant platform in Canada and Australia, Welch claimed, and deals the company has signed or is signing with the U.K.’s W.H. Smith bookstore and the French Fnac bookstore/electronics chain should boost the company’s presence in those two markets as well, he said.

. . . .

From a hardware perspective, the Vox feels comfortable in the hand, with a textured, rubberized backing. It measures 7.57 inches by 5.06 inches by 0.53 inches, and weighs 14.2 ounces. And there are four colors to choose from, if that’s your thing.

The 1024-by-600 multitouch FFS+ screen shines brightly, although the brightness can either be automatically adjusted via a light sensor or manually adjusted for “night mode”. I didn’t have a chance to play with the Kobo in bright sunlight (where E-Ink displays like those used by the Touch excel) but the Vox wasn’t washed out from sunlight through a window.

Battery life is rated at 7 hours, according to Kobo.

Link to the rest at PC Magazine

From bestselling author Barry Eisler:

A lot of conversation in and about the publishing world is fixated on fear of Amazon’s purported potential monopoly power—on the possibility that Amazon will eventually enjoy such market dominance as a publisher that it will abuse its position and begin to punish authors, perhaps with extremely low royalties. Which leads to aquestion I’m not sure I can adequately answer, though I find it fascinating:

Why all the fear about what Amazon might do in the future, when legacy publishers are doing those fearful things right now?

Today, Amazon pays self-published authors 70% of the retail price of titles sold on the Kindle Store through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing. Legacy publishers, by contrast, pay their authors 17.5%. Now, certainly 17.5% is appallingly low. But if appallingly low royalties are your concern, why would you expend so much energy speculating about a lower royalty that might eventually come to pass, while caring so little about the extremely low royalties in effect today? It’s like panicking about possibly getting sick in the future while failing to treat the pneumonia killing you right now.

I know from experience that some people will respond to the paragraph above by claiming New York publishers are not a monopoly. After all, don’t the big houses fight with each other over new manuscripts? Aren’t there sometimes bidding wars over a hot new property? And they even poach each other’s employees and authors, too. So of course there’s competition, right?

No. Everything I just described is, relatively speaking, a distraction—Kabuki competition, not the real thing. If the legacy houses actually competed with each other—if they actually strove to attract authors and serve readers and lower costs and improve performance—the publishing world would not be universally characterized by the following:

• An identical, lock-step, onerously low 17.5% digital royalty rate
• The practice of forcing readers who prefer digital to wait, sometimes for over a year, until a title is also ready to ship in paper
• Digital retail prices equivalent to paper ones despite the obvious lower costs of digital distribution
• Byzantine and opaque royalty statements, delivered twice-yearly as much as six months after the end of the applicable reporting period
• Non-compete clauses that attempt to preclude authors from meaningful control over their own professional and artistic destinies
• Morbidly obese contracts delivered months after agreement on high-level deal points, written in unendurable legalese and drawn up in nine-point font on 14-inch legal paper, the only purpose of which is to intimidate authors into not reading the document, and to obscure the meaning of what’s written just in case they do
• Payments tendered months after they’ve come due
• A refusal to share sales data with authors, even though authors have long clamored for such information and the web technology to provide such access was already old a decade ago.

We can argue about whether the system I just described is properly known as a monopoly, or as a quasi-monopoly, or as a cartel. What can’t be argued is that such a system is only possible—indeed, is only conceivable—in the absence of meaningful competition.

. . . .

Which brings us back to my original question: why are so many authors afraid of a possible monopoly while sanguine about a real one?

I can think of several possibilities.

First, fear is a powerful emotion, and, as Gavin de Becker observes in his superb The Gift of Fear, is by definition related to something that hasn’t happened yet. Once the feared thing has happened, we’re no longer afraid of it. New York’s quasi-monopoly is a longstanding and accomplished fact; therefore, it can’t be feared (though it can be loathed). By contrast, Amazon is relatively new in publishing. Whether it will attain and abuse monopoly power is currently unknown, and therefore is something people can fear. It may be that because of the nature and survival value of fear, the mind ascribes greater weight to potential threats than it does to actual problems, and this difference might explain the skew between fear toward Amazon and acquiescence to New York.

Second, and perhaps related, is the concept of the devil you know. Sure, New York functions as a cartel, but it always has, and people are accustomed to it. It seems normal. Amazon, by contrast, is unknown.So hey, your husband beats you, but it’s been going on for a long time and you’ve survived. Do you really want to divorce and remarry? Maybe the new guy will beat you, too. Maybe the beatings will be even worse. Better to stick with what’s familiar.

. . . .

Will the New York houses be able to shake off their torpor and rebuild their businesses based on more enlightened practices? It’s hard to say. The same monopoly that protects a company’s profits also withers its strength and adaptability. A company coddled by monopoly is like a fighter who never trains—who never even fights. Will a company like that be able to answer the bell when a real challenger enters the ring? I don’t know.

What I do know is that a vigorous new player just kicked open the locked door of a dark and moribund fortress and is finally letting in some sunlight. If you see a better way than Amazon to reform New York’s previously unassailable quasi-monopoly and all the suboptimal business practices that monopoly has enabled, I’d like to know what it is. In the meantime, I welcome Amazon and any other new entrant that can continue to loosen the legacy houses’ monopolistic grip,and force them to rely on practices beneficial to authors and readers rather than on monopoly rents beneficial only to themselves.

Link to the rest at Joe Konrath’s Blog

From CNet:

San Francisco-based Hyperink, a self-publishing company, is capturing the attention of wannabe authors. It’s also got the attention of Lerer Ventures, a seed stage venture capital fund founded by Kenneth Lerer, the chairman and co-founder of The Huffington Post.

. . . .

The startup, which launched today, aims to publish books about obscure and niche-specific topics, like “How to Start a Mommy Blog” and “How to Barefoot Run,” based on popular searches on Google.
“Around 90 to 95 percent of queries on Google are new and original,” says co-founder and CEO Kevin Gao. “Typically, people enter a keyword and then the word ‘book.’ We look at that data and determine what topics are in high demand.”

Don’t go pitching your “top search term” book ideas to Hyperink. It will be looking for you.
Unlike other self publishing platforms, such as Amazon.com and Lulu.com, which work directly with authors, Hyperink hires freelance journalists as ghostwriters to interview experts and then write books for them.

That’s why the books on Hyperink are mostly nonfiction. Hyperink’s experts are covering narrow topics and can crank out a book in less than a month (Gao says quantity and quality are equally important to Hyperink). The authors get help in everything from layout and editing to cover design and marketing.

Hyperink authors get to keep up to 50 percent of sales. That’s more than they would earn with traditional books, according to Gao.

Link to the rest at CNet

Another excellent essay from Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

Theodor Geisel, whom you all know as Doctor Seuss, stunned the publishing world by writing an original and somewhat controversial  book for a strict formula book line. He had the task of writing a children’s book, using only 225 approved words. None should be above two syllables.

He ended up using most of the approved words, threw in a few of his own, and added just one word of three syllables. Even though the finished book was less than 2,000 words long, it took him eight months to finish it because he found it so hard to write with such stringent limitations.

He turned in The Cat In The Hat to his editors at Houghton Mifflin and Random House (who worked on the project jointly for contractual reasons), and then had to suffer through some ridiculous criticism. The book, you see, promoted terrible behavior. That amoral cat taught the children how to act badly while their parents were away.

I have no idea how many fights Geisel had to conduct to keep his book as he wanted it, but I do know that the arguments about the “lessons” that The Cat in The Hat teaches continues to this day. I heard them resurrected when The Cat in The Hat movie came out a few years ago.

Once again, The Guardians of Quality and Those Who Know Better deemed The Cat in The Hat a book (and movie) that  might unduly harm children. Only now, fifty-plus years after the book’s initial publication, The Cat in The Hat is such a beloved classic that those of us who read the book as children and have read the book to children laugh at such silly criticism.

. . . .

Over the years, we have drilled down this notion of genre into something so fine that we have subgenres, and sub-subgenres, and breakout genres. (Thriller, for example, used to be a sub-genre of mystery. Now thriller is a breakout genre—meaning it broke out of its label—and has become a much bigger selling genre than mystery.) It is to the point that if you want to sell a novel into traditional publishing, you must not only know the genre the book belongs to, but its subgenre as well. In fact, in your pitch letter, you must tell the editor what other books your novel is similar to and if you are wrong, then that’s an easy rejection.

All of that is, in my opinion, the cost of working with a large publishing company. You the writer are making a deal with that company: you will provide a marketable novel in exchange for the distribution and marketing. You will invest your time (and therefore your dollars, since time is money) on creating a salable product and the publishing company will invest its resources into getting that book to market.

It can cost large publishers as much as $250,000 per title to get their books to market. That includes overhead, shipping, warehousing, production, editing services, advertising, the advance, and more. Inside that overhead is not just the rent for the office space, but the salaries of the editor, sales force, managing editor, and others who worked on that book. Those salaries are divided down into a formula that works out to some kind of hourly figure which then becomes a cost on the balance sheet for one novel.

. . . .

Most writers of all levels do not stand up for their work because they’re afraid they’ll never sell another word. They’re afraid to take a risk which—in my mind—begs the question: If you’re unwilling to take a risk, why become a writer in the first place?

Writing is all about risk. The first risk is comes in putting the first word on paper, in believing that you are good enough to attract readers. The second risk is working in the arts in America, which has always been a dicey proposition. The third risk is believing that your vision matters.

The moment you lose your integrity, you lose your vision. If you lose your vision, you lose what makes you unique as a writer.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From the Wall Street Journal:

Barnes & Noble Inc. will double the size of its Nook boutiques in 40 of its most productive stores nationwide over the next few weeks in time for the holiday selling season, the company said Friday.

The nation’s largest bookstore chain plans to increase the area occupied by the boutiques to an estimated 2,000 square feet from 1,000 square feet, the company said at its annual shareholders meeting.

. . . .

Barnes & Noble now claims 27% of the fast-growing digital books market, a larger market share than it projected several years ago, the company said on Friday. The bookseller is expected to introduce a new color tablet in November.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (Link may expire after a few days)

Barnes & Noble must have some sort of basis to support a statement that it has 27% of the ebook market to satisfy its attorneys and auditors, but PG is deeply skeptical.

My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel — it is, before all, to make you see. That — and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there, according to your deserts, encouragement, consolation, fear, charm, all you demand — and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.

To snatch, in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. It is to show its vibration, its color, its form; and through its movement, its form, and its color, reveal the substance of its truth — disclose its inpiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment. In a single-minded attempt of that kind, if one be deserving and fortunate, one may perchance attain to such clearness of sincerity that at last the presented vision of regret or pity, of terror or mirth, shall awaken in the hearts of the beholders that feeling of unavoidable solidarity; of the solidarity in mysterious origin, in toil, in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate, which binds men to each other and all mankind to the visible world.

Joseph Conrad

One of the most important services New York publishers can provide to authors is sophisticated marketing.

Passive Guy can’t imagine any self-published author would have ever done something to equal Simon & Schuster’s book trailer.

Don’t you all feel humbled because you don’t have the marketing smarts of S&S? Where do they find these geniuses?

PG can barely force himself to stay at the keyboard, so powerful is his desire to go buy a Snooki book.

Via Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, with thanks to David Gaughran for the tip.

“Advertising may be described as the science of arresting the human intelligence long enough to get money from it.”
- Stephen Butler Leacock

“I have always believed that writing advertisements is the second most profitable form of writing. The first, of course, is ransom notes…”
- Philip Dusenberry

“So long as there’s a jingle in your head, television isn’t free.”
- Jason Love