From Blank Slate Press:

This past Thursday and Friday I attended the IBPA (Independent Book Publishers Association) Publishing University in Chicago.

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1)    “The flaws in the traditional publishing model are everywhere. It is not a viable model.”  This is one of my favorite quotes from Dominique Raccah, founder of Sourcebooks and one of the people busy reinventing the industry.  The telling part of the quote is in its context. Her presentation was not about the industry per se, and that quote was not taken from her presentation, but rather was a response to a question from an attendee who asked why, with all the opportunities available for authors today, she or anyone else should seek to publish traditionally. Raccah responded that she actually had no idea why anyone would want to do that if they are willing and able to take on the tasks necessary to make a book a success according to their own measures and expectations.

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5)    The Myth of Big 5 Marketing Support. So, this may sound strange coming from a publisher, but I’ve been on the other side as well and I know that, for many (most?) the idea that just because you got a nice advance and you’ve got a publicity team assigned to you, doesn’t mean you’re actually going to get real, sustained—or intelligent!—pr/marketing support. Dori Jones Yang, a successful historical fiction author, told the story about her agent’s response to all the marketing she was doing. The agent was thrilled at her success and said, “As soon as you hit it big, your publisher’s publicist is going to leap into action.”

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Ingram took the opportunity to formally announce Ingram Spark—a “new and improved” service designed for small publishers that will roll out later this year.  I learned that very small publishers (those with under 1 million in sales…uh, yeah, I fit in that group), makes up 20% of the publishing industry, and Ingram is perfectly positioned to serve that 20%.

As the largest wholesaler in the industry, Ingram serves over 200 ebook retailers in over 150 countries. They have 2500 partners, they handle 11 million titles through 3800 channels, and can output a different book every six seconds. But still they see room for significant growth catering to that 20%–as well as working with many of the major publishers who use their services (including O’Reily Media who just closed their last warehouse).   Ingram Spark will be much easier (according to the Ingram folks) to use than Lightning Source today. It will be “easy, quick, and free” and will provide one interface for POD and ebooks.

Link to the rest at Blank Slate Press and thanks to Lassal for the tip.

And this from Midwest Independent Publishers Association:

Ingram used the IBPA keynote luncheon on Saturday as the platform to introduce “Spark.” This new Ingram service was created to allow independent publishers to deal directly with Ingram in DISTRIBUTING print on demand (POD) books. The quoted costs for the POD service: 1.3 cents a page and 90 cents for the cover (no varnish or embossing). A $49 fee to set up a title is waived if you order 50 books. Ingram will make the books available throughout the US and 38 countries across the world. Spark is scheduled for launch on May 28. By August, Ingram will also offer e-book conversion and e-book DISTRIBUTION for Kindle, Apple, Kobo, Nook, and all LSI partners. Ingram plans to eventually offer the sale of ISBNs (as arranged through Bowker) and add marketing services.

Link to the rest at MIPA

From BiblioCrunch:

Are you tired of buying eBooks that are poorly formatted and designed? A lot of other readers are too. Proper interior design and packaging of an eBook is relatively easy and cheap compared to writing, editing, marketing, and the cover design of a book. However, eBooks on the market continue to have formatting errors that create reader outrage, even from major publishers. Compared to the technology in web browsers, eReading systems from Apple, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Adobe, and Kobo are a bit behind the times. However, if you keep things simple in your layout and formatting, you will create a pleasant reading experience across all devices.

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Most of the vendors make you separately upload a cover that is massive in size (2500px in height is a good size to upload to most platforms). However, the cover you embed inside the eBook package typically does not need to be that large. 1024px in height is fine. Different eReading systems have different ways of rendering the cover. For the MOBI/KF8 format for Kindle, Amazon’s guidelines do not allow you to link to the cover in the Table of Contents for some reason. However, for EPUBs it is generally a good idea to create a separate cover page HTML file plus a link in the Table of Contents or else your cover won’t show up on Adobe Digital Editions.

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Generally, all you need on the Title Page for an eBook is the name of the book and the author. The text should almost always be centered. You can also include the publisher’s name and/or logo if you like and other contributors (e.g. the editor, the cover designer, etc.). Some authors like to put the edition (i.e. Kindle Edition, EPUB edition) and the copyright on the title page. Although, you can put this information on the copyright page instead—it’s a matter of preference. An important note for people uploading EPUBs to Smashwords, the title page must have a copyright statement and “Smashwords Edition” right below the copyright or your eBook will not get into Premium Status.

Link to the rest at BiblioCrunch

From Good Ereader:

The New York Times started to include ebooks in print and online editions back in 2011. The company announced today that it is suspending the inclusion of ebook titles in the newspaper and only posting them on the website. The prices of the ebooks will also not be included going forward, due to the shifting economic landscape of online sellers.

Pamela Paul is the current editor of the Book Review section of the New York Times, a post she only attained in April. She said in a statement, “The ebook list has migrated online, the digital world being its natural habitat. Given the fluid variety of pricing in today’s marketplace, we have also stopped including cover prices on the lists.”

Link to the rest at Good Ereader

There’s a new term for 99-cent ebooks — fluidly-priced. Remove them from the Sunday paper and those nasty indie ebooks will surely go away. Take the print readers on a pleasant journey back to an earlier time before the economic landscape of publishing began to shift. Why remind the New York literati about Amazon over their coffee and croissants?

The new editor knows how to make Big Publishing cheer. But can she can make them buy more advertising?

From The Digital Reader:

Apple has a long history of censoring the more risque content from ebooks sold in iBooks and iTunes, even going so far as to threaten developers like Izneo with banishment, but today they have taken it to a new level. Several newspapers including De Standaard are reporting that Apple has rejected De Hartsvriendin, Heleen van Royen’s latest book, because of 2 links found in chapter 22.

Yes, links.

Apparently Apple has moved beyond censoring content they don’t approve of. Now they are blocking the sale of ebooks that merely link to content that Apple doesn’t approve of. Admittedly, the links lead to a couple porn sites , but that doesn’t change the fact that Apple is once again banning an ebook because of links.

Link to the rest at The Digital Reader

PG is of two minds about this.

On the one hand, for ebook innovation, links would be an obvious tool, albeit one that would work much better with tablets than with e-ink readers.  It’s still early days for tablet technology and lots of cool new capabilities that authors might want to use will be appearing in the future.

On the other hand, if parents discovered links to porn sites in a children’s picture book, Apple would feel an enormous backlash and sales of children’s ebooks everywhere would plunge.

Before you say this would never happen, PG’s theory about the Internet is that, if it is possible, it will happen some day.

Books tend to have much longer lives than other Internet content. The links that go to perfectly benign locations in year one may go to somewhere entirely different in year five after the owner of the domain has let its registration lapse and someone else buys the domain name.

This very thing happened to a website that PG formerly visited on a regular basis. Apparently, a large porn video operation vacuums up discarded domain names that have had a reasonable number of visitors in the past.

From FutureBook:

Pottermore picked up the Digital Strategy of the Year award at The Bookseller Industry Awards, beating an incredibly strong shortlist that included Orion’s SF Gateway, Nosy Crow, Kobo, Random House, Harlequin, Penguin and Bloomsbury. I thought it was worth reflecting on the award and why Pottermore won it.

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Pottermore did not win the award simply because it had the Harry Potter brand, it won because of the vision, and because of the execution of that vision. Pottermore could have been a disaster. If you want the background here it is: Pottermore, before its launch, was being written off. The strategy, as stated at its slightly premature announcement, looked overly ambitious, and what we had seen of the site up until the launch point, seemed a touch flakey. On the e-book side, all we really knew was that OverDrive was involved, and even that had some shaking their heads. Few could square the circle on how Pottermore would live up to its promise of making the e-books widely available across all devices from one location.

On launch everything changed, and changed immediately. For weeks it dominated the conversation among the digerati, as we all marvelled at its chutzpah and looked under the hood.

To be precise, Pottermore did four things incredibly well for which the words ‘game changer’ apply. First, it created a commercial e-book platform that was as least as good as Amazon’s. In fact, it was better. Via Pottermore I can put an e-book file on multiple devices (the site lists more than 25), something even Amazon does not allow its customers to do. This is what Project Z should have been, it is what Anobii or Bookish might have become (perhaps they still can). There is a debate to be had around interoperability, and when we have it, we could do worse that look at Pottermore for the solution.

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Fourth, it extended the Potter brand into the digital world, and crucially made use of the wealth of content available to it to create a familiar and immersive space for fans. With The Book of Spells it pushed that content further, walking a fine line between book and game, and along the way creating a new type of experience.

Link to the rest at FutureBook

From MediaShift E-books:

MediaShift and PBS are releasing a new line of e-books (and print-on-demand books) based on content from the MediaShift network of sites. We aim to keep our books simple, helpful and timely. The content is based on insightful stories from MediaShift, updated and expanded for reading on your favorite e-reader or tablet device.

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Your Guide to Cutting the Cord to Cable TV

. . . .

How to Self-Publish Your Book

by Carla King

Did you ever consider self-publishing your own book but were daunted by the complex process of actually doing it? Self-published author and expert Carla King gives a simple step-by-step guide to self-publishing your book as an e-book or print book. Plot your success by choosing the reputable tools and services recommended here, along with techniques that will help your book succeed in the market that you choose.

Link to the rest at MediaShift E-books and thanks to Julia for the tip.

From Publishing Perspectives:

Xihinanet.com reports that over 80% of the people in China have read books online, but large numbers of them are not satisfied with the quality of literature being offered, according to an online survey by the China Youth Daily.

Some 88.8 percent of respondents said that they have read novels online, while 23.6% said that they were frequent readers.

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[O]nly 20% of those surveyed said that they were satisfied with the quality of books available online, and more than 30% said that they believed that most online novels were not “top quality” but were inferior pieces of work.

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives

From Techdirt:

We’ve never quite understood the purpose behind DRM, and have said so many times. It doesn’t stop infringement, because the DRM is always cracked, and the crack always leads to a clean version. And once you have a clean version, it’s available everywhere. Those who want to infringe will do so. So, in the end, the only thing DRM does is (1) annoy legitimate buyers and (2) lock in certain platforms such that the ebook platform providers (hello Amazon!) have much more power than the publishers.

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[A] blog post from Tor UK talking about the impact one year later with the key line being:

As it is, we’ve seen no discernible increase in piracy on any of our titles, despite them being DRM-free for nearly a year.

Given the point we made above, this is hardly surprising. In fact, it seems almost silly to look at all the fears some had about the move to DRM-free. In fact, it looked like Tor was a lot more worried about it than its authors. As the blog post notes, when it carefully approached its authors, including some best sellers, they were eager to support the move, with many applauding the publisher for taking that step, rather than being anti-consumer.

Link to the rest at Techdirt and thanks to Elizabeth for the tip.

From The Telegraph:

So I thought that the e-book revolution would be a chaotic orgy of vanity publishing, in which thousands of crazy scribblers could upload their constipated novels about the collapse of British values or their overwrought rehashings of Lord of the Rings.

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I reckoned two copies of each e-book would be downloaded – one by the author and the other by a delighted cousin who’d designed the cover. Having had three “proper” books published (Icebox and Mischief, novels published by Headline in 2000 and 2002; and Surely Not!, a humorous book co-written with Bill Dunn and published by Pocket Books in 1999), I intended to avoid the whole embarrassing palaver.

But circumstances change behaviours. The credibility of e-publishing took an early leap skywards in 2000 when Stephen King chose to serialise his novel The Plant online, reportedly making half-a-million dollars from the experiment. E-reader devices have since become acceptable, even hip, like screwtop wine. Amazon sells more e-books than tree books these days.

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The downside is that you’re also saying to hell with the significant benefits of having an editor in your corner. One solution is to join a group of mutually-supportive beta-readers, who will review your work-in-progress. If you can harness the feedback, it’s an effective blend of market research and mob-edit.

So, this month I launched a novel into the e-market – the culmination of several months’ slog, proofing the text, writing the blurb, doing the cover design (or, actually, paying someone to), getting the internal text layout right (or, actually, paying someone to), developing and launching a website (or, actually – yeah, that too). All the stuff that a publisher used to do, the e-author has to do for himself. Or pay someone to.

You also have to make endless commercial decisions. How much am I going to charge? What’s an attractive price for a novel in India? Did I, months or years ago, sit down and type the words “Once upon a time…” in the expectation of conducting board meetings with myself to thrash out medium-term revenue-recognition strategies?

And once the book is out there, the work really starts. Someone remarked that publishing a book was like dropping a rose petal into the Grand Canyon and waiting for the echo.

Link to the rest at The Telegraph

From Publishers Weekly:

Two years after HarperCollins’ Avon Books imprint launched the digital romance imprint Impulse, its William Morrow imprint announced plans for Witness, a “digital-original” mystery, suspense and thriller line. Witness will be overseen by Morrow executive editor Dan Mallory who noted that books for the line will consist of new titles, international bestsellers not previously available in the U.S. and newly digitized backlist classics.

According to Morrow, 100 titles have already been signed for Witness whose first 10 titles will be released in October. Although Witness titles will not automatically move into print, Morrow said that the HarperCollins sales group is always seeking out opportunities in print, “working with key retail accounts to execute tailored promotions in physical stores,” adding that more than 60% of Impulse titles have a print format.

Witness will feature the same royalty structure as Morrow/Avon’s other digital-first imprints: authors receive a 50% royalty once their book sells 10,000 copies (initial royalties start at 25%). They will not receive an advance.

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Pricing will be “market responsive” HC said, ranging from 99 cents to $2.99, and HC noted that all titles will be backed by a dedicated marketing team.

Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly and thanks to Barry for the tip.

Passive Guy hasn’t seen any of the contracts for HarperCollins’ digital imprints, but typically, ebook royalties from major publishers are calculated as a percentage of the net revenue the publisher receives from the ebookstore, not on list price as paper book royalties are calculated.

Applying KDP royalty rates and a net revenue royalty base, here are a couple examples of how the royalties might work after the first 10,000 copies of a book had been sold and the author’s share increased from 25% to 50%:

Amazon price: $2.99

Delivery Cost: $0.07

Net Revenues: $2.04 (70% royalty from Amazon)

Royalties: $1.02 (50% of net revenues)

Amazon price: $0.99

Delivery Cost: NA

Net Revenues: $0.34 (35% royalty from Amazon)

Royalties: $0.17 (50% of net revenues)

PG will look to those who are more familiar with the romance market than he for opinions on whether the prestige of HarperCollins translates into increased sales for its Impulse ebooks to romance readers. He would also be interested in reports on the quality of editing and covers that Impulse authors receive.