A response to Author Solutions and Penguin Random House – The Real Deal? from the indispensable David Gaughran:

[Author Solutions uses] a multi-pronged strategy:

1. Author Solutions runs a multitude of faux-informational websites purporting to provide independent advice to inexperienced writers. After filling out a questionnaire, these sites then present a selection of publishing “options” – all subsidiaries owned by Author Solutions, all terrible. Author Solutions spends a lot of time and money to ensure that these sites appear at the top of Google’s search results for any generic terms that a publisher-hunting newbie would use (I’m not linking to these sites as that will help their SEO, but you can Google anything like “I need a publisher” to see what I mean. Running variations of those searches will bring up more than 20 different fake sites, all operated by Author Solutions).

2. Author Solutions operates fake social media profiles of “independent publishing consultants” which are manned by Author Solutions staff, target the most inexperienced writers, and only recommend Author Solutions companies.

3. Author Solutions pressures customers into writing positive testimonials before releasing their books for publication. I received one such complaint the last time I posted about Author Solutions, from an AuthorHouse UK customer who said that they wouldn’t publish the book she had already paid for until she wrote the testimonial here (second from top).

4. Author Solutions partners with supposedly legitimate and independent organizations to give a veneer of respectability to their scammy operations (like Hay House, Writers Digest, Simon & Schuster, Lulu, HarperCollins, the Authors Guild, Harlequin, and various writers conferences).

. . . .

While I regularly read both The Bookseller and FutureBook, I’ve had plenty of issues with their editorial line, particularly with regard to their policy of never printing anything critical about Author Solutions – or, at least, not since they were purchased by Penguin.

In the last few months, this policy has extended to censoring comments critical of Author Solutions on their blogs, a policy they now share with Digital Book World - whose parent company has its own Author Solutions-powered vanity press.

Both of these companies depend on income from advertising and running conferences, and it appears they don’t want to be critical of a huge player like Author Solutions’ owner Penguin – especially with their impending merger with Random House, which will create the largest (by far) trade publisher in the world.

Link to the rest at Let’s Get Visible and thanks to Geoff for the tip.

Passive Guy says the vanity press business is just another variation on the contract scams that the “legitimate” operations of some big publishers foist on unwary authors.

Without spending time blowing his own horn or claiming to be the smartest guy around, PG has negotiated a lot of contracts with a lot of large organizations – Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, Citicorp, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Fidelity, Disney, etc., etc., etc. He’s currently negotiating contracts with companies that are household names for some of his non-literary clients. Suffice to say, PG has a sense of what’s generally considered reasonable in American business contracts.

When he first focused on a plain-vanilla publishing contract from a large New York publisher a few years ago, PG was astounded at how unfair some of the standard contract terms were for authors. As he saw other publishing contracts, he learned that publishers copied onerous terms from one another. The wording might be different, but the meaning was the same.

Additionally, it was not unusual to find what, to PG’s jaded eyes, were drafting techniques designed to disguise some of the more egregious contract provisions from authors who did not have experience dissecting contracts.

After having reviewed many, many agreements and proposed agreements between traditional publishers and authors, PG is prepared to say these contracts, as a group, stand apart from the general run of business agreements as conscience-shocking monstrosities.

No, they do not reflect the special snowflake nature of publishing. They’re simply designed to screw authors and give publishers control over authors and their work that is far beyond what is regarded as reasonable in the rest of American business.

So, when David justifiably rants about how Random Penguin’s Author Solutions and other vanity presses screw authors, PG suggests this is just the other side of the same coin as the non-vanity part of the business. Each side reflects the same attitude toward authors — geese to be plucked.

PG hasn’t written longer posts on specific publishing contract provisions for some time. You can find examples here, here, here, here, here, and here. If you use TPV’s blog search function to look for How to Read a Book Contract and cursor down, you’ll find more.  You can also search on the Contracts category to pull up everything, but this category covers much more than contract problems for authors.

We’re all familiar with breathless stories of big advances that appear in the publishing trade magazines. Just like Lotto winners, these featured authors experience a few weeks’ of bright lights for their big payoffs.

PG is convinced that a much bigger story is not receiving much press coverage – a lot of indie authors are making anywhere between a respectable income and a great deal of money.

PG doesn’t claim it’s a scientific sampling, but, in his conversations and emails with indie authors who were formerly trad-published, he has always found they’re making more as indies, doubling or tripling their best years working with a publisher.

Certainly there will be some that don’t fit this pattern, but the reports are common enough that PG is confident the experience is widespread.

Barry Eisler caused a big stir a few weeks ago when he said the only unique thing a publisher could deliver to an author was widespread print distribution. All other publisher services could be obtained elsewhere. Most important, big publishers and indie authors stood on an equal footing in accessing ebook distribution and sales.

Hugh Howey received a lot of press for his print-only publishing agreement with Simon & Schuster. He said he wouldn’t agree to any publishing agreement, even with a large advance, that required him to surrender his ebook rights.

The people who run Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing are low-key about promoting exactly how much indie authors are making on Amazon. However, given the painful decline of the Nook, in a very real way, KDP’s biggest competition, at least in the US, is traditional publishers. And the competition is not just for big-name authors. In PG’s experience, mid-list authors may have the most to gain from going indie.

Is a hot indie author better off taking a large advance or staying with KDP? The publishing Lotto stories make it seem like a large advance from a traditional publisher is the way to go. KDP hasn’t released any stories to offset those about tradpublishing’s jackpots.

In Passive Guy’s habitually humble opinion, KDP has a golden opportunity free for the taking. If PG were KDP’s king of marketing, here’s the kind of press release he would send out each month:

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

Amazon Payments to KDP Authors increase 79%

Amazon announced today that May royalties paid to Kindle Direct Publishing authors increased 79% over royalties paid in May, 2012. The amount of royalties paid by KDP has increased each month since it opened in 2007.

KDP is Amazon’s program that allows authors to publish their own works and sell them as ebooks on Amazon.

“Sales of self-published Kindle ebooks are going through the roof,” said Rex Riptide, director of KDP Author Relations. “Readers are excited to find fantastic new ebooks at reasonable prices from self-published authors. We’re excited to see royalty payments to our author customers grow with each passing month.”

Some KDP authors are generating sizeable incomes from their books. During May, 2013:

• The top-selling 50 authors publishing through KDP received an average of over $110,000 in monthly royalty payments.
• Over 20,000 KDP authors earned monthly royalty payments of more than $10,000.
• Over 60,000 KDP authors earned monthly royalty payments of more than $5,000.

 Bestselling zombie romance author Lilly LaRue said, “With my old publisher, I never made enough money to quit my job as a Nobel prize-winning research scientist. Nine months after I started self-publishing with KDP, I said good-bye to the lab and am writing full-time. I’ve never been happier.”

The release is a little over the top and the numbers are entirely fabricated, but you get the idea.

So, here’s the question for those of you who have published traditionally and are now self-publishing – Are you making more or less as an indie author than you did as a tradpubbed author?

For readers outside the United States, today is Memorial Day in the US.

While for many, the holiday is only a long weekend marking the beginning of summer, Memorial Day, originally called Decoration Day because flowers were used to decorate gravesites, was established in 1868, following the American Civil War to commemorate men and women who died while in military service.

PG took this photograph of the American military cemetery in rural Tuscany near Florence. Most soldiers buried there died in World War II, fighting in Italy.

From The Bookseller:

Orange Prize-winner Ann Patchett has warned that authors who decide to shun traditional publishing deals and instead use self-publishing channels to “cut out the middle man” are turning their back on vital publishing services they really need.

. . . .

Patchett told The Bookseller that authors should become more involved in the industry and take greater responsibility as part of a wider ecosystem, just as book-buyers should think twice about purchasing through the cheapest channel, like Amazon, if it means they might lose their local bookshop. She also said authors who shunned traditional publishing deals in favour of self-publishing, thinking they would be able to earn more money, should think carefully about the step.

“If you had asked me two years ago, I would not have thought it was my responsibility. But I do think authors need to get involved with all sort of aspects of publishing and health of the publishing industry,” she said. “This is not every man working for themselves, we need to think and work as a business. Authors have been protected for a long time, we are very well cared for, but we need to think about our other partners, from bookshops to publishing and self-publishing.”

Regarding self-publishing, she added: “There are people who want to put books on Amazon because they cannot get publishing deals and that is understandable. But there are some authors who could get published in the mainstream but because they are trying to make more money, they think the best way is to self publish. They are cutting out the middle man whose services they really need, such as the editor and the publicist.”

Link to the rest at The Bookseller and thanks to David for the tip.

PG has just about decided that the differences between indie publishing and traditional publishing are so great that nearly anyone immersed in traditional publishing has almost nothing useful to say about indie publishing.

One of the most fundamental mistakes someone who is an expert in one field can make is to assume their expertise is transferable to another.

Thus, those who have deep experience with traditional publishing assume indie publishing is the same except without advances or some other such idiocy. Those who have lots of experience with bookstores assume Amazon is the same except with lower prices.

The idea that an indie author pursues his/her path because day-to-day life in indie world is superior in every way to traditional publishing with all its accoutrements and hangers-on is terra incognita for most in traditional publishing.

But, the services! How can we forget the services that traditional publishing offers?

Editors? Indie authors can choose the one they want to work with instead of arguing semi-colons with a fresh-faced and clueless English major who is somebody’s niece.

Publicists? You mean people who order authors around and insist on twenty Tweets per day?

Publishers? Ah, yes,those who present you with medieval contracts, take most of your money, never answer emails and send you disappointing checks with impenetrable royalty statements every six months.

What professionals get paid every six months? Lawyers? Doctors? Accountants? Teachers? Publishers? Editors? Publicists? No, no, no, no, no, no and no. Even sex workers get paid more often (and usually better) than traditional authors.

Even if indie life didn’t pay more, it would be worth it to a lot of authors not to have to deal with so many annoying and largely useless “services” they don’t need from people they didn’t choose.

Passive Guy recently received an inquiry from the proprietor of a blog he enjoys. The question boiled down to, “How does The Passive Voice attract so many great comments and discussions?”

PG doesn’t really know the answer to that question.

He does know he is grateful for all of your comments. As he has said before, he believes the comments are the best part of this blog and continues to learn a great deal from them. This would be a really dull place if PG were the only one posting.

PG says thanks to all those who leave comments, whether they do so frequently or occasionally. Keep them coming.

From Futurebook:

So there’s been another spat reminiscent of the Stephen Leather equivalent at Harrogate last year. This time involving US self pubber Barry Eisler. [Explanation here]

Apparently agents and publishers don’t like being told they risk being redundant. Quite a few people have commented on this – at considerable length, so I’ll keep this brief.

Of the current top five (as of 25th April 2014) kindle bestsellers in the USA, three are self pubbed, one is published by a small, specialist ebook publisher and only one is published by a mainstream, bricks and mortar publisher.

. . . .

Barry Eisler, for example, happily peddles the canard that he had never considered that self publishing might work better for some genre’s than others.

. . . .

Self publishing suits Barry Eisler – great. It doesn’t suit thousands of others, nor is it likely to. The trouble is, as far as publishers are concerned, that is beside the point – self publishing suits commercially savvy, genre defined authors brilliantly. The authors who have historically been the commercial driving force of all major publishers. If the King’s, the Grisham’s and Patterson’s of the future are going to be self published where does that leave traditional publishers?

Link to the rest at Futurebook and thanks to Ant for the tip.

Passive Guy was interested in the statement that self-publishing suits commercially savvy authors but that thousands of authors aren’t commercially savvy, so traditional publishing will still have plenty of books to publish.

Long-time traditionally-published authors have been encouraged by publishers and agents not to be commercially savvy. Don’t worry about this contract stuff or how your book is promoted or money, just go back to your desk and write. Certainly, some authors, perhaps even most authors, have accepted this role.

That was before there was an alternative.

Before indie publishing, there wasn’t a big financial penalty to be paid for accepting the passive non-business role. Savvy author or not, traditional publishing was the only game in town and anybody who wanted to be an author would receive the same treatment and the same contract terms (a handful of mega-selling authors notwithstanding). There was not a significant upside for a typical author to cultivate his/her marketing or management abilities.

In the past couple of years, many traditionally-published authors have discovered they pay a substantial financial penalty if they’re not commercially savvy and continue with traditional publishing. Joe Konrath has shared lots of numbers about his writing income from his traditionally-published and self-published books and the picture isn’t pretty for traditional publishers and their authors.

In all the hissy fits that publishers and agents have about what Barry and Joe and an increasing number of other authors say about the decreasing value that traditional publishing offers to talented authors, nobody seems to recognize the core issue.

Self-publishing is about the money.

In short, an ever-increasing number of authors, novices and veterans, are realizing they can make more money self-publishing than they can going the traditional route. It’s not a religious issue. It’s pure economic self-interest.

All the insults coming from publishers, agents and their pet authors won’t change that fundamental fact.

Unless you have the business sense of a three-week-old kitten, if you’re a talented author (really talented or modestly talented), you will put more cash in the bank if you self-publish than if you sign a contract with a traditional publisher.

PG’s statement applies to 99% of authors. Are there outliers who make more money with a $2 million advance than they would self-publishing those books? Sure. If you’re an outlier, follow the money. If you’re not an outlier and you follow the money, you’ll probably end up in indieworld.

If you want to follow something other than money, you may end up in all sorts of different places. Just don’t complain about your day job or not being able to focus on your writing.

To be fair, a number of small innovative publishers are offering much better financial terms than authors will receive from New York that effectively lower the charges for services a publisher can provide – marketing, promotion, expanded distribution, etc.

The value proposition these publishers offer is that, in part because they do marketing, promotion and distribution all the time, they’re better at it than most authors are. However, by paying authors much higher royalties than they’ll receive from traditional publishers, these new model publishers are not charging nearly as much for marketing, distribution, etc., as a traditional publisher does.

PG’s advice for professional authors or those who want to be professional authors: Follow the money.

From author Brita Addams:

There has been much written about the problems that authors are having with Noble Romance. My situation isn’t unique, but quite typical. The problems are nothing new, but the nature of some of them is certainly new.

Inexperience, arrogance, and disdain for authors has characterized the management of Noble Romance and authors are suffering for it. NRP now has a CEO who interprets contracts the way he wishes, apparently feels a firm release schedule isn’t necessary, doesn’t get books to third party sites in a timely fashion, and in some cases not at all. His continued admonishments to authors on their email behavior has raised the ire of many.

. . . .

Even before her departure, Jill Noble Shearer had raised the ire of many authors. She made many promises that were never kept and then with her departure, she left authors scrambling, wondering if her promises would be kept by the new powers-that-be.

. . . .

In the hours and days that followed Jill’s departure, her daughter attacked several authors, including myself, with some nasty comments, until she was finally fired from her “management” position at Noble. By that action, we thought that new management was on the side of the authors. Little did we know.

. . . .

In a phone conversation I had with him in early August, Mr. Gombart promised to get all of Noble’s books up on as many outlets as possible, because distribution was the most important thing. It made sense. I walked away from that conversation confident that Noble was in good hands and that Mr. Gombart would make things right.

Then things deteriorated. I informed Mr. Gombart of my agreement with Jill Noble re: reversion of my rights, and he told me on the phone, “Jill did not have the right to make such an agreement. Jim Noble is the only one who can revert rights and he is not inclined to do so.”

. . . .

At this point, he took the tack that he was “going to teach authors how to act.” He refused to speak to anyone who was upset, who spoke of reversion, well, anyone who disagreed with him in any fashion. See below the email where he chastises me for my email tone. This is not isolated. He spoke such things to me and others, on the telephone and in emails. He apparently doesn’t wish to hear any opinion but his own. No logic but his own, no ideas, but those that have put Noble on the path of destruction that it is on now.

Many authors wanted out. We all put up with the willy-nilly way that Jill ran the company, and then Mr. Gombart refused to listen to anything that was contrary to his agenda, something the authors are still wondering about. Certified letters have gone wholly unanswered, yet he claimed recently on Piers Anthony’s blog that no letters have gone unanswered. That is a bald faced lie and every NRP author I know will say the same.

. . . .

On February 7, when Serenity’s Dream still hadn’t been put up on All Romance Ebooks, I wrote to Mr. Gombart.

I wondered when you will be getting Serenity up on All Romance ebooks. I see it isn’t there and a good share of my sales have come from there, behind Amazon of course. My tour officially starts on Sunday and I’d like to have the link should people wish to shop there. 
Hope all is well,
Thank you in advance,
Brita

On February 7, I received this reply:

I basically do not work with them, them represent 0.9% of our overall sales.
I may do it for you in the next future but I have other emergencies.
I hope you understand the logic behind that.
Jean Marc Philippe Gombart
CEO
Noble Romance Publishing

. . . .

On Sun, Mar 3, 2013 at 9:32 PM, Jean Gombart wrote:

Britta,

As I told you I will do it and will correct what need to be corrected but you need to understand that as a publisher I have total control on with whom I do want to work. I do not have neither contractual or moral obligation to work with Are ever if I do not want to work with them. I am doing that to please you, not because I have to.

As a mark of courtesy, I would be delighted if you would change your email tone. The is not the way I like to work with people and if that does not improve soon, I may end up not working with Are afterward.

Nice words and elegant style will lead us to a great working relationship, please try harder.

Best Regards,
Jean Marc Philippe Gombart
CEO
Noble Romance Publishing

. . . .

Every Noble Romance author, that I am in touch with, had mistaken royalty payments in December, followed by a drastic reduction in their royalties over the last two or three months. My intention is to have my representative visit the Noble offices in October and audit my records there, in their entirety from 2010 to the current time.

Link to the rest at Brita Addams

Passive Guy has no first-hand knowledge of the situation with Noble Romance, but he will observe that the problems Ms. Addams reports are similar to those experienced by some other authors with a publisher that has financial problems and/or takes on new management that may or may not understand how to run a publishing business.

As a general proposition, authors should carefully research the history of a publisher before signing any contract with it. 30 minutes on Google will usually disclose if other authors have experienced problems.

If the publisher has provisions in its publishing contract prohibiting the author from disparaging the publisher, even if Google does not disclose any unhappy authors, you can assume the publisher has them.

If an author is doing business with a publisher and observes deviations from professional behavior – promises unkept, schedules unmet, one employee saying one thing while another employee says something different, missed or late royalty payments – at a minimum, the author should usually cut her losses and not submit any more books to that publisher.

One of PG’s most common pieces of legal advice is, “Don’t do business with flakes.”

From publishing consultatant Mike Shatzkin:

There are three overarching realities that are determining the future course of book publishing. They are clear and they are inexorable:

Scale, and its close cousin “critical mass”, is the ability to use size as a competitive advantage in any endeavor;

Verticalization, or being in sync with the inherent capability of the Internet to deliver anything of interest in an audience-specific way; and

Atomization, or the ability for any person or entity to perform the most critical component of publishing — making content available and accessible to anybody anywhere — without capital and without an organization dedicated to distribution.

. . . .

In the 20th century, scale in publishing was really an internal concept. Big publishers had more resources to sign books, get to bookstores, and roll out marketing than smaller ones. Barnes & Noble and Borders had supply chain and cost advantages over independent bookstores, except that Ingram and other wholesalers lent their scale to provide partial compensation. Bigger literary agencies had negotiated more boilerplate agreements than smaller ones and often had helpful relationships that went beyond publishing, but a single operator could still cultivate enough editors to make a legitimate case that he or she could place a book as effectively as the giants.

But that’s changed entirely in the past 10 years. Now publishing operates in a world increasingly controlled by Amazon, Apple, and Google, all companies that make far more money outside of books than through books. One Big Six CEO observed to me about five years ago that the time had passed when s/he could call all the biggest trading partners of their company and reach the CEO instantly. Penguin Random House has merged into a publishing company that will control about half the most commercial titles in the marketplace, but any suggestion that their size will enable them to dictate much to Amazon, Apple, or Google is deluded.

What Random House can do is apply scale against other publisher competitors. And they will.

Critical mass is a scale-related concept but it is also a component of verticalization. When a publisher, or any aggregator, has enough material to allow it to ignore competition in a consumer offer, it has achieved the effective barrier to entry that scale also provides. For example: subscription models for general books are a very difficult commercial proposition because the biggest agents for the biggest authors wouldn’t want their titles included. But Amazon might just have so many titles they can make available through a subscription offering that they can do it successfully even without the top of the bestseller list.

. . . .

The barrier to entry for book publishing was always relatively low compared to other media: magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, and movies would all require much more of a financial and organizational commitment than was required to publish a book. But there definitely was a fence around the book publishing world, and the position of “gatekeeper” was both well-earned and well-rewarded.

But those days are gone too.

As of this writing in April 2013, sales of any book of narrative reading will, depending on topic or genre, be 20% to 60% in ebooks, which requires no inventory investment and minimal distribution infrastructure. Sales of the printed books — the other 40% to 80% — will be anywhere from 25% to 50% through online channels. Those sales can also be achieved (largely through Amazon) without an investment in inventory, printed at the moment they’re ordered.

Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files

PG will observe that large organizations dealing with disruptive changes to their businesses have a number of very challenging problems:

+ They don’t have the right employees. The employees necessary for the old business are probably not the right employees for the new business. This is a particularly acute problem in the executive suite.

Hiring a bunch of new employees doesn’t work for a variety of reasons. For one thing, there is typically an age difference. The old business has older employees, including a lot of lifers. The old business doesn’t realize how weird its corporate culture feels to employees necessary to operate the new business. Ultimately, regardless of what the CEO says, the culture doesn’t want to change. The old employees are masters of the politics of dealing with current management and know how to shoot down or slow down new initiatives.

New employees and what seem to the old organization to be radical new ideas are treated like bacteria invading a human body. The immune response of the old organization is powerful and manifests itself in many ways. Instead of focusing solely on building the new, valuable time of the new employees is involved in dealing with the immune response. If the organization has hired really talented new employees, those employees will leave for greener pastures where there aren’t any immune responses, leaving the big new thing left half-done. If the organization tries to tie talented new employees down with employment contracts, they’ll responde with low morale, start leaving early and spend their evenings and weekends working on independent projects.

+ The size and resources that give organizations access to scale in the old business slow them way down as they try to adjust to the rapidly-changing new business. Yes, they can eliminate departments and fire people who are no longer needed, but that requires time and places a tremendous drag on the morale of the survivors. Having a billion dollars invested in people and infrastructure necessary for the old business and irrelevant for the new one is a big management problem and a boat anchor for a company that needs to move quickly.

+ Finances preclude dumping the old business model as quickly as is strategically desirable. What CEO is going to give up a billion dollar revenue stream that exists today but will be a $50 million dollar revenue stream in five years?

Current revenue is the shiniest of shiny objects for a typical financially-oriented executive. Instead of putting all resources into the potential five billion dollar revenue stream of five years into the future, the executive deludes him/herself that the organization can do two things well, one entrenched in the past while the other pioneers the future.

When the real (as opposed to perceived) competition is 100% focused on the future, this strategy almost never works.

The tech world is littered with the corpses of highly-impressive companies with really smart CEO’s who failed when they tried to ride two horses at the same time. Yes, some companies are able to be successful in lots of different businesses, but none of those businesses are typically facing a serious technology disruption.

From FutureBook:

The publishing industry is struggling to find the metaphors that describe the transformation that is taking over the sector. This is one conclusion from Digital Minds, the annual digital conference that acts as the Sunday-prelude to the London Book Fair.

First up in the metaphor-wars was Pan Macmillan’s ebullient digital director Sara Lloyd who chaired the conference. Digital was akin to climate change, she said, and it also now has few deniers. Like global warming, the way we describe digital has altered as our understanding of it has, and while it will threaten some parts of the business, other bits will survive and adapt. “Digital weirded our world, and for a while we didn’t recognise the seasons as those seasons changed.” Unlike, climate change, however, as Lloyd admitted, this was a change we could–in fact should–embrace.

. . . .

One of the best sessions at Digital Minds was the session on ‘start-ups’ and how publishers could work collaboratively with them. The session began by going down the usual route of start-ups telling publishers how best to work with them, but was turned on its head by Penguin’s Molly Barton, who explained in great detail just what a publisher, such as Penguin, was doing to engage with start-ups.

She advised start-ups to have clear message, and strong business plan before approaching a publisher in order to quickly find the right people to talk to. She advised them to talk among themselves and “competitively reposition” themselves if they find other companies working on the same problems. She also cautioned against too much “pivoting”, which might mean the publisher lose faith in the executives and their commitment to their idea. Anyone who thinks publishers don’t get the start-up scene, should meet Molly. But bring a business plan.

Link to the rest at FutureBook

Passive Guy says the most valuable startups for publishers are talented authors. Increasingly, such authors are not particularly interested in working with traditional publishers in part because they’ve lost “faith in the executives and their commitment to” treating those authors as valued partners in deed as well as in word.

At this stage in the disruption of the traditional publishing business, publishers need authors more than authors need publishers. Smart authors already realize this fact when publishers attempt to engage them. This truth will continue to become more and more obvious as additional time passes.

Perhaps it’s time for authors to put something like this on their websites:

Publishers wishing to submit proposals for publishing any of author’s books should send them to queries@author.com.  Proposals should be no more than 250 words and include the amount of the proposed advance, royalty rates for hard copy and ebook editions, the number of years of publishing rights requested and the amount of the guaranteed promotion budget for each book. Proposals that ask for rights for a period of longer than ten years or include ebook royalties of less than 50% of net revenue will not be considered. Regretfully, Author does not have time to respond to proposals that do not meet these requirements.

From TechCrunch:

After the U.S. cleared the deal, the European Commission has officially approved the proposed merger between two of the biggest book publishers in the world, Random House and Penguin.

. . . .

As it is seeking “new digital publishing models,” the merger has been widely commented on as a way to counter Amazon’s influence on the ebook market.

. . . .

The so-called agency model partially disappeared with the settlement of Apple and those book publishers. Book publishers now have a very thin margin to negotiate with Amazon to increase ebook pricing. According to publishers, the $9.99 standard created with the introduction of the first Kindle is not enough for newly released bestsellers.

That’s why the Penguin and Random House merger makes sense. The new entity will leverage its size to dictate its own terms.

. . . .

In other words, it could create a publisher-owned Kindle Store competitor, something that is highly needed to end Amazon’s dominance on the ebook market.

Link to the rest at TechCrunch

PG thinks readers ultimately determine what price is acceptable for ebooks. Amazon has done a good job of convincing readers that ebooks shouldn’t cost more than $9.99 and indie authors are convincing them that $2.99 – 4.99 is even a better price.

Artificially elevated prices only work if readers believe there is a limited number of interesting books they haven’t read. The Big Publishing/Barnes & Noble strategy has been to reduce the number of available books in physical bookstores and use the promo tables in the front of the store to focus readers’ attention on a small number of books.

Unfortunately for this strategy (or maybe because of this strategy), readers are not going to Barnes & Noble so much any more. In fact, the company’s announced plan is to close about one-third of its existing bookstores over the next decade. In the history of planned downsizing, businesses usually end up getting smaller much faster than they plan to do so, so PG expects disappearing Barnes & Noble stores to become a more and more common phenomenon.

A world with disappearing physical bookstores is almost an ideal environment for Amazon’s continued expansion. The readers who formerly shopped at their local Barnes & Noble will now go to Amazon where there is no shortage of interesting books readers haven’t read and no shortage of price competition.

If Penguin House is dedicated to the proposition of forcing ebook prices up, it must have one giant blockbuster after another. This means huge advances for the winners, but it also means that non-blockbuster authors will be treated even worse than they have been in recent years. Such treatment will tend to push smart authors toward indie world.

The must-have blockbuster strategy will also result in increased earnings volatility. If a couple of blockbusters fizzle, the year is shot.

If a big Penguin House ebook doesn’t sell at $24.99, the publisher is caught in a bind. Does it reduce the price to $9.99 and teach readers that this is a great price for an ebook or stick with the higher price and blow up the quarter’s earnings?

PG thinks a “strategy” of building a Penguin House ebookstore to compete with Amazon is foolish in the extreme, a path that only executives who know nothing about etailing and dealing with real customers would pursue. Since that profile describes the management of Penguin and Random House, the merged company may well try to take on Amazon with its own estore.

PG will offer a tag line for the Penguin House ebookstore at no charge – “Fewer books, but higher prices!”