Business End

Articles about the business aspects of publishing and self-publishing.

The Dreaded Author Platform

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This post, from literary agent Rachelle Gardner, originally appeared on her Rants & Ramblings On Life As A Literary Agent blog on 6/15/09.

Last week at the Write-To-Publish conference, the one topic that kept coming up in conversations, panels, and workshops was AUTHOR PLATFORM. Yes, the hated p-word!

I explained again and again that publishing just ain’t what it used to be. Gone are the days when publishers were solely responsible for the marketing of a book.

Today’s audience is more segmented than it has ever been before. People have more options for their leisure time than ever before – 600 channels on television, movies on demand, video games and Wii, and then of course, the Internet. It’s harder than ever to attract people to books. The way to do it is increasingly through personal connection, and that means YOU, the author, making connections with your readers.

(This discussion applies mostly to non-fiction writers, but you novelists, take note. It will help you, too, if you want strong sales on your book.)

It has never been more crucial for authors to play a major part in marketing themselves, BUT it has never been easier. Where are readers hanging out these days? The Internet. That’s the best place for you to find readers for your books.

The Internet has leveled the playing field. With a well-written and compelling blog, you have the potential to build a significant platform. If you take the time to research website optimization and do everything recommended to build traffic on your blog, you can build a sizable audience in a matter of months. Then when you begin to use Twitter and Facebook strategically, you can grow your audience exponentially.

You can, and you must.
 

Read the rest of the post on Rachelle Gardner’s Rants & Ramblings On Life As A Literary Agent blog.

Amazon Kindle Numbers

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This post, from bestselling mainstream author J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing blog on 6/11/09.

Elsewhere on the Internets, people have been referring to my previous posts about the Amazon Kindle (here and here) and one of the things they were interested in is numbers.

So here they are. Thoughts, explanations, and predictions to follow.


AFRAID by Jack Kilborn, a horror novel, was released on the Kindle on April 1. During the first month of its release, it was available for $1.99 on Kindle. During that month, it sold over 10,400 copies.

SERIAL by Jack Kilborn and Blake Crouch was released for free on the Kindle May 20th. It’s a horror novella. As of June 10, it has been downloaded on Kindle more than 34,000 times. SERIAL also appears on www.blakecrouch.com, and has had 12,000 downloads, along with 7000 downloads from the Sony Reader website.

Both AFRAID and SERIAL were released by my publisher, Grand Central. They promoted both titles on Amazon using sidebars on Amazon.com, and on the Amazon Kindle blog.

On April 8th, I began to upload my own books to Kindle. As of today, June 11, at 11:40am, here is how many copies I’ve sold, and how much they’ve earned.

THE LIST, a technothriller/police procedural novel, is my biggest seller to date, with 1612 copies sold. Since April this has earned $1081.75. I originally priced it at $1.49, and then raised it to $1.89 this month to see if the sales would slow down. The sales sped up instead.

ORIGIN, a technothriller/horror occult adventure novel, is in second place, with 1096 copies sold and $690.18. As with The List and my other Kindle novels, I upped the price to $1.89.

SUCKERS is a thriller/comedy/horror novella I wrote with Jeff Strand. It also includes some Konrath and Strand short stories. 449 copies, $306.60.

DISTURB is a medical thriller. 371 copies, $234.21.

SHOT OF TEQUILA is a crime novel featuring Jack Daniels. 342 copies, $164.02.

55 PROOF is a collection of 55 short stories. 217 copies, $138.99.

PLANTER’S PUNCH is a Jack Daniels novella I co-wrote with Tom Schreck. 154 copies, $107.10.

DIRTY JOKES & VULGAR POEMS is a collection of over 1000 of my Twitters, one-liners, and funny poems. 37 copies sold, $18.57.

So far on Kindle I’ve earned $2781.35 in 64 days.

PRICING: I’ve kept my collaborations priced at $1.59, and upped my other books to $1.89. Also, I reduced the price of my poetry collection to 80 cents.

What I’ve learned about pricing: Not much. I went on some Kindle forums and asked what the magic price point is, and got answers ranging between free and five bucks.

I’ve kept my books under two bucks for several reasons. First, because my intent is to use these books to hook readers and get them to buy my other, in-print titles. I give these same books away on my website for free, so charging Kindle users more than a few bucks doesn’t seem fair.

That said, raising the price from $1.59 to $1.89 didn’t cause any drop in sales or Amazon ranking. In fact, my Kindle numbers have been steadily going up.

I don’t know what the perfect combination of price/profit is… yet. Authors make 35% of their suggested retail price (Amazon then discounts this.) So I can raise the price, sell fewer books, but still make a greater profit.

For me, however, this isn’t all about profit. It’s about units sold. Which also gets confusing.
 

Read the rest of the post on A Newbie’s Guide to Publishing.

What We Saw When We Looked Through Their Eyes

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This article, by Steve Outing and Laura Ruel, originally appeared on Eyetrack III. While the article is geared toward the designers of news websites, it provides invaluable insight into how visitors’ eyes track across any website—information you can put to use when designing or redesigning your own website or blog.

News websites have been with us for about a decade, and editors and designers still struggle with many unanswered questions: Is homepage layout effective? … What effect do blurbs on the homepage have compared to headlines? … When is multimedia appropriate? … Are ads placed where they will be seen by the audience?

The Eyetrack III research released by The Poynter Institute, the Estlow Center for Journalism & New Media, and Eyetools could help answer those questions and more. Eyetracking research like this won’t provide THE answer to those questions. But combined with other site metrics already used by news website managers — usability testing, focus groups, log analysis — the Eyetrack III findings could provide some direction for improving news websites.

In Eyetrack III, we observed 46 people for one hour as their eyes followed mock news websites and real multimedia content. In this article we’ll provide an overview of what we observed. You can dive into detailed Eyetrack III findings and observations on this website — use the navigation at the top and left of this page — at any time. If you don’t know what eyetracking is, get oriented by reading the Eyetrack III FAQ.

Let’s get to the key results of the study, but first, a quick comment on what this study is and is not: It is a preliminary study of several dozen people conducted in San Francisco. It is not an exhaustive exploration that we can extrapolate to the larger population. It is a mix of "findings" based on controlled variables, and "observations" where testing was not as tightly controlled. The researchers went "wide," not "deep" — covering a lot of ground in terms of website design and multimedia factors. We hope that Eyetrack III is not seen as an end in itself, but rather as the beginning of a wave of eyetracking research that will benefit the news industry. OK, let’s begin. …

At the core: Homepage layout

While testing our participants’ eye movements across several news homepage designs, Eyetrack III researchers noticed a common pattern: The eyes most often fixated first in the upper left of the page, then hovered in that area before going left to right. Only after perusing the top portion of the page for some time did their eyes explore further down the page.

 

How a typical site visitor's eyes move across a web page

(image copyright Eyetrack III, The Poynter Institute)

Depending on page layout, of course, this pattern can vary. The image above is a simplistic representation of the most common eye-movement pattern we noticed across multiple homepage designs. (In other words, don’t take what you see above too seriously.)

Now also consider another Eyetrack observation: Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page — especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right. Photographs, contrary to what you might expect (and contrary to findings of 1990 Poynter eyetracking research on print newspapers), aren’t typically the entry point to a homepage. Text rules on the PC screen — both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.

A quick review of 25 large news websites — here’s a list of them — reveals that 20 of them place the dominant homepage image in the upper left. (Most news sites have a consistent page design from day to day; they don’t often vary the layout as a print newspaper would.)

We observed that with news homepages, readers’ instincts are to first look at the flag/logo and top headlines in the upper left. The graphic below shows the zones of importance we formulated from the Eyetrack data. While each site is different, you might look at your own website and see what content you have in which zones.

Read the rest of the article on Eyetrack III.

An Author's Field Guide To Internet Trolls

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This is a cross-posting of an entry from my Indie Author blog, dated 6/8/09.

‘Author Platform’ is the buzzphrase of the moment. If you’re doing a good job of creating and maintaining that all-important communication channel between yourself and the public, it’s only a matter of time before the web trolls descend upon you to ruin things for everyone.

Herewith, I present a relevant excerpt from Ms. Gertrude Strumpf-Hollingsworth’s “Encyclopedia of Annoyances, Bothers and Frustrations”, which provides a valuable natural history lesson in the identification and management of the species most likely to darken an author’s virtual doorstep. 

Introduction

The Internet Troll (webicus infuriatum) is a hardy, highly adaptable family of parasites with established populations all over the web. Most leading Techno-Naturalists classify it as a viral organism due the fact that it reproduces by infecting members of targeted populations. Once exposed to webicus, susceptible individuals soon display the aggression, vitriol and boorishness which are the identifying hallmarks of all Trolls.

Hiding behind a pseudonym, webicus will quickly become the dominant element in any online ecosystem which provides it with a steady supply of attention and argument. In fact, webicus is so skilled in monopolizing these resources that it frequently drives off larger, but more peaceable, local populations. While all Trolls are destructive, there are perhaps none so pernicious as the subspecies which target author websites and online writer communities. Armed with a voluble nature and much larger vocabularies than other Trolls, these are particularly troublesome. 

The Queen Bee/King Drone (lordicus cliqueium)

Behavior: Lordicus begins by befriending charter members and site owner/administrators alike with its initial friendliness and offers of assistance. With favors banked and loyalties established, lordicus reveals its true nature when another community member voices a dissenting view, or becomes as well-liked as lordicus. In either case, lordicus and its followers close ranks to attack or freeze out the other member, claiming to speak on behalf of the entire community.

Control: The only effective method of lordicus control is a strongly-worded email from the site owner or administrator. Lordicus’ response is invariably a dramatic, martyred leave-taking from the site, after which it will continue to lurk and foment dissention among other members via off-site communications.

Identifying Call: A shrill, “Who do you think you are?”, sometimes followed by a low-pitched, “Nobody cares what you think, anyway.” 

The Puffed Pedant (self-importantia verbosia)

Behavior: Self-importantia is known for its lengthy, patronizing deconstructions of other members’ writing, in which it takes great pleasure in pointing out every broken rule of grammar, plotting, characterization and the like, regardless of whether or not said rules were broken intentionally, as a stylistic choice. Given that s.i. is never a published author in its own right, one might expect other community members to routinely disregard its remarks. However, s.i. posts with such smug conviction that it effects a sort of Jedi Mind Trick on the least experienced and most gullible members of the community.

Control: Since s.i. doesn’t technically overstep a site’s Terms of Service, there’s little the site owner/admin can do to put a stop to its antics. It was once thought that exposing the Pedant to the works of Kurt Vonnegut or Anthony Burgess would humble and silence the creature, but field studies have proven it will merely label such works “the exception that proves the rule” and emerge both unscathed and uneducated by the experience. Depriving s.i. of the attention, argument, and writing samples it craves usually proves more effective.

Identifying Call: A repetitive, clucking, “Do your homework.”  

The Prickly Recluse (hypersensitivium rex)

Behavior: This species is known for its uncanny ability to incorrectly interpret the tone or meaning of any other member posts, regardless of how innocuous those posts may be, invariably choosing the most negative or insulting meaning possible and taking that meaning entirely personally. From there, hypersensitivium will repeat and repost its incorrect interpretation in an effort to rally support and sympathy for itself.

Control: First-time victims generally interpret the Recluse’s behavior as innocent misunderstanding, and will usually attempt to resolve the matter with an apologetic, clarifying post. However, since hypersensitivium will misinterpret the palliative post as well, such efforts are destined to fail. A warning post or email from the site administrator will generate one last, self-pitying post from the Recluse, followed by several weeks of absence from the site. It is from this latter behavior that the Recluse gets its name. 

Identifying Call: A sharp, striking, "How dare you!" 

The PubPro Mimic (wannabeum knowitallia)

Behavior: This type of Troll masquerades as a publishing industry professional with many years of relevant experience, yet never offers any proof of its claims and simply ignores all requests for such. Nevertheless, using its supposed trove of expertise as bait, wannabeum easily attracts a cadre of insecure writers looking for a “secret handshake” or other insider knowledge that might give them an edge in getting published.

Since wannabeum lacks the expertise to which it lays claim, its haughty assertions about writing, getting an agent, publishing and bookselling are largely false. Even so, any attempt to correct the Mimic directly, or even to merely post an alternative viewpoint, will backfire in a firestorm of belittling recriminations from the Mimic, which will rely on its claimed expertise as all the support or proof its posts require.

Control: Catching wannabeum in a resumé lie will cause it to immediately vacate a site, but this is nearly impossible since wannabeum never posts under its real name and is careful to keep the identifying details of its claimed career experience vague.

Identifying Call: “If you’d worked in the publishing business for as many years as I have, you’d know how ridiculous you sound.”

The Equalizer (evenus stevenus)

Behavior: Evenus is the self-appointed score keeper and referee of any community it inhabits. Evenus keeps constant track of who has shared good or bad news, who has posted congratulations or sympathy, and whether or not such congratulations or sympathies are adequately effusive and timely. Anyone failing to pass the Equalizer’s test is subjected to the same kind of freeze-out favored by the Queen Bee / King Drone, but unlike that species, the Equalizer keeps the impetus behind its attack secret for as long as possible. Often, Evenus deprives its victims of this information for so long that another member of Evenus’ circle is ultimately the one to reveal it.

Control: As with the Puffed Pedant, since Evenus doesn’t technically break any site’s Terms of Service, little can be done to discourage it. One can either ignore Evenus or strive to steer clear of it.

Identifying Call: frosty silence.
 

The Sock Puppet Master (bittera duplicator)

Behavior: Perhaps the most pathetic of all the Troll species which favor author communities and websites, bittera creates its own support network by setting up multiple user accounts. It uses these accounts to create negative or attacking posts about others and their work, then uses its other accounts to second its own opinions in a masturbatory fashion.

Control: No specific action is necessary. Bittera will eventually reveal itself as a fraud by losing track of its various aliases, posting in the tone or style of one persona while logged in as another. Once exposed, this Troll will immediately delete all of its past posts, close its many accounts and move on to a new site. It may reappear months later to set up a new collection of accounts and aliases, but only when it’s sure its past activities have been forgotten.

Identifying Call: mockingbird-like repetition of, and agreement with, anything posted under any of its many aliases.

The Fake Friendly (condescendiosa passive-aggressivium)

Behavior: This Troll openly attacks and insults authors and their work, and when called to account for its unacceptable behavior, claims its remarks have been misinterpreted and it meant no offense.

For example, in a thread about the merits of giving away free ebook copies as a promotional gambit, following the post of a member extolling the virtues of free ebook copies, it may post, “If your book was any good, you wouldn’t have to give it away.” When the other member responds with understandable anger and offense, the Fake Friendly will defend itself by retreating behind a response along the lines of, “I didn’t say your book actually is no good, I’m just saying that you deserve to be paid for quality work.”

Condescendiosa can keep this back-and-forth dance of insults and re-interpretation going indefinitely, but its most maddening behavior is its penchant for claiming the moral high ground by recasting its abuse as simple, well-meaning honesty, which it says others can’t tolerate on account of being overly sensitive.

Control: Much like the Sock Puppet Master, this type of Troll is always the cause of its own undoing. As it slashes and burns its way through the community, systematically training its disingenuous focus on member after member, condescendiosa eventually finds it has more enemies than cohorts and vacates the premises.

Identifying Call: “You’ll never make it as a writer if you don’t develop a thicker skin,” and “I don’t know what you’re so upset about.”
 

April L. Hamilton is an author and the founder of Publetariat.

Publishing Comparisons (POD vs. POD)

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This post, from Timothy Pontious, originally appeared on his The Pencil Place blog on 5/26/09. In it, he provides a pretty thorough survey of POD publishers.

I had my mouse cursor hovering over the Upload button at lulu.com, but I am truly thankful that I took more time to research the POD / self publishing / vanity publishing horizon before I settled on a publisher for my current project. No, I’ve not settled on that publisher(s) yet.  Thanks for asking.  I was originally leaning toward lulu.com, but all bets are off at the moment. 

There may be several dozen ways to organize this data, so I didn’t. This is a semi-random info dump of what I’ve found so far.  Some entries are lump-able into categories, and others just kind of stand on their own.  

Since I don’t have a legal department, I’ll issue a disclaimer anyway.  This information is all gathered recently across many web sites. For all I know it is already outdated somewhere.  This information is for rough comparisons only. Your mileage will vary.  

Most of these publishers are a mix of paper/digital, so I did not differentiate unless there is something unique in their approach.  

NOTE ->  All places where I report the cost of a copy of a single book for an author, it is either a 5.5" x 8.5" or 6" x 9" paperback trade book – color cover and black text on white paper @250 pages (or similar as described on their page).   I’ve tried to give similar data where it is available, in a similar pattern in the text.  It is extremely difficult to match apples and apples across these many web pages.  

The other cost I list is the minimum cost for your first hundred books, which is the minimum setup fees and book costs with NO additional services selected.  Also no discounts are accounted for, and my math may be fuzzy, but I tried to be consistent. 

Publetariat Editor’s Note: While an estimate of your cost for the first 100 copies is a useful bit of information for making comparisons between publishers, do not assume the companies profiled in this article will actually require you to order a minimum of 100 books. Many POD publishers don’t ask you to buy anything more than a single author copy for review prior to releasing the book for sale. Check with each individual company to verify its minimum order policy.   

Mind your security while you browse these sites. Some of these pages are truly horrific throwbacks to not only Web 1.0, but Windows 98 or something.  They tease with a little information and require you to register so they can send you more data.  I did not bother registering with these sites, assuming they either didn’t know how to spell "Internet", or they were up to something else evil.  Really folks, this is the 21st century. Put your data out where we can find it, or some of us are just not going to play that game and you’re losing authors. Allrighty then?  

I may also have missed some significant publishing vendors.  Let me know and I’ll include them as an update.  So here we go.  

POD and Self Pub (paper/digital) Publishers (in no particular order)

Most of these entries have editorial, layout, book design and marketing packages that can be purchased. Sometimes the packages are bundled.  

iUniverse [http://www.iuniverse.com/] has a separate service for everything.  If you’re the author who needs a lot of services, the kind of traveler who demands room service and excellent concierge service, this is perhaps your publisher.  I would not be surprised if they have services for their services.  Setup fees range $599 – $2099.  Author cost per book (for our example size as stated above) is $11.19.  The minimum cost per the first hundred copies (your promotional stash) is $1718.  Layout, design and editorial services are abundant.  They don’t seem to have much of an author community, but they do have author podcasts going.  They also offer hosted web sites to market your book.  Only books, no other media. 

Lulu [http://www.lulu.com/]  also offers a suite of services for editing, layout, cover design, and etc.  There are no setup fees, but the services can rack up the cost quickly. The author cost for one book is $8.53. The cost per the first 100 is $853.  Lulu also handles CDs, DVDs, audio books, PDF downloads, and some other media as well.  There is an authors forum area, and they brag about their technical support.  For a confident author with an editor friend and a graphics friend, Lulu can be a low cost entry point effectively.  Lulu has storefront pages for your book collection that is a fairly staid template with your customized background image.  

Authorhouse [http://www.authorhouse.com/]  opens their setup fees from $598 to $1298.  The author cost for a book is $9.83. The minimum cost for the first hundred books seems to be $1581.  Authorhouse will grant a free ISBN number, but they didn’t say anything about US Copyright registration.  They also brag on their technical support.  

Scribd [http://www.scribd.com/]  Scribd is the single eBook-only venture I came across (but that is not what I was looking for so that’s appropriate).  You may upload any document to Scribd, and readers can read a sample online for free.  If they purchase that book, they may read it all online, or download and therefore print it.  The author may set any price, and keeps 80% of the revenue.  This is seemingly a streamlined system (I’ve not tried it yet) and the home page is already throwing books at the viewer’s browser, which I like as a marketing approach.  The downside is that the browser must load the iPaper application, which streams the document to the browser, and therefore takes a bit of time to load.  This feature has taken some heat in some forums I was reading through.  Scribd has a fairly complete FAQ area to welcome new authors, so that’s a plus.   

Selfpublishing.com  [http://www.selfpublishing.com/]  This is one of the sites that requires registration, so I didn’t investigate it very thoroughly.  One odd thing is that a hosted ISBN is $99, and an indie ISBN is $125 and the barcode is another $25.  You can buy 10 bar codes in a block from the source on the Internet, plus bar codes, for that amount.  If you have nine more books in you, I’d venture elsewhere.  

CreateSpace [http://www.createspace.com/] This one also requires registration a little sooner than I would have preferred.  The author cost for a book is $3.66 (or less if you upgrade your package). They offer a free hosted ISBN, and an indie ISBN for $35.  They pay royalties as follows:  Retail is list price -20%, and Amazon is list price -40%.    They offer hosted web sites for your book.  One big plus is that they handle multiple media formats (including the only video service I found so far).  CreateSpace is owned by Amazon, so if you publish here the next step for marketing should be a breeze! 

Read the rest of the post on The Pencil Place blog.

Why Self-Published Music Sux

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This (satirical and comic) piece, by Zoe Winters, originally appeared on Publishing Renaissance on 6/2/09.

I feel the need to talk about this troubling issue I’ve seen cropping up. It’s self published music. You see, Britney Spears may not be the height of all musical talent, but there is a certain level of quality we know we get from her music since it’s produced by a big record label. It doesn’t matter if you know who her record label is, it’s just important that you know she has one. This means she has been vetted.

Other people have put their money into her, and so therefore we can trust her far more than we can trust a garage band we’ve never heard of. Why doesn’t the garage band have a recording contract? There is SO much music out there and so much of it self published now, that we have all this crap we have to wade through. I mean do you seriously seriously think that people have the time to listen to a full song before deciding whether or not to buy your self-produced CD?

And with all the vanity self-publishing music companies out there that allow people to put their music up, well it’s a problem. Youtube anyone? Holy crap what were people thinking there? And now even iTunes just lets any joker who thinks he can write and play music to just… put it out there for SALE!!!! OMG

And here we, the unsuspecting customer are supposed to just trust it. There are even some bands who go so far as to make up their own record label. And that’s lying. Because you’re not allowed to start a business with a business name. Even though it’s perfectly legal. If you start a flower shop and you name it Awesome Flowers instead of your name, then that’s lying. Cause we think it’s a real legitimate flower shop instead of just someone who started their own business. If I don’t know who your recording contract came through, I can’t trust your music. I can’t just test it out cause that would be too hard to do. Why should a consumer be responsible for checking out a product before purchase?

Now, I will admit that it’s become increasingly difficult to get a BIG recording label (even though that’s the ideal we ALL strive for and no one has any other goals or dreams), and so sometimes it’s a little bit respectable if you have a small recording label, but the most important thing is… you can’t be your own label. You need to get a neighbor down the street or something to start a record label and sign you. Then it’s legit see? Cause a different person from you is running the show and paying the bills. If you’re the one paying the bills and investing everything in your own work, how can we trust you? How do we know you aren’t just self-absorbed and delusional? I know other businesses work on this initiative principle, but music isn’t the same. Music is different, just trust me on this one.

Self published music just isn’t the same as big record label music. And no matter what any of these “indie musicians” (like who do they think they are calling themselves that? Like we can’t see through that) say, it’s just always going to be this way. They don’t have respect, they’re never getting respect, so they may as well give it up now.

And do you know why they aren’t getting respect? Because most of them suck, and most of them think they automatically deserve respect, just for creating something and working hard to package and distribute it. Well get in line buddy! I am making my music the legit way, and you should too.

Who ever heard of a world or culture where a mega-corporation didn’t first approve all artistic expression and turn it into a mass consumer commodity? That’s how shit should be done, dude. And if you don’t agree, well, you’re just delusional. This country was NOT founded on any kind of dreams of independence or doing your own thing. We are all supposed to follow. So get back in that line and follow. Some day if you’re good enough, a big record label will smile down upon you and make all your dreams come true. And then we’ll respect you, because you will have done something respectable. Instead of this fake self publishing music stuff you’re doing now.

Read the rest of the article on Publishing Renaissance.

Eighteen Challenges in Contemporary Literature

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This list, by Bruce Sterling, originally appeared on Wired.com’s Beyond the Beyond blog on 5/30/09.

1. Literature is language-based and national; contemporary society is globalizing and polyglot.

2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.

3. Intellectual property systems failing.

4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.

5. Ink-on-paper manufacturing is an outmoded, toxic industry with steeply rising costs.

6. Core demographic for printed media is aging faster than the general population. Failure of print and newspapers is disenfranching young apprentice writers.

7. Media conglomerates have poor business model; economically rationalized “culture industry” is actively hostile to vital aspects of humane culture.

8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.

9. Digital public-domain transforms traditional literary heritage into a huge, cost-free, portable, searchable database, radically transforming the reader’s relationship to belle-lettres.

Read the rest of the list on Wired.com’s Beyond the Beyond blog.

Interview With Cliff Pickover: Mainstream/Indie Author

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Dr. Cliff Pickover is a very successful scientist, researcher and mainstream author, with over 40 published titles to his name and a list of accolades and reviews that reads like a who’s-who of the publishing and media businesses. So why has he gone indie with some of his books?

 
Dr. Pickover is the author of over 40 books (many of which can be found on various Amazon bestseller lists on any given day). He has published through mainstream presses such as Oxford University Press and John Wiley and Sons, through smaller outfits like Smart Books, and he has self-published as well. His books have received rave reviews from the likes of Publishers Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, Booklist and Wired magazine, and he’s collaborated with celebrated fantasy author Piers Anthony on the book Spider Legs. He’s also the author of the tremendously popular Mind Bending Puzzles series of calendars and cards.
 
Dr. Pickover’s professional stature as an inventor and scientist is no less impressive. He received his Ph.D. from Yale University’s Department of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry, he holds over 50 patents, and his research has received attention from such media outlets as CNN, Wired magazine and The Discovery Channel.  
 
Dr. Pickover: you’ve been a mainstream author, and a very successful one, for a very long time. Yet your novels, The Heaven Virus and Jews in Hyperspace, are indie endeavors.
 
I have published both fiction and nonfiction books, but finding a publisher for fiction is much more difficult than for nonfiction. More generally, if the ability to find a publisher for nonfiction can be compared to walking across the street, finding a publisher for fiction is like walking from New York to California, backwards. According to Marc McCutcheon, author of Damn! Why Didn’t I Write That?, of the 50,000-plus new books published each year, only about 3,500 are fiction. A mere 120 fiction releases each year are first novels of an author. Although these numbers are a few years old, it gives you an idea of the magnitude of the challenge.
 
I’m not the only author to realize the immense challenge in publishing fiction. For example, John Scalzi has written extensively on the difficulty of publishing science fiction. First let me tell you a little bit about John. He is a published nonfiction book author. He has written for the Chicago Sun-Times, the Washington Post, the San Diego Tribune and the San Francisco Examiner. He’s even been on Oprah. John has been an editor, most notably for a humor area on America Online. He even has an agent — for his nonfiction.
 
Scalzi believes that in order to get science fiction published, you need to have accomplished only two things: 1) You must have published a science-fiction novel in the past, and 2) You must be writing military science fiction. He’s conducted extensive surveys of bookstore shelves devoted to science fiction. By his estimate, eight out of the ten books on the shelves are from well-established science-fiction writers, many of them dead, such as Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, and Niven. The remaining two books of the ten are from relatively new authors, and most of these are “hard” science fiction dealing with space battles, military machines, starships, and the like. Scalzi concludes that this leaves only “four science fiction books out of a hundred that feature new authors not writing about space navies and powered war suits.”
 
Some fiction publishers receive so many submissions in just one day that they would need huge staffs just to read the first few pages of each submission. Even having an agent can be fruitless. For example, publishers will read few manuscripts submitted by agents who are not very well connected or well known. Many publishers and authors have said, “Your odds of getting hit by lightning are higher than getting a novel published by a name publisher.” 
 
Along those same lines, with respect to your mainstream-published books, what has your typical marketing and promotion experience been?
 
If you are speaking of author-based promotion for mainstream books, then I would have to say that book-signing at local bookstores has little value. I’ve been interviewed on some big radio shows, such as Coast to Coast, and this appears to be useful. 
 
Your earliest books were strictly nonfiction. At what point did you decide to try your hand at fiction, and why?
 
For a long time, my mainstream science books have incorporated elements of fiction. For example, in order to teach readers about black holes or time travel or mathematics, I have used fictional settings in which the reader explores the science with a quirky set of assistants. In other words, many of my own science books include science-fiction story lines to stimulate readers’ interest in the serious science. For example, my “nonfiction” books Black Holes: A Traveler’s Guide, Time: A Traveler’s Guide, The Stars of Heaven, Surfing through Hyperspace, The Mathematics of Oz, The Loom of God,and The Paradox of God all feature fictional characters who investigate astronomy, physics, mathematics, and religion.
 
I have always written fiction. As I said, fiction is very hard to publish, even if one is a published author and even if one finds an editor who likes the novel. As an example, an editor at a mainstream publisher actually liked the sample of my latest novel Jews in Hyperspace but did not have the time to proceed further in his consideration of the work. Science-fiction editors are so swamped and drowning in submissions that they often are too busy to respond to most authors and continue the dialogue needed to get a book submission published. For Jews in Hyperspace, I decided to publish directly to the Kindle as an experiment. I consider self-publishing an experiment that gives authors hope and more exposure.
 
I’d like to help novelists reading this interview with this “Tips for Writers” page, which I’ve assembled for you. I hope you and your readers find it helpful.
 
Have you made the decision to go indie—whether that means publishing yourself or through indie presses—for your future works? Why or why not?
 
I have relatively little problems selling math or science books to traditional publishers, so I wouldn’t “go indie” for those. Indie is great for experiments with fiction, and we can always hope that such an experiment will bear fruit. It is easy to publish to the Kindle, and I give tips for writers who wish to publish to the Kindle. In fact, April, I learned a lot from your great document on Kindle publishing. All indications point to the fact that the Kindle is taking off in terms of popularity and importance. It may be a turning point in the history of book publishing. I want to help authors publish to the Kindle, and I hope that the instructional document I have placed at the web site is of some use to authors and to your readers.
 
Have any of your books gone out of print, and if so, do you have plans to re-release them yourself?
 
Yes, some of my books have gone out of print. In fact, Sterling has brought back into print The Loom of God , and some of my other books have been brought back into print by mainstream publishers. I have no major plans to bring my out-of-print books back into print, preferring to focus on new works that would help me connect with readers.  
 
Many of your works are available in Kindle editions, but no other e formats. What is it about the Kindle that convinced you to release Kindle editions of your books?
 
In fact, the mainstream publishers of my books made the decision to release Kindle editions. I suspect that they felt it a valuable experiment, given the ease with which people can purchase books from Amazon.com for the Kindle. In seconds, an author’s book can be downloaded to the Kindle.
 
Incidentally, my novel The Heaven Virus is available as a 99-cent download from Lulu.com. I have not yet determined if setting so low a price helps sales, because potential readers may feel that if a book is too inexpensive it may be of inferior quality.
 
None of your books are available in audio format. Do you have plans to create audio or podcast editions in the future?
 
I do not have plans for audio format at this point in time. Many of my books are quite visual, with numerous figures, and many have equations. These may be a little bit harder to convert to audio than works such as novels.
 
A common complaint among authors is the difficulty in finding time to write. You’re extraordinarily prolific as an author—releasing a book a year on average—, as well as an inventor and researcher. You’re the editor of Reality Carnival, an editor of technical journals, a regular past contributor to Discover Magazine, a frequent contributor to numerous other periodicals, and you’re a very avid reader as well. Do you have any advice or tips a more typical author can use to improve his or her level of productivity?
 
The key is for writers to avoid perfection as they write. Writers should give themselves permission to be sloppy as their thoughts gel.
 
The French writher Marcel Proust composed his books in a haphazard fashion. He did not start at the beginning and finish at the end. He did not write linearly. Instead, ideas came to him in flashes as he went about his daily routine. Most of my own books are composed in the same way. As ideas come to me during the day or in the realm between sleep and wakefulness, I jot them down and continue to fill in details in the book. For me, writing is exactly like painting, adding a spot of color here, a detail there, a twig on this tree, a bit of foam on that ocean wave… No painter starts at the top of the painting and finishes at the bottom.
 
My approach to filling in detail, like a painter dabbing paint, is fine in the age of word processors, but it was amazing that Proust used the same approach so well. He would dictate to his stenographers who would type an initial manuscript. Then, he would crowd the margins with additional details and establish links between scenes and characters. He would paste in new pages and have the new work typed again and again. Edmund White notes in his biography of Proust, “If any writer would have benefited from a word processor, it would have been Proust, whose entire method consisted of adding details here and there and of working on all parts of his book at once.”
 
When I start writing my novels, I do not know how the stories will end. I let the characters and initial crazy situation drive the plot, forcing both me and the book’s characters to attempt to solve the challenges that come along. 
 
It’s obvious how your education and professional experience have informed your writing, but do you feel your experiences in authorship have informed your professional life to any extent?
 
My writing has greatly influenced my professional life in ways too numerous to mention. However, it is easy to see how my own writing has made me more skillful in editing the work of others, which plays a role in my professional life as a journal editor. I also do a lot of inventing and have many patents. For inventing, the ability to write helps quite a bit. One of the challenges for new inventors is the need to express the essential aspects of an invention in words.
 
As you must know by now, self-publishing and promoting your own books takes a lot of time and effort. Given that you’re already very successful in numerous other venues and can probably go on selling nonfiction and reference manuscripts to publishers for many years to come, why bother with indie authorship?
 
Indie authorship lets authors connect with people— it lets authors experiment, it lets authors hope, it lets authors dream. Through the Kindle, Lulu.com, and similar avenues of publication, authors gain exposure and learn about the process of writing and promotion. One thing is certain: the author has no chance of fame and fortune without trying and connecting with readers. Indie authorship gives everyone a chance.
 
Finally, can you tell me a little more about your book, Jews in Hyperspace? What is it about, and can readers without any background in science or Judaism understand it?
 
Jews in Hyperspace is one of my favorites, and I published it directly to the Kindle. I give a free excerpt here — a website at which I also tell your readers how the book came to be written.
 
Readers need no special background in science or Judaism to enjoy the wondrous adventure. In the book, I mix higher dimensions and religion, miracles and modern technology, and politics and physics to produce a gripping tale set in a future Jerusalem. It’s a strange blend of scientific thriller and a quest for religious harmony.
 
April, here’s the premise. Orthodox Jews are disappearing from Jerusalem. One moment they are praying at the Western Wall, and in the blink of an eye, they seem to evaporate, occasionally leaving behind only their fur hats—their shtreimels—that sit like small, soft flying saucers, perched on stone pavement in the dwindling light. In order to build the Third Temple while being respectful of the Islamic structures on the Temple Mount, the Jews have discovered a way to access a fourth spatial dimension. They will build the Third Temple invisibly "above" the Temple Mount and "above" the Mosque in the direction of the fourth dimension. I discuss everything from the future of Israel and Jerusalem to Parallel Universes, the building of Third Temple in Jerusalem, Nephilim, angels, and the fourth dimension.
 
Without indie publication, this novel would be difficult to publish. Jewish publishers are not accustomed to publishing science fiction. Thus, it would surely be difficult to find a route to publication through Jewish publishers.

Publetariat Vault Update: Get Ready!

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The Publetariat Vault is coming, and the Vault FAQ and Terms of Use are up!

The Vault aims to give publishing pros and content producers a tool they’ve never had before: a complete picture of the commercial viability of a given literary work, including actual sales data and reader reviews, provided before rights to that literary work are secured.

Authors: If you’ve self-published in an effort to garner mainstream publisher or content producer attention you will definitely want to list your book, and we’re making it easy by providing a free listing period for the Vault’s grand opening.

The Vault will provide a searchable database of indie print and ebooks available for mainstream acquisition. Listings will include the usual book information (e.g., title, author name[s], brief description), as well as a synopsis, excerpt, keywords, links to reviews of the book on bookseller sites and book sharing sites (e.g. GoodReads, Shelfari), the ability for authors to select up to 4 genre assignments from among over 70 choices, and the ability to provide links to any or all of the following: current bookseller listings (including current sales rank, where reported on bookseller sites), author websites and blogs, author social media profiles, articles published by authors, reviews of the book, author interviews and more.

In other words, all the information publishing acquisions pros and content producers need to decide whether or not a book meets their needs, both in terms of content and marketing criteria.

The Vault is being built by indie authors with publisher input, so you can be sure it will enable you to showcase your book in the best possible light while providing the information publishing pros say matters most to them in deciding whether or not to pursue a given book. The Vault isn’t quite ready for you yet, but it will be soon and in the meantime, you can work on getting the following items ready for your free listing:

Brief Description – plain text passage, up to 1000 characters including spaces. If your book is listed on Amazon, the Vault can pull your description in directly from your book’s Amazon page. Editor’s correction: since tests have shown that Amazon can alter or reformat its data at any time without notice (remember #AmazonFail?), the Publetariat Vault has elected not to rely on the import of any data from Amazon in its listings.

Synopsis – a file in txt, rtf or pdf format, containing a beginning-to-end, concise summary of your book in 2 pages or less, maximum file size of 50k. Be sure to include author name(s) and book title, either at the beginning of the first page or in the header or footer of every page. If you’re not sure how to create a synopsis, Google "book synopsis" for more information and examples.

Excerpt –  a file in txt, rtf or pdf format, containing up to the first 30pp of your book, maximum filesize of 1MB. Note that pdf is the only file format that will preserve your original fonts and formatting. Again, be sure to provide the name(s) of the author and the book, either in the form of a cover page, or in the header or footer of every page.

Author Website or Blog – Whether you need to create a new one or polish up an existing site or blog, it’s time to get started.  There are plenty of free, online resources to help you with this. Several are available right here on Publetariat, in the Sell department, but you can find plenty more by Googling for "author blogs", "build a website" or "author platform".

Social Media Profiles – if you intend to share your Facebook, MySpace, Twitter and other social media profiles with publishing pros who check out your book listing, you’ll want to make sure those profiles reflect positively on you and your book. Remove any questionable material (photos, videos and written confessions of you partying down or badmouthing real and imagined enemies have got to go) and add more material of authorial merit. If your blog, site or social media profiles scream, "BUY MY BOOK!!!!", tone it down. You’ll also need to ensure your social media profiles are set to "public" on sites like Facebook or MySpace in order to allow people who aren’t members of the site(s) in question to view your profile(s).

Book Cover Image – a cover image with dimensions of 125×175, with a file type of gif, jpeg or jpg. If your book is listed on Amazon, the Vault can pull your book cover image directly from your book’s Amazon page. Editor’s correction: since tests have shown that Amazon can alter or reformat its data at any time without notice (remember #AmazonFail?), the Publetariat Vault has elected not to rely on the import of any data from Amazon in its listings.

We’re planning to open the Vault for listings by the end of June—sooner, if we can possibly manage it—, so if you want to be a part of this exciting new opportunity to bring indie books to the attention of publishers who are looking to buy, get ready NOW!

How Giving Ebooks Away For Free Increases Print Book Sales

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This post, by Brad Vertrees, originally appeared on his Brad’s Reader blog on 5/31/09.

I’m always on the lookout for authors who not only embrace ebooks but use them to complement their print book sales. The most interesting way of doing this, I think, is by giving ebooks away for free. Science fiction writer Cory Doctorow does it and I’m sure a lot of other writers do too.

Last night I came across the blog of writer JA Konrath (who goes by the pen name Jack Kilborn) via this Enriched by Words blog post. As I side note, I’d like to mention that I had the pleasure of seeing Konrath in my local bookstore when he stopped by to sign a few copies of his book. He happens to also live in the Chicago area like I do. 

Anyway, in Konrath’s blog post Ebooks and Free Books and Amazon Kindle, Oh My he talks a lot about how distributing his ebooks for free has really helped his print book sales, not hurt them, as many publishers fear. He even lists out the reasons why he gives his ebooks away for free. Here are a few exampless:

2. Books Are Expensive. Many people don’t want to spend $24.99 or even $6.99 to take a chance on an unknown. And even fewer want to spend $14.99 on an ebook download. But people love a bargain, and free is the best bargain of all.

Let’s face it: There are many more unknown authors out there than famous ones. And people don’t like to shell out hard earned cash on someone who is unknown. When an author gives away an ebook for free, readers have nothing to lose. They are much more likely to give that author a chance. If they like the ebook, then they’ll probably buy the print book the author is selling. If they don’t like the ebook, they haven’t lost anything.

3. Free is Viral. If you Google Kilborn+Crouch+Serial, you currently get 6550 hits. Part of that is because of an orchestrated campaign done by Blake and I, in conjunction with my publisher, Grand Central. But part of it is because people are talking about it, picking up on it, repeating it, linking to it, etc. Publicity and promotion is free and easier to come by (if you’re a midlister) when you’re giving something away.

This reminds me of something Cory Doctorow said regarding book piracy (forgive me, I don’t have the exact quote). But he basically said he’s more worried about obscurity than someone pirating his books. I think Konrath has the same idea here too. Does Konrath worry about piracy? Probably not. In fact he appears to encourage people to link to his ebooks and some even offer Konrath’s work on their own websites.

Indeed, obscurity can ruin even the most talented writer. If no one knows about you and your books, no one will buy them. And with the sheer number of books being published and sold nowadays, getting noticed is harder than ever. I’ve always maintained that once an author gets a publishing contract and his/her book is on the way to bookstores, it is no guarantee of success. I’ve seen a lot of good books disappear from the shelves of my local bookstore, not because they are [not] selling well, but because they have been returned to the publisher for not selling at all.

Konrath understands this perfectly:

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome in the print world is distribution. The number of print books I sell is limited by the number of books printed, and the places they are for sale. If no one is aware of my books, no one will buy them. I strive to make people aware I exist, so readers seek me out rather than accidentally run into me, but I can only reach so many people.

“Free” isn’t a replacement for traditonal print books at traditional price points. Instead, free complements those print books. Free is used to market those books. Free gives an unknown author a chance of being known, which is the key to selling books. This might seem counterintuitive – giving stuff away for free to sell more (and that’s probably why most publishers resist it so much). But it works. Authors like Doctorow and Konrath are proving it every day.

Read the rest of the post on Brad’s Reader.

Tension, Pacing and Speedboats

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This post, by Ben Whiting, originally appeared as a guest blog entry on Tricia Goyer’s My Writing Mentor blog on 4/20/09.

Every good story has some degree of underlying tension. Even in a character-driven novel like Pride and Prejudice, which is totally devoid of exploding helicopters and other modern action conventions, is full of internal and external conflict. The question is not if? but how much?

Think of your story as a speedboat. You, as the author, are the pilot of this speedboat, charged with controlling both the speed and direction of your story at all times. The reader is pulled along behind you as a water-skier and is free to let go of the rope at any point. Your job is to keep the ride interesting—by taking unexpected turns or traveling at break-neck speeds. Another method of maintain interest is alternating your speed, which is our focus here.

The first reason to vary the speed at which you pull your reader is simple: boredom. Going at the same pace through an entire novel, no matter how gripping that pace may be initially, will sooner or later grow tiresome to the reader. Clichés are avoided for the same reason. Variety is the spice of life. Familiarity breeds contempt. We’ve heard these self-condemning sayings so many times they have lost their impact, and a constant pace in your story will have the same affect.

Perception is the other reason speed variation is important. You need go no further than your local highway to test this theory. To the pedestrian standing on the side of the road, sixty miles and hour is very fast. To a passenger in a car going ninety-five, sixty seems as slow as dial-up Internet access. By taking advantage of this comparative aspect of pacing, an author can make an already tense portion of the story seem even more intense.

Ben Whiting is a full-time English student at the University of Texas at Arlington and co-general editor of the award-winning collegiate publication Marine Creek Reflections. His current writing project, Penumbra, is a contemporary suspense novel that he hopes to finish over the summer.

Read part two, ‘More Boating Techniques’, on Tricia Goyer’s My Writing Mentor blog.

The Future of Books and Electronic Reading

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This article, by Cliff Jones, originally appeared on the Times Online on 5/24/09.

Random House’s e-book list has authors for downloading with ‘rich media’ content to phones, computers, PDAs and e-readers

Random House has just launched the UK’s first “enhanced” electronic book list. The Book and Beyond project brings together 10 of its authors — with more to come soon — making their new books available, unabridged, for digital download to phones, computers, PDAs and e-book readers. This, in itself, is nothing remarkable. The e-book market has been with us for nearly a decade in one form or another. What is significant is that it is the first download list to feature books embedded with “rich media” content. (Video, pictures, music, games and computer apps to you and me.)

While we’re used to the idea of bonus content as a marketer’s siren call, that content is usually little more than the digital sweepings from the editing process and/or a hastily shot, behind-the-scenes short. With Book and Beyond, this content is designed to become part of the e-book reading experience itself. Download Jacqueline Wilson’s My Sister Jodie and you get a computer game, links to the Wilson community and a no-expense-spared, cinema-style trailer for the book. Irvine Welsh, when his content is added shortly, will offer a gritty video commentary on the characterisation of his book Crime and a taster of his prequel to Trainspotting. Danny Wallace and the mentalist Derren Brown get the enhanced treatment, too, with audio books and text being combined, so you can hear the book as well as reading it. It is Random House’s intention to lead high-profile authors confidently into the e-realm, blurring the margins between the written word and other forms of entertainment as they go. Indeed, just as television, cinema, gaming and radio coexist, the e-book is not intended to replace the traditional book, but to exist alongside it, as a new kind of reading experience.

“I’m not in the business of selling books. I sell writing,” says Welsh. “It doesn’t bother me how they want to read it as long as it’s true to the ideas I had. People criticise e-books for being nothing like the real thing. But they’re not trying to be. E-books are just a different way of getting writing and story­telling. Personally, I like a nice book. I need that private intellectual space that a real book gives me. But I don’t expect everyone to feel the same way.”

Last Christmas was the turning point for e-publishing. More Sony Readers, Kindles, iPods and iPhones were sold than even the optimists anticipated: sales of e-books rocketed on Boxing Day as a result. Up to 1,300 a day in the UK are being sold currently. In America, there were 2.5m such legal downloads last year and more than 500,000 e-book readers sold. And with electronic readers being enthusiastically taken up by Britain’s schools and FE colleges, the e-book experience may, at last, be about to have its moment.

The man who developed Book and Beyond for Random House is a former marketing executive for Sony BMG Records, Jonathan Davis. He wanted to ensure the giant publisher was ready for the digital tsunami. “I lived through it once, and I like to think we’ve learnt from the mistakes made by the record industry. It was freefall. Big mistakes were made early on. The download was demonised, and all they really succeeded in doing was to stifle a new market for a year or two. Publishers need to listen and look at what people are actually doing and respond with the kind of books and reading experience they want for the way they are living.”

Read the rest of the article on the Times Online.

Offer free downloads of your book?

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Saw a guy on BookTV last night talking about CC licensing. You can license any copyrighted work for free downloads, licenses can/cannot allow changes, CC licenses allow free downloads only for non-commercial uses; CC-licensed matl can be passed along to others. It’s Creative Copyright, but don’t the URL at hand.

Has anyone ever used something like CC licensing to offer free downloads of your book for publicity purposes? This strategy is being used by some bands. And Nine Inch Nails did something like this for promo — and results were huge sales of CDs, etc.

Any comments? Suggestions?

The Long Goodbye?

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This article, by Elisabeth Sifton, originally appeared on The Nation website on 5/20/09.

Humanity has read, hoarded, discarded and demanded books for centuries; for centuries books have been intimately woven into our sense of ourselves, into the means by which we find out who we are and who we want to be.

They have never been mere physical objects–paper pages of a certain size and weight printed with text and sometimes images, bound together on the left–never just cherished or reviled reminders of school-day torments, or mementos treasured as expressions of bourgeois achievement, or icons of aristocratic culture. They have been all these things and more. They have been instruments of enlightenment.

Once the invention of movable type and various commercial advances in the early modern era enabled printers to sell books to anyone who could and would pay for them (no longer reserving them for priests and kings), they became irresistibly popular: their relatively sturdy bindings gave them some permanence; the small-format ones were portable and could be read anywhere; and they transmitted sensory pleasures to eye, hand and brain. Children learned to read with them; adolescents used them, sometimes furtively, to discover the secrets of grown-up life; adults loved them for the pleasure, learning and joy they conveyed. Books have had a kind of spooky power, embedded as they are in the very structures of learning, commerce and culture by which we have absorbed, stored and transmitted information, opinion, art and wisdom. No wonder, then, that the book business, although a very small part of the American economy, has attracted disproportionate attention.

 

But does it still merit this attention? Do books still have their power? Over the past twenty years, as we’ve thrown ourselves eagerly into a joy ride on the Information Superhighway, we’ve been learning to read, and been reading, differently; and books aren’t necessarily where we start or end our education. The unprofitable chaos of the book business today indicates, among other things, that slow, almost invisible transformations as well as rapid helter-skelter ones have wrecked old reading habits (bad and good) and created new ones (ditto). In the cacophony of modern American commerce, we hear incoherent squeals of dying life-forms along with the triumphant braying and twittering of new human expression.

People in the book business, like the readers they seek out (a minute fraction of the literate population), hate to think that books might be moribund, and signs of vigorous life in some quarters belie the grim 2009 forecasts. Also, publishers have always mournfully predicted that the end was nigh–they must share either a melancholy temperament or sensitivity to the fragility of culture–so today’s dire predictions aren’t in themselves news. (I’m speaking here not of technical books or textbooks, which are facing their own crises, but of what are called general trade books–literature, politics, history, biography and memoir, science, poetry, art–written for the general public.) When I first got a publishing job almost half a century ago, my elders and betters in the trade regularly worried about The Future of Books, even though manuscripts continued to pour onto our desks. They worried, too, when firms changed ownership. The eponymous boss of the house where I first typed rejection letters and checked proofs sold his company to Encyclopedia Britannica in 1966; The Viking Press, which I joined in 1968, was sold by Thomas Guinzburg, son of its founder, to Pearson in 1975 and went through many permutations of a merger with Penguin Books, also owned by Pearson; Alfred A. Knopf, where I worked from 1987 to 1992, was a jewel of a firm that in 1960 had become a dépendance of Random House, in turn owned by RCA, then sold to the Newhouse brothers in 1980 and sold by them to Bertelsmann in 1998; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which I joined in 1993, lost some of its independence when Roger Straus sold the company to Holtzbrinck in 1994, and more after his death in 2004.

All told, I’ve worked in only four firms, yet for seven different owners and in eight or nine different publishing arrangements designed and redesigned to accommodate varying corporate intentions. I have seen up close how feckless management activity can change things. Of course, now we all are acquainted with truly vast corporate fecklessness, which has brought us a world-historical economic meltdown that dwarfs everything. For publishers, it comes on top of systemic difficulties they have long struggled to resolve, mitigate or ignore–difficulties only compounded by changes that the digital realm has been making in our reading culture.

As we know, all retail businesses collapsed in September, failed to recover during the Christmas season and have been weak ever since. Book sales continued to drop in the spring, but then, they’ve been stagnant for years. It was in 2001, when the dot-com bubble was beginning to burst but before the shock of 9/11, that I first heard a morose sales director use the catch-phrase "flat is the new up." Book publishers and sellers were overextended and had grown careless, like everyone else, in the go-go years, while the digital reading revolution continued and business worsened. In the past six months, layoffs and shutterings have become commonplace.

A key element in the dissemination of books, independent of publishers and booksellers but essential to both, is the press. The simultaneous collapse of the business model for newspapers and magazines is a gruesome fact of life, and we book people keenly feel the pain of a sister print-on-paper industry, to put it mildly. All citizens should be alarmed by the loss of such a vital necessity to a democracy. But the hard numbers and socioeconomic exigencies of journalism’s huge crisis differ greatly from those of book publishing’s smaller one (though they are often conflated). Here I want only to stress that the loss of so many book-review pages nationwide is crippling all aspects of our literary life. And I mean all. Book news and criticism were fundamental to the old model of book publishing and to the education of writers; Internet coverage of books, much of it witty and interesting, does not begin to compensate for their loss.

It is taking time for the obsolescence and decay in the book world to show, given the energy and talent of so many writers, their continued devotion to book genres, the resourceful bravery of some publishers, the continuing plausibility of many aspects of their business, the pleasure and profit taken in reinforcing familiar reading habits and the astonishing biodiversity of book publishing. Not to mention the usual quotient of laziness. European publishers are happy right now because things seemed to go well at the winter book fairs in Leipzig and Paris; the London Book Fair, in April, was hopeful if meager, with strenuous, incoherent efforts made to engage with the digitized word. In America, pubescent vampire novels are selling like crazy to readers of all ages, also memoirs about cats and puppies; classics are still in demand, as are cookbooks about cupcakes, of which there are an amazing number. Books by brand-name writers continue to populate the bestseller lists (though not racking up the numbers they used to). Every week the trade bulletins report hundreds of new books being signed up, sometimes for absurd amounts of money, by dozens of publishers.

Read the rest of the article on The Nation.

Why A Pre-Publication Web Presence Is Important.

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This post, from Yen Cheong, originally appeared on The Book Publicity Blog on 5/11/09.

At this point, pretty much everyone is convinced of the value of an author’s web presence.  Yay.  But I’ve seen too many authors shoot for the book’s publication date (or a couple weeks before) as the launch date for their website.

This is about four months too late.

Typically, four to six months before the hardcover publication of a book, the publicity department sends out galleys to magazine and newspaper book editors as well as to some broadcast producers and online journalists. 

[Publetariat Editor’s Note: since ‘galleys’ aren’t always applicable to the world of indie authorship, you may want to substitute ‘author copies’ for the term in this article.]

When I follow up with galley recipients, I’ll include some information about the book in the text of my email message, but it’s helpful for me to be able to link to more information online — links are an extremely effective and unobtrusive way for book publicists to provide the media with the additional details that could sell a writer or editor on a book.  They are also vital tools for bloggers whose posts are lent credibility by links that direct readers to further information.

I’m not saying the complete author website needs to be up and ready six months before the book’s publication date.  I’m not even saying the author has to have a web site at all.  But I am saying it’s a really, really good idea for *something* — a website, a social networking profile, a blog — to be accessible when galleys are mailed out.  An author without a web presence is a bit like the proverbial tree falling in a forest with no one around.

The more information a website has the better, of course, but it’s also okay also to add to the site in stages.  Realistically, busy authors may simply not have the time or the money to create beautiful websites at this stage in the game (or ever).  Here are a few quick and cheap suggestions for getting online fast:

Read the rest of the post on The Book Publicity Blog, and also see What Not To Have On Your Book Website on the same blog.