Business End

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

The Copyright Naughty List

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This post by Susan Spann originally appeared on the Writers in the Storm blog on 12/10/14.

Happy Holidays!

‘Tis the season to stay off the copyright “naughty list,” so I’m here to share a few #PubLaw tips for avoiding copyright infringement in your holiday blogging and social media celebrations!

When celebrating online this holiday season, keep these helpful rules in mind:

SONGS (AND LYRICS) ARE PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT

At the holidays, it’s tempting to re-post the lyrics to favorite carols or celebratory songs, either on Facebook, on a blog, or on other social media sites. Unfortunately, lyric-sharing often violates the copyright of the lyricist or songwriter, because lyrics are protected by copyright, as are novels, short stories and poems.

Posting an excerpt (no more than 2-3 lines) is often permitted as “fair use,” especially when the quoted work runs at least 30 lines. However, there is no absolute test for fair use, and no definitive test for when you’ve used too much of a copyrighted work. The legal test is “facts and circumstances,” based on several factors (so anyone who tells you “X lines is ok, but more is not” isn’t telling you the absolute legal truth.

 

Read the full post on Writers in the Storm.

 

Start Here: How to Get Your Book Published

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This post by Jane Friedman originally appeared on her site on 1/28/12.

Publetariat Editor’s Note: We mostly focus on the indie and small press routes to publication here at Publetariat, but since the hybrid publishing model (a mix of indie and mainstream releases) can be very effective it’s never a bad idea to share information on how things work in traditonal publishing, too.

It’s the most frequently asked question I receive: How do I get my book published?

Unfortunately, when I hear this question, I know I’m dealing with someone who is at such a beginning stage that it’s difficult to know where to begin.

With this post, I hope to offer the most critical information and address the most pressing questions, as well as provide a starting point for more fully exploring what it means for you to try and get meaningfully published. I’ve also created an Amazon list of the best resources on this topic.

If you’d like an in-depth guide on how to get your book published, consider my book on the topic: Publishing 101: A First-Time Author’s Guide.

 

First: The Difference Between Fiction and Nonfiction

Novelists (fiction writers) follow a different path to publication than nonfiction authors.

Novels and memoirs: You must have a finished and polished manuscript before you look for a publisher or an agent. While you may have heard of some novels or memoirs being sold based on an idea or proposal, this is rare for first-time authors without a strong publishing track record.

For most nonfiction: Rather than completing a manuscript, you should write a book proposal—basically like a business plan for your book—that will convince a publisher to contract and pay you to write the book. For more information on book proposals and what they entail, click here.

 

Read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

The Making Of A Boxed Set

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This post originally appeared on SFR Brigade on 11/13/14.

Boxed sets are a popular commodity at the moment. You see them everywhere, collections of stories by a variety of authors, grouped under some unifying label. But there’s a lot of work involved in putting a set like this together. That’s why we thought we’d share our experiences and lessons learned.

Earlier in the year, one of the members of the SFR Brigade asked for volunteers for an SFR boxed set. Eleven of us promptly banded together, and our Nebula Nights collection appeared in e-bookstores in record time. Since its release at the beginning of August, the set reached #1 on Kobo and All Romance, and charted as high as #3 on Amazon in science fiction romance. The book maintained an Amazon ranking above 10,000 for most of those three months. So you could say it did well. At the end of October, our contract with the publisher expired, so we decided to go it alone, since the set is still selling quite strongly. This article is a combination of what we did, and what we learned from our experience with the publisher.

Ready to go?

What’s your goal?
There’s no point in embarking on a project like this if you don’t know what you’re intending to achieve. In creating Nebula Nights, we wanted to showcase our genre, and encourage readers to purchase more of each author’s work. In quantifiable terms, we aimed at reaching one of the major lists, like the NYT or USA Today. It’s good to dream big!

 

Read the full post on SFR Brigade.

 

Year-End Tax Help for Authors

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This post by attorney and tax expert Julian Block originally appeared on Indies Unlimited on 12/7/14.

The only time most of us think of doing something about our federal income taxes is once a year — the hours we spend actually grappling with Form 1040 or when gathering records to deliver them to a paid preparer. What we should do is make tax planning a year-round concern and position ourselves to take full advantage of the many opportunities that are available to lessen the amount that is siphoned off each year by the IRS. The savings can amount to many thousands of dollars. What follows are some tactics that not only can save taxes for 2014, but even provide a head start on 2015 as well.

Timing receipt of income pays off for freelance writers. The IRS requires most freelance writers and other self-employed individuals to use the cash method of accounting, under which income isn’t counted until cash, a check, or an e-payment is received and expenses aren’t counted until they’re paid.

How does the IRS apply that requirement to a hypothetical freelancer we’ll call Phyllis Neff? Like most other writers, Phyllis has a good deal of flexibility on whether to report income or deduct expenses in 2014 or 2015. As part of her end-of-year financial planning, therefore, she should review perfectly legal tax-trimming tactics that must be taken by Dec. 31 if they aren’t to be lost forever.

 

Read the full post on Indies Unlimited.

 

Ebooks Can Tell Which Novels You Didn't Finish

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This article by Alison Flood originally appeared on The Guardian on 12/10/14.

Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch put down prematurely by 55% of ebook readers, with self-published star Casey Kelleher holding most attention

The Goldfinch may have won Donna Tartt the Pulitzer, praised by judges as a novel which “stimulates the mind and touches the heart”, but the acclaimed title’s 800-odd pages appear to have intimidated British readers, with less than half of those who downloaded it from e-bookseller Kobo making it to the end.

New data from Kobo shows that, although The Goldfinch was the 37th bestselling ebook of the year for the retailer, it was completed by just 44.4% of Kobo’s British readers. Kobo speculated that it “likely proved daunting for some due to the length of the novel”.

Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s account from 1853 of how he was kidnapped and sold into slavery – “I sighed for liberty; but the bondsman’s chain was round me, and could not be shaken off” – was, according to Kobo, similarly overwhelming. Ninth on their British bestseller list, following the hugely successful film adaptation, the book was completed by just 28.2% of British readers.

 

Read the full post on The Guardian.

 

Build Relationships With Reviewers Well Before Your Book Launch

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This post by Jennifer Mattern originally appeared on AllIndieWriters on 10/21/14.

When you try to land reviews for your new book, the last thing you want is to be just another random new author reviewers have never heard of. Yet it’s not uncommon for authors, and especially indie authors, to wait until the last minute to think about book reviews.

So for this week’s quick tip, let’s make sure you don’t fall into that group. Rather than waiting until your book is about to launch (or already has), build relationships with key book reviewers early. Put yourself in a position where, when you do contact them to request a book review, they already know your name and are already at least somewhat familiar with you.

Here are three ways you can start building relationships with potential reviewers even before your book is released.

1. Comment on their existing reviews.

 

Read the full post on AllIndieWriters.

 

Facebook's Like Affair With Brands Is Over

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This post by Will Oremus originally appeared on Slate on 3/24/14.

Facebook is ending the free ride, wrote Valleywag’s Sam Biddle in a post that has been greeted with widespread alarm. No, it’s not forcing ordinary users to pay for its service or to share pictures of their babies. Rather, the claim is that it’s deliberately bringing an end to the era of free advertising for businesses via their Facebook pages.

Citing an anonymous source, Biddle reports that Facebook is in the process of slashing brands’ “organic page reach” to just 1 or 2 percent. That means only a tiny fraction of the people who have liked a business on Facebook will see each of its posts in their news feed, unless that company pays Facebook for wider promotion. The organic-reach squeeze would affect “all brands,” Biddle writes, from corporate behemoths like Nike to local merchants like New York’s Pies ‘n’ Thighs restaurant. He casts this as a cruel bait-and-switch on Facebook’s part:

Facebook pulled the best practical joke of the Internet age: the company convinced countless celebrities, bands, and “brands” that its service was the best way to reach people with eyeballs and money. Maybe it is! But now that companies have taken the bait, Facebook is holding the whole operation hostage.

That’s one way of looking at it.

Here’s another one: People don’t really like seeing a bunch of ads in their news feed.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

YouTube Megastar Zoella’s Record-Breaking Debut Novel Was Ghostwritten, But Fans Don’t Care

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This post by Jonathon Sturgeon originally appeared on Flavorwire on 12/9/14.

In the beginning, there was YouTube. Then, a little later, there was Zoë Sugg, a young woman with a dream. When those two things merged, they formed Zoella, vlogger extraordinaire, lover of all things “Beauty, Fashion, & Life.” Next came fame and fortune and millions of YouTube subscribers and Twitter followers. Finally, last month, Zoella’s new novel arrived. It is titled Girl Online, and now it’s the fastest-selling debut novel of all time.

But!

Last weekend, Sugg’s publisher, Penguin Random House, admitted that the novel was “factually” not written by Sugg. “To be factually accurate you would need to say Zoe Sugg did not write the book Girl Online on her own,” they said. Then, on Twitter, Sugg, admitted that the novel was ghostwritten by committee. And not just a little bit ghostwritten. The entire thing, as it turns out, was ghostwritten, except for the ideas for the characters and the story. Here is Sugg’s “confession”:

 

Read the full post on Flavorwire.

 

How To Revive A Stale Book For More Sales

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This post by Penny Sansevieri originally appeared on The Future of Ink on 11/28/14.

What if I told you that you could simply and easily revive an old or older book and start making sales on it again? Would you be game?

Most of us who have been writing for a while are sitting on a lot of content and a lot of older books that are taking up virtual shelf space on Amazon.

I was at an event a few weeks ago and an author there said that he had a science-fiction/fantasy book that had been out for a few years and it hadn’t done well. “I sure wish I knew then what I know now,” he said. And I realized that for him, it’s really not too late.

This is an issue a lot of authors face: a stale book that’s been out for a while and you feel like you’ve really exhausted your options. Book sales are sagging and you figure it’s over.

Well, it’s not. You have a ton of options now to revive, renew, and even re-release a book with minimal effort.

 

Read the full post on The Future of Ink.

 

The Weird World of Fan Fiction

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This article by Alexandra Alter originally appeared on The Wall Street Journal on 6/14/12.

What if Edward Cullen, the moody vampire heartthrob in Stephenie Meyer’s best-selling “Twilight” series, was an undercover cop? Or a baker who specializes in bachelor-party cakes? Or a kidnapper who takes Bella hostage?

It may sound like heresy to some “Twilight” fans. But those stories, published online, have thousands of dedicated readers. They were written by Randi Flanagan, a 35-year-old sales manager for a trade publishing company in Toronto.

Ms. Flanagan writes fan fiction—amateur works based on the characters and settings from novels, movies, television shows, plays, videogames or pop songs. Such stories, which take place in fictional worlds created by professional writers, are flourishing online and attracting millions of readers.

Ms. Flanagan started writing her own takes on “Twilight” three years ago, after devouring Ms. Meyer’s vampire books. She has since written 15 stories, including some that are as long as novels. In the process, she has gained groupies of her own. Some 1,500 readers subscribe to her account on fanfiction.net.

“A lot of people don’t understand why I would devote time to this,” says Ms. Flanagan, who writes at night after her young son goes to bed. “It’s just fun.”

Fan fiction has long existed under the radar in a sort of shadowy digital parallel universe. But the form has been bubbling up to the surface lately, as a growing number of fan writers break into the mainstream.

 

Read the full article on The Wall Street Journal.

 

When a Brand Becomes a Publisher: Inside Red Bull’s Media House

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This post by Dorian Benkoil originally appeared on PBS Mediashift on 11/10/14.

It’s often said that every company is a media company. Red Bull has embraced that maxim in a full-throated way.

Not only does the Austrian energy drink maker create TV shows, magazines, movies, books, music and more, but they also distribute their creations everywhere from newsstands, to theaters, TV, YouTube, mobile apps and, of course, the Web.

What makes them rare, if not unique, as a consumer brand, though, is that so much of the media they create stands on its own, as true media, enjoyed for its entertainment or informational value — rather than as, simply, marketing.

Werner Brell, managing director of Red Bull Media House, said in a rare public appearance at the Content All Stars summit in New York a few weeks ago: “We were creators, producers and distributors” of Felix Baumgartner’s record-breaking leap from outer space to Earth, which got 9 million concurrent views on YouTube.  “We owned the entire project.”

 

Building a Media House
The Media House, created six years ago as a separate arm of the company to create what Brell called “premium” media, produces and sells high-end art and photography coffee table books, a yearly calendar, DVDs of adventurers exploring forests and fjords, and TV shows.

 

Read the full post on PBS Mediashift.

 

Adobe Makes Dramatic Change to iOS App Publishing Program

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on goodereader on 11/27/14.

Adobe has been running a fairly popular service for the last few years that has been marketed towards independent authors, businesses and design studios to create enhanced eBook apps for iOS. Adobe has just confirmed that starting in May 2015, these companies will either have to find other options to publish apps, or pay thousands of dollars a month.

The Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition puts iPad app design within reach of anyone with InDesign skills, providing an intuitive way to create unlimited apps for the iPad without writing code. This service was free to Adobe Creative Cloud members. The essence of the program was to provide an avenue to develop enhanced eBooks, cookbooks, magazines and other content using the EPUB3 framework and packaging them as dedicated apps to be sold in the Apple Newsstand or the App Store.

 

Read the full post on goodereader.

 

The Books Of Revelations: Why Are Novelists Turning Back To Religion?

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This post by Philip Maughan originally appeared on New Statesman on 11/27/14.

There is a sense that, in recent years, novelists have formed part of a rearguard action in response to Richard Dawkins’s New Atheist consensus. Philip Maughan talks to Marilynne Robinson, Francis Spufford and Rowan Williams about God in literature.

Close to the end of White Noise, Don DeLillo’s 1984 novel about a professor of Hitler studies who will do just about anything to ease his fear of dying, an elderly nun reveals the secret truth about faith. “Do you think we are stupid?” she asks Jack Gladney, bleeding from the wrist at a Catholic hospital following a botched murder attempt. “We are here to take care of sick and injured,” the old nun explains in a halting German accent. “Only this. You would talk about heaven, you must find another place.”

All the crosses, devotional images of saints, angels and popes that line the walls of the ward exist merely as set dressing. “The devil, the angels, heaven and hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse,” she says. “As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak.”

“I don’t want to hear this,” Gladney moans. “This is terrible.”

“But true,” the nun says.

Perhaps this goes some way to explaining the unlikely popularity of religion in contemporary fiction. So far this year we have seen the strange sanctification of a thalidomide victim who died in childhood (Orla Nor Cleary in Nicola Barker’s dazzlingly manic In the Approaches), an avowedly atheist dentist lured to Israel by the leader of an underground sect (Joshua Ferris’s Man Booker-shortlisted To Rise Again at a Decent Hour), a high court judge, Fiona Maye, ruling on whether a hospital has the right to administer a life-saving blood transfusion to a teenage Jehovah’s Witness (Ian McEwan’s The Children Act) and, most recently, the voyage of a prim evangelical on a mission to outer space (Michel Faber’s Book of Strange New Things).

 

Read the full post on New Statesman.

 

How The Strand Bookstore Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon

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This post by Christopher Bonanos originally appeared on Slate on 11/28/14.

Walk into the Strand Book Store, at East 12th and Broadway, and the retail experience you’ll have is unexpectedly contemporary. The walls are white, the lighting bright; crisp red signage is visible at every turn. The main floor is bustling, and the store now employs merchandising experts to refine its traffic flow and make sure that prime display space goes to stuff that’s selling. Whereas you can leave a Barnes & Noble feeling numbed, particularly if a clerk directs you to Gardening when you ask for Leaves of Grass, the Strand is simply a warmer place for readers.

In the middle of the room, though, is a big concrete column holding up the building, and it looks … wrong. It’s painted gray, and not a soft designer gray but some dead color like you’d see on a basement floor. Crudely stenciled signs reading BOOKS SHIPPED ANYWHERE are tacked to it. Bookcases surround the column, and they’re beat to hell, their finish nearly black with age.

This tableau was left intact when the store was renovated in 2003. Until then, the Strand had been a beloved, indispensable, and physically grim place. Like a lot of businesses that had hung on through the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD years, it looked broken-down and patched-up. The bathroom was even dirtier than the one in the Astor Place subway. You got the feeling that a lot of books had been on the shelves for years. The ceiling was dark with the exhalations from a million Chesterfields. There were mice. People arriving with review copies to sell received an escort to the basement after a guard’s bellow: “Books to go down!” It was an experience that, once you adjusted to its sourness, you might appreciate and even enjoy. Maybe.

That New York is mostly gone, replaced by a cleaner and more efficient city—not to mention a cleaner and more efficient Strand.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

The DBW Writers’ Survey

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 11/19/14.

The annual DBW Writers’ Survey is up!

Please consider participating and sharing. The more respondents, the more meaningful the results.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how those results are analyzed. In the past, the outcome of publishing paths has been the main focus of this survey, which does not help authors make decisions with their manuscripts. There is an implied assumption in those past results that authors can simply choose whether to traditionally publish or self-publish. And so aspiring authors who have not yet managed to get traditionally published do not have their $0 income factored in, while all self-published authors are counted.

Compounding the problem, hybrid authors (those who have published both ways) have been treated as a special case in the past. This is odd considering that the vast majority of hybrids have either been picked up because of success with self-publishing, or found success self-publishing a backlist that did poorly enough with a traditional publisher for the rights to revert. In both cases, it was the decision to self-publish that was heavily rewarded.

These issues can be handled in the analysis. One way would be to compare hybrids with those who have been traditionally published, as both groups represent the top fraction of two different freely made decisions: the decision to either query an agent/publisher or to self-publish. These two groups also have in common the ability to draw the interest of a publishing house, whether out of a slush pile or out of the pool of self-published titles.

 

Read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.