Book Trends

Articles about trends in bookselling and the publishing industry.

Making the Leap Into Freelance Copy Editing

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This article by Jessica Eggert originally appeared on American Journalism Review on 4/9/15.

When Jim Thomsen found out he was going to lose his position as a copy editor at the Kitsap Sun, a daily newspaper in Bremerton, Washington, he said that it was the blackest period of his life. “I couldn’t figure out what else I could do,” he said. He spent about a year looking for another job in the newspaper industry. Nothing.

That’s when he decided to start freelance editing manuscripts. Thomsen had been editing manuscripts on the side but never considered it as self-sustaining. Now, he said he’s making more money than he ever did at a newspaper and doesn’t regret the transition at all.

“I had to get past my psychological dependence on my identity as a newspaper person,” he said. “I had to shed myself of my tribal identity and find out what is forward thinking and lucrative, and I found that.”

Thomsen is hardly alone. He’s one of many editors who have opted to become freelancers after leaving a full-time job in the newspaper industry.

 

Read the full post on American Journalism Review.

 

Ebooks For Libraries

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This post by JA Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing site on 3/31/15.

TL;DR

I want to help authors get their ebooks into libraries.

I want to help libraries acquire indie ebooks.

To do this, I started a business called EAF – EbooksAreForever.com.

I want to sell your ebooks to libraries.

 

What’s going on with libraries and ebooks?

There are 120,000 libraries in the US. These libraries, and their patrons, are eager for popular ebooks. Many libraries have a budget they must spend, or they risk having that budget cut.

Currently, libraries have no allies in the ebook market. They aren’t happy with the restrictions and costs of the current leader in supplying libraries with ebook content, Overdrive. Through Overdrive, many publishers charge high prices for ebooks, some higher than $80 a title. They also require yearly license renewals, and may force libraries to re-buy licenses after a certain arbitrary number of borrows.

Just one example of the perils of this approach for America’s libraries is that a library must pay for extensions of time-limited licenses of old ebooks and purchases of licenses for new ones. All kinds of sustainability and predictability issues arise. And that’s true even if the budget remains the same, rather than declining, as many have in recent years. It will be harder than ever for libraries to grow their collection, whether the licenses are time-limited or come with limits on the number of times a library can loan a book.

So libraries are spending a fortune and don’t even own the content they’re spending that fortune on. In many cases, if they stop paying the fees, they lose the content they bought. This has been dubbed “digital decay”, and it’s a money grab, pure and simple.

What’s going on with indie authors and ebooks?

Some indies are on Overdrive and 3M. I’ve been on Overdrive for a few years. My last quarterly check was about $60, and I have a large catalog. This is small money, not just for me, but for any writer. And I was fortunate enough to have been invited into Overdrive. Many authors are not.

The vast majority of libraries don’t have access to many of the ebooks that readers are seeking. The latest AuthorEarnings.com report showed that 33% of all ebooks sold on Amazon are from indie authors. Libraries are missing out on 1/3 of available titles, because they have no way easy way to acquire them.

 

Read the full post on A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing.

 

Fuck You, Clean Reader: Authorial Consent Matters

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 3/25/15. Note that it contains a lot of strong language, but as strong language and authorial consent are at the heart of this post we have not censored any of it in the title or excerpt here.

There exists a new app called Clean Reader.

The function of Clean Reader is to scrub the profanity from e-books.

Their tagline: “Read books. Not profanity.“

You can dial in how much of the profanity you want gone from the books.

Author Joanne Harris has roundly (and to my mind, correctly) condemned the app, and I would recommend you read about her and condemnation. I would further suggest you go on and read the email she received from the Clean Reader people and, more importantly, her response to that email. (Oh, also: check her tweets, too: @JoanneChocolat.)

I am an author where much of my work utilizes profanity. Because fuck yeah, profanity. Profanity is a circus of language. It’s a drunken trapeze act. It’s clowns on fire. And let’s be clear up front: profanity is not separate from language. It is not lazy language. It is language. Just another part of it. Vulgarity has merit. It is expressive. It is emotive. It is metaphor.

So, as someone with a whole pig wagon full of fucks at stake, let be be clear:

Fuck you, Clean Reader.

*cups hand to mouth*

Fuuuuuuck. Yoooooooou.

*fuckecho through the canyon of fucks*

Please let me condemn your app in whatever obscene gesture you find most obscene.

Let me unpack this a little.

When I write a book, I write it a certain way. I paint with words. Those words are chosen. They do not happen randomly. The words and sentences and paragraphs are the threads of the story, and when you pluck one thread from the sweater, the whole thing threatens to unravel — or, at least, becomes damaged. You may say, Well, Mister Wendig, surely your books do not require the profanity, to which I say, fuck you for thinking that they don’t. If I chose it, and the editor and I agree to keep it, then damn right it’s required. It’s no less required than a line of dialogue, or a scene of action, or a description of a goddamn motherfucking lamp. Sure, my book could exist without that dialogue, that action, that goddamn motherfucking lamp.

But I don’t want it to. That’s your book, not my book.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

From the Internet to the Ivy League: Fanfiction in the Classroom

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This post by Elizabeth Minkel originally appeared on The Millions on 3/25/15.

It’s starting to feel like spring the morning that the Dinky, the shuttle that runs between Princeton Junction and Princeton University, deposits us on the edge of campus. There’s still plenty of snow on the ground, but the students milling past us are ambitiously channeling summer, bare arms and legs, flip flops and black and orange athletic gear. We’ve cut the timing a bit close, so my friend and I are frantically checking every single map on the path to East Pyne Hall, the site of our 12:30 class, English 222. The official course title is “Fanfiction: Transformative Works from Shakespeare to Sherlock” — essentially, a class I’d have given anything for as an undergrad.

To some extent, fanfiction has always had a place in the English classroom. The history of literature is one of reworking and retelling stories, especially prior to our modern conception of authorship. Popular media narratives often portray fan fiction — using someone else’s books, TV shows, films, or real-life personas, among other things, as the starting point for original fiction — as cringe-worthy scenes of sentimentality and/or sex between superheroes or vampires or all five members of a certain floppy-haired boy band. I and plenty of others have worked to ground the historically marginalized practice in “literary” precedent — favorite examples of authors explicitly refashioning others’ works include Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, both of which I first studied in a classroom.

 

Read the full post on The Millions.

 

Which Bad Novel Is Perfect for You?

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This post by Katy Waldman originally appeared on Slate on 3/18/15. While authors who are interested in exploring the possibilities of the Kindle Scout program may find the article’s tone dismissive or even inflammatory, it provides some solid insight into the reader’s-eye-view.

Reading, and voting on, the books of Amazon’s new Kindle Scout program.

As the title of one of the new century’s most beloved novels reminds us, complexity can exist where we see only the absence of complication. A single color contains multitudes. That novel’s author, E.L. James, might have been commenting on the category to which her own work belongs: “bad” books. Fifty Shades of Grey is a bad book—cheesy, boilerplate, and silly, despite its silky dreams of sophistication and naughtiness. But man, the simple descriptor bad encompasses so many other vistas of badness, strange and terrible to behold. These are planets of implausibility and awfulness that revolve beyond our wildest imaginings.

Welcome to Kindle Scout.

Kindle Scout is a new initiative from Amazon, a “reader-powered” publishing platform for “new, never-before-published books.” It works like this: Authors submit their manuscripts, 5,000-word excerpts of which are posted on the website for a 30-day scouting period. During that time, Amazon members can browse the selections and nominate the ones they’d like to see published. A reader is allowed just three swappable picks at a time, to preserve the integrity of each recommendation. At the end of the trial run, a team of staffers tallies the nods, applying its own secret rubric to decide which manuscripts get released. (A Kindle Scout representative declined to elaborate on the criteria it uses.) Selected books, explains Amazon, “will be published by Kindle Press and receive 5-year renewable terms, a $1,500 advance, 50 percent eBook royalty rate, easy rights reversions and featured Amazon marketing.”

On the writer’s resource site Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss has a smart post assessing the authorial incentives and drawbacks of such a deal.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

Which eBook Publishing Platform is Best?

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This post by Kristen Eckstein originally appeared on The Future of Ink on 3/13/15.

Before we get too deep into answering this question, know upfront this is like asking a mother of three which child is her favorite. Each platform comes with unique benefits and drawbacks.

Digital publishing is a huge all-encompassing world of everything from e-books and Kindle to video and teleseminars. For the purposes of this article’s length and my own personal expertise, we’ll stay focused on ebook publishing platforms. There are three primary platforms to publish an ebook: Amazon’s Kindle, Barnes and Noble’s Nook and Apple’s iBooks (iPad).

 

Amazon’s Kindle

Kindle is the granddaddy (though still quite young to be a grandpap) of e-bookdom. To this day, the Kindle Store still holds the record for e-book sales—67% of the e-book buying market. While this number has fallen to Nook over the past couple of years (it was closer to 99%), it’s still a good chunk of the market share. When Amazon came out with the Kindle, it did a lot of things right:

 

Read the full post on The Future of Ink.

 

How to Develop a Bestselling Book Idea

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This post by Penny C. Sansevieri originally appeared on PR Toolkit on 8/21/14. Note that it is geared to writers of nonfiction.

With so many people jumping on the publishing bandwagon, it’s clear that anyone can write and publish a book these days. But there’s a difference between writing a book versus writing a book that will sell. Once you understand how to use keywords and research to your advantage, you can create a bestselling book, in particular, a book that will be a hit on Amazon. Here’s what you can do:

 

Where can you find ideas?

It starts with keywords. There are people who understand Search Engine Optimization to such a degree that they write books based on the most popular keywords that were top searches in Google. Why? Because those keywords are proven sellers. I don’t recommend this as a strategy for your book, but it does illustrate how important it is to write on a topic that already generates interest. This approach can help you resolve the following issues for your own book:

Book topic: You want your book to respond to the needs and questions of your audience. What do they want to know? How can you help them achieve their goals? You might not have to completely overhaul your original idea, but you can tweak your focus to respond to readers’ needs. And, since book production is a much faster process these days, you can respond to hot topics and trends quickly.

 

Read the full post on PR Toolkit.

 

Stacey Jay, Crowdfunding, and the Business of Publishing

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This post by Livia Blackburne originally appeared on her site on 1/7/15.

So I usually don’t jump in on internet kerfuffles, but  the recent blowup over Stacey Jay’s kick starter really caught my attention.  The short version is that author Stacey Jay started a kickstarter for her next YA novel after her publisher declined to buy it.  She factored in living expenses as part of the money to be raised, and got a lot of blowback for that choice, so much, in fact, that she ended up canceling the Kickstarter and apologizing.

I’m not the only person to weigh in.  There’s a Roundup at Bookshelves of Doom. And I particularly liked the response written by Chuck Wendig and Laura Lam. So I’ll just share a few thoughts.

 

1. What is the biggest cost of writing a book?

My dad, a lifelong businessman, once asked me what my biggest cost was for a self publishing project I was planning. I started quoting a rundown of editing costs, cover artist quotes, etc, but he stopped me halfway and said, “No Livia, your biggest cost is your time.” And of course, he’s right. This is business 101, but somehow for writers, the idea of time being a valuable thing is counterintuitive.

 

Read the full post on Livia Blackburne’s site.

 

How I Became An Indie Author: Helen Harper

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This article by Helen Harper originally appeared on the ALLi self-publishing advice blog on 3/4/15.

It Shouldn’t Happen to an English Teacher

Everyone makes mistakes. Career-wise, one of my biggest was to step into a temporary Deputy Head position at the international school where I was teaching English. Five years ago it was a small start-up, and I took the job knowing that I’d have to retain all my responsibilities as head of department, as well as teaching, and the new requirements of senior management. The upshot was that for eight months, I didn’t have a day off. I worked weekends, holidays, evenings … all I did was work. And by the time May rolled around, I was burnt out and had nothing left to give. I needed something else.

 

Bored? Then Write a Novel…

There was nothing I wanted to watch on television. I’d been working so hard that I had few friends. And I couldn’t find any books I wanted to read – so instead I wrote my own.

Every evening I’d come home, grab a bite and write. I didn’t tell a soul about it. I was lost in the fantasy world of Mack Smith, a young woman living with a pack of shapeshifters in rural Cornwall. It was a little bit like being a superhero. By day I taught English, and by night I transformed into a crime-fighting, ass-kicking heroine! Sort of, anyway.

 

Read the full article on the ALLi self-publishing advice blog.

 

Episodic Fiction is Finding a New Home on Kindle Unlimited

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This post by Michael Kozlowski originally appeared on GoodEReader on 3/11/15.

Indie authors are disrupting e-book publishing by writing episodic fiction. They are primarily distributing the titles through Kindle Unlimited and the Kindle lending library. This is providing a financial boon to authors who write 60 page novels in a serialized manner. This method of writing is quickly becoming more profitable than simply writing a single feature length novel.

Serialized fiction first gained prominence in Victorian England and it first appeared in newspapers. It was practiced by such literary giants as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Conrad. It fell out of favor in the last fifty years, but is now making a rebound, thanks to Amazon.

Things have been fairly static in self-publishing and traditional publishing for decades. An author writes a book and has it distributed through specific sales channels. They promote a single title and get paid when readers purchase it. Now we have Amazon picking up the tab when a book is read and the reader pays virtually nothing.

The Kindle Lending Library was first established in 2011 and allows members who opt into Amazon Prime to read one free book a month. This has proven to be a lucrative method for indie authors to garner sales. Kindle Unlimited is a similar program, but instead of a Prime membership, users pay around $10.00 a month and read as many e-books they want.

 

Read the full post on GoodEReader.

 

Your Book’s Genre and Classification Matter

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This post by Bob Hughes originally appeared on Beneath the Cover on 3/5/15.

For many novelists, the genre of their work matters a great deal. Even if there’s an element of fantasy in their work, they dread that it be labeled as something less than their ideal, as you can see from a New York Times interview with the acclaimed British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day”), concerning his new novel, “The Buried Giant.”

He asks the Times reporter Alexandra Alter, “Will readers follow me into this? Will they understand what I’m trying to do, or will they be prejudiced against the surface elements? Are they going to say this is fantasy?”

A fantasy novel from a serious novelist! Oh, no. It shouldn’t matter for a writer as acclaimed as Ishiguro. But it does. Even though so-called literary novelists as celebrated as David Mitchell have explored fantasy in their work (such as Mitchell’s latest, “The Bone Clocks”), critics of literary fiction tend to look down on fantasy as a serious art form, despite the literary success of J.R.R. Tolkien or George R. R. Martin.

 

Read the full post on Beneath the Cover.

 

Do Publishers Deserve to Exist?

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This post by Peter Ginna originally appeared on his Dr. Syntax blog on 10/24/15.

This week’s screed against book publishers comes from Matt Yglesias at Vox.com, who proclaims, “Amazon is doing the world a favor by crushing book publishers”–a headline that shouts clickbait but fairly reflects his piece. Yglesias, whose work I have often admired, notes that he’s the child of two authors and has published a book himself, so his hatred seems to be honestly earned. Writing of the “fundamental uselessness” of publishers, he says they are going to be “wiped off the face of the earth soon” by Amazon “and readers will be better for it.”

Book-business types rolled their eyes at Yglesias’ hostile tone and ignorance of some key facts, but I saw it cited as smart and “thoughtful” by a number of media people and others who I’d have hoped would know better. So at the risk of repeating points that have been made many times before (but seem still to be widely un-apprehended), maybe it’s worth briefly reminding ourselves just how publishers do add value in connecting writers and readers. So, pace Matt Yglesias, here are some of the services publishers perform.

Curation. The function of choosing what work is most worth presenting to readers is derided by some as a retrograde, “elitist” notion. Why should publishers appoint themselves as selectors of what people ought to read, when everybody can put their work online and let readers judge for themselves?

 

Read the full post on Dr. Syntax.

 

Teenager’s 10 Steps To Become Successfully Self-Published

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This editorial by Aaron Ozee originally appeared on Publishing Perspectives on 2/19/15.

Aaron Ozee, a prolific 18-year-old self-published poet, offers his sometimes unorthodox methodology for becoming a bestselling author.

When a writer gets the initial idea that their work is valuable enough to see the light of day and deserves public attention, that is when everything gets seriously tricky. Traditional publishing is a very attractive yet competitive method of releasing a book into the marketplace, especially since there are a limited number of manuscripts actually accepted annually by publishing houses. Most manuscripts that are submitted for review are tossed away into the black abyss of a cold file cabinet with no assurance that they will ever crawl to the surface again.

Feeling sad yet? You should be.

Though it is almost impossible to get anywhere by reserving your publication for a high-priced review and potential consideration by a literary agent, it does not mean the end of all things written. Self-publishing, the best alternative to traditional publishing, is the way to go, specifically because it is inexpensive, and in some cases, completely free and can easily be controlled by the author as the process begins to unfold. Now, self-publishing may be a fantasy to aspiring writers, but it can usually be confusing to those who have never had experience in taking that route to the top.

I published my first book when I was only 15 years old and in the following 4 years published another 8, became a bestselling author at the age of 17, translated my works into 6 foreign languages, made my publications available for purchase in 100 different countries and territories worldwide, and became perhaps the youngest bestselling American poet.

 

Read the full editorial on Publishing Perspectives.

 

How to Create Picture Ebooks for Kids

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This post by Laura Backes originally appeared on Jane Friedman’s site on 2/23/15.

Until recently, creating ebook versions of children’s picture books was something publishers reserved for their best-selling authors and illustrators. If you wanted to self-publish a picture ebook, you either needed to be a whiz at writing code, or you paid an ebook creation service to do it for you. (That said, it was possible to find a few services targeted toward publishing books for kids on Apple devices, such as Book Creator.)

Last September, Amazon released KDP Kids’ Book Creator, which allows the average Joe to create illustrated children’s books for the Kindle and upload them directly to Amazon. These books can be designed in the landscape format (to mimic the layout of print picture books) and can include text pop-ups that enlarge the text with a tap or a click, making it easier to read.

Side note: Using the KDP Kids’ Book Creator means you’re publishing through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing program. You can choose from several royalty structures within that program, and also choose whether or not to be included in KDP Select, which gives Amazon exclusive distribution of your ebook for a certain time period in exchange for marketing perks.

While the KDP Kids’ Book Creator still has a few rough spots (which Amazon is presumably ironing out in response to user feedback), it’s a good start. Those of us who have worked in children’s publishing for years recognized this move for what it was: a game changer.

Just how much has Amazon’s new free software changed the game?

 

Read the full post on Jane Friedman’s site.

 

Magical Thinking and the End of Publishing

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This post by John Pettigrew originally appeared on Publishing Matters on 2/23/15.

‘Magical thinking’ is allowing our own ignorance of a topic to give us the impression that there’s something special, ‘magical’ about the people who do understand it. It’s a common failing but it’s having an unfortunate effect on the publishing industry’s approach to ‘digital technology’. And some critical shortsighted mistakes are being made as a result.

There are surely fewer more ridiculous terms used in publishing than ‘digital natives’ – apparently, people in their teens and twenties who have grown up with technology and so ‘get it’ in ways that older people don’t. The assumption that all people in their 40s, 50s or older somehow don’t ‘get’ technology (especially odd given that this is the generation that invented most of it!) is just wrong. After all, the fact that I grew up with cars and learned to drive one as soon as I could doesn’t mean that I could make one, or even begin to fix anything but the simplest issues when it breaks down!

Why, then, do we talk as though ‘young people’ somehow have a magical grasp of technology that older people don’t?

 

Magical thinking

We see magical thinking all over the place, but perhaps especially with subjects that are perceived as difficult – finance, science, technology. Because it looks difficult to us (who don’t understand it), we overestimate the difficulty of the subject.

This can have two opposite unfortunate effects. The first is when we undervalue or even devalue the subject area – because we don’t understand it, it must not be very important, and those people who do think about it are somehow lacking in finer feelings or social niceties or whatever. This approach is often associated with perceptions of Maths, Science and Engineering. We hear, “Oh, well, I don’t understand Maths” used almost as a badge of pride – in a way we’d never hear, “Oh, well, I don’t really understand literature.”

 

Read the full post on Publishing Matters.