top shelf

From: Christine Finlayson

“This month in keeping with our look inside publishing, I’m departing from my usual craft advice to give you my view of the new state of the industry.

     I don’t see the new shape of things as many do: the twilight of the dinosaurs, the old-thinking Big Five print publishers staggering, falling to their knees and heading for extinction as they’re overwhelmed by a nimble army of small, warm-blooded mammals whose claws are the sharp, smart, flexible tools of electronic publishing.
     It’s true that I’m a gatekeeper, a longtime member (to my surprise) of the industry establishment. But I am no worshiper of the old ways. Traditional publishing always was cost-heavy and inefficient. It’s a wonder that it worked. But the new electronic 'paradigm' is not the glorious revolution that true believers would like it to be.
     What’s happened instead is an evolution of the publishing world into a new class system, and like any class system it has winners, losers and opportunities. It’s a system that, if not recognized for what it is, will trap frustrated writers in a pit far more hopeless than the one they yearned to escape. Let’s start with a couple of cold-eyed realities.”
— Donald Maass, Writer Unboxed
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"[…] a farm league for larger publishers […]"

"TeleRead: From what I’ve seen from browsing your site, Publerati doesn’t work quite like most people expect from a publisher or literary agent. Give us a quick overview of what you do and how?

Caleb [Mason]: Publerati is a hybrid ebook fiction publisher and literary agency. In many ways we are playing both sides of the street: looking to move forward into the new digital streams for books that are completely separate from the traditional publishing industry and its current business models, but also looking to sell rights to the traditional industry when and if we feel it is in the best interests of our authors, and the authors in fact want to go in that direction. Some do not, but instead want to go forward as their past publishing experiences have not been good. No one emails them back. Their books are published and declared out of print before having a reasonable chance. Editors come and go so fast the authors get lost within the mega-publishers.

TeleRead: What types of books do you publish and why?

Caleb: We only publish fiction and do so in all popular ebook formats. We actively look for novels that are unique and unlike the many genres already well represented by large publishers. In essence, we are taking the risk on titles we feel have artistic merits with the potential to also become commercially successful. Some people in the publishing industry say it is like a farm league for larger publishers, which could be the case for some titles, and this is why I wanted Publerati to be a hybrid agency and ebook publisher, at least at our start while we see how things play out."
— Julie Monroe, in conversation with Caleb Mason, Teleread
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Turn Away

"'Nearly a third of self-published ebooks are “erotica,' according to a new analysis from Digital Book World and the Book Genome Project, compared with about 1% of traditionally published ebooks.

     What’s more, nearly 10% of that subset of self-published ebooks has themes of incest or bestiality.
     How big of a problem is this for ebook retailers?
     'It obviously matters when you are perceived as being a wholesome, family oriented, though declining brand like WHSmith,' said Andrew Rhomberg, an ebook observer and founder of ebook discovery start-up Jellybooks, referring to the British ebook retailer that shut its digital doors last week temporarily until it had cleaned its shelves of much of its erotic content, adding, 'but should Amazon worry, probably not.'
     While 'electronic books' have been around in some form or another since the 1980s, they did not rise to commercial prominence in any form until 2007 at the introduction of the Kindle. Perhaps the ebook business is going through the same kind of growing pains the Internet as a whole had around adult content in the first five or six years of its commercial existence."
— Jeremy Greenfield, Forbes
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power reading... with 2013 Man Booker Prize judge Natalie Haynes

heroes & villains

From: challenge oppression

"Perched on the end of a panel filled with writers who are throwing off the shackles of conventional publishing, surrounded by Kindle enthusiasts of every stripe, Mark Buckland found himself very much the odd one out at the Edinburgh international book festival. The head of the e-savvy independent publisher Cargo began by asking how many in the audience were self-published authors and wryly suggested he was 'going to get lynched.'

     It's no surprise that an audience which had paid £10 a ticket to hear about writing in a digital age was mostly made up of authors, with a sizeable minority already publishing themselves, but the hostility Buckland faced as a representative of the publishing industry was something of an eye-opener.
     Catherine Czerkawska, who described herself as a 'classic midlist author,' had already revealed how as publishers became bigger she found herself suffering from the 'rave rejection,' her agent telling her she was "too accessible … to be truly literary, but too literary to be popular,' how she had uploaded her backlist to the Kindle store and 'never looked back.' Maggie Craig had just confessed how, for the first time since she had begun writing, Amazon had given her 'a good monthly income,' joking that if big publishers find a writer is making money 'they call a meeting to find out what's going wrong.'"
— Richard Lea, The Guardian
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"All conversations between authors nowadays seem to revert to the single intriguing topic of eBook or 'Indie' publishing. This is because it's becoming more and more difficult for authors to find a conventional publisher for fiction. This is especially true if a significant percentage of your readers are likely to be middle aged and older women in search of a well told story. But now, our readers have Kindles, Nooks, iPads or other e-readers.
     Many writers are publishing their own novels and stories, old and new. Prices are low and you can usually try before you buy, so eBooks are an excellent way for readers to experiment with finding new authors or meeting old favourites. My novels and stories are now available in eBook form, with more to come."
— Catherine Czerkawska, from her web site
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a little romance

From: Cover Browser

I hope cover artist E. M. Jackson (The Saturday Evening Post, April 4, 1931) got some recognition, if not money, for this image when it was turned into the now iconic Harlequin logo.
     It is probably no coincidence that Jack Palmer, head of Canadian distribution for The Saturday Evening Post, was one of the founders of Harlequin Books in May of 1949.

"[August 15, 2013] Harlequin, the publisher with a name that is almost synonymous with romance novels, is releasing a host of new e-book originals through several of its imprints over the next several months, with plans to further increase this initiative. No date is set yet for the books to appear in print.

     'We’re thrilled to further expand our reach in the digital space,' Loriana Sacilotto, executive vice president of global editorial at Harlequin, told Publishers Weekly. 'In a retail environment that’s increasingly challenging for new and emerging authors, digital publication and promotion allows us to continue to encourage author discovery and growth, bring books to market more quickly, [and] leverage popular digital trends.'

From: FLY-BY-NIGHT

     The new program will include the launch of Harlequin-E, an imprint that will be devoted solely to works that are released first in digital format."
— Milly Driscoll, The Christion Science Monitor
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"[July 19, 2012] The relationship between novelists and romance-book publisher Harlequin Enterprises has soured over royalty fee contracts for electronic books.
     Three authors sued Toronto-based Harlequin Enterprises, the world’s largest publisher of romance novels, today in federal court in Manhattan, alleging the company has exploited a technicality in their contracts to pay them 21 percent less in royalties.
     At issue is whether Harlequin Enterprises, a unit of newspaper and book publisher Torstar Corp. (TS/B), is the publisher of the books, or whether it has licensed its Fribourg, Switzerland-based subsidiary, Harlequin Switzerland, to distribute the e-books, according to the complaint."
— Emily Grannis, Bloomberg Business Week
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Boekroof

From: Sergio Falcone & Co

"Legally purchasing an ebook may soon make you responsible for anything that happens to it. Thanks to a new digital distribution agreement publishers are making with ebook platforms, all ebooks may soon come with a digital watermark that’s specifically linked to a person’s account, so if a copy of that book somehow ends up on a pirating or torrent website, they know who to blame.

     […] think of an ebook like a real book, just for a second. Imagine if someone stole your book on the subway and ended up giving it to someone else. Now imagine that the police, or the publisher of that book, found that stolen copy and saw that it had 'owned by [Insert Your Name Here], purchased at Barnes & Noble' in the cover. Not a problem, right? Now imagine Barnes & Noble decided not to let you buy any more books because your copy was distributed illegally. […]
     It appears that this move is initially only targeting Dutch content publishers, but it’s not far off from coming to Western shores. The anti-piracy agency named BREIN, which is a Dutch acronym that roughly translates to 'Protection of the Rights of the Entertainment Industry of the Netherlands,' will have access to all of the digital transaction records of all ebook purchases, data that used to be private."
— Jeffrey Van Camp, Digital Trends
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ebookapocalyse

The Tandy TRS 80 model 1, launched in 1977 (from: Old-Computers)

"In late 1999, Microsoft created an ad for its upcoming 'Microsoft Reader' software. The headline blared, 'This is a story about the future of reading,' and underneath the story about the company's actual product, the marketers inserted a timeline based on 'the best estimates of Microsoft researchers and developers' of what was going to happen to books in the future.

     The Microsoft Reader product was unremarkable and did not drive a revolution in the book marketplace. But the predictions! They're fascinating, particularly in how they attempt to anticipate the backlash and counterarguments to the increasing ubiquity of e-books that they forecast. It will not surprise you that they were overly optimistic, but interestingly, these are some of the few specific predictions that seem to have gotten better as they reached further into the future. Normally, the opposite is true. Let's go through them…."
— Alexis Madrigal, The Atlantic, (via Yahoo!)
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Rocket-eBook (from: Lybrary)

"In 1998 an innovative startup, NuvoMedia, introduced the Rocket-eBook, the first successful true ebook reader. Before the Rocket-eBook the only option were PDAs [Personal Digital Assistants] such as the line of PalmPilots, Franklin's eBookMan (a somewhat more ebook friendly PDA), etc.
     The Rocket-eBook was overall a big success and largely responsible for the first wave of ebook enthusiasm riding along the Internet bubble. The screen was about the size of today's popular e-ink readers from Sony and Amazon. At that time E-ink was in its infancy and NuvoMedia had to resort to standard LCD screens. However, for 1998 the b/w screen was pretty nifty and very good for reading purposes. Remember the only other option were tiny PDA screens or heavy 'schlepptops'. They even had a touch screen and it worked for 10 to 20 hours on one charge."
— Lybrary
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"I can’t get no respect.” Chapter II

"In 2001 when my first novel, 'Slab Rat,' was published and I was important for about eight weeks, I was asked to write three very short stories for a literary magazine….

     As best as I can remember [my third novel, 'Pocket Kings'], did not receive one negative review. There were some flat-out raves, too. The Washington Post loved it and it was an Editor’s Choice in the New York Times Book Review. This was the first time that the Times had liked a book of mine. They cold-bloodedly butchered the first and fatally wounded the second.
     'Pocket Kings' got positive reviews, but the problem is it just didn’t get too many of them. As far as I know, only one newspaper west of the Pecos (the Dallas Morning News), reviewed it. Newspapers don’t cover books anymore, of course. And then there’s the lack of a readership on my part, I’m just not that prominent, etc. But why wouldn’t newspapers or magazines in Las Vegas cover a novel about poker....
     'Pocket Kings' took so long to actually get published that before it finally hit the stores and Amazon, I’d already written another novel, called West of Babylon,' and was ready to shop it around. My agent and I had decided, however, to wait and send out the newer book in the wake of 'Pocket Kings.' Our hope was that “Pocket Kings” would get positive reviews and that publishers would then chomp at the bit for 'West of Babylon.'

   ...we decided I should self-publish the book in electronic book format only. I would be publisher, editor, publicist, regional sales manager, mail room guy and everything else. (My wife designed the cover in return for a $50 gift card to the Gap.)
     I can tell you that self-publishing is not fun.
     After a few weeks of this 9-to-5 masochism, [as P.R. agent] you lose your sense of shame. I’m no longer so hesitant about sending emails because, I figure, nobody is going to read the damn thing anyway. The worst thing they can do is turn you down or ignore you, and by now I am used to that. I sent an email to the book section editor of a newspaper I thought would find 'West of Babylon' to its liking and, through an intermediary, was able to discover that the editor had never gotten the email. I have to assume that this is just one of the reasons for the great silence: I’m sending queries to people and my email is probably going straight into spam folders, right along with the ads for Viagra and Cialis. I have no idea what’s worse: writing books that don’t ever get published, or writing books that get published but don’t ever get read, or writing emails that don’t ever get read to people about books that don’t ever get published and won’t ever get read."
— Ted Heller, Salon
Read the full, unfragmented article here…

Buy all of Ted Heller's "analogue" books here…

And get his latest book 'West of Babylon' here…

Why do e-book outfits love the letter 'K'? (Part 2)

Photo: Selina Swayne (from: word and image)

"An Australian bookseller has announced that he will no longer stand 'passively by while Amazon steals our customers and steals their reading choices,' and is urging readers to throw their Kindles in a specially provided bin.

     Pages and Pages, one of Australia's leading independent booksellers, made the announcement on Friday that it would be holding a 'Kindle Amnesty' on the third Saturday of every month, when customers would be able to get rid of their old Kindles in a bin in the Mosman Village, Sydney store in exchange for a A$50 (£34) gift voucher if they also buy the ereader the store sells.
     'Pages & Pages is no longer sitting passively by while Amazon steals our customers and steals their reading choices. Through this campaign we want people to understand what Amazon is doing and make an informed choice to have choice,' said manager and Australian Booksellers Association president Jon Page.
     'The ebook is not a threat to physical bookshops. This new format presents bookshops and readers with many wonderful opportunities to sell and read more books. What does threaten bookshops is a company who engages in uncompetitive behaviour, pays no tax in Australia and misleads readers with restrictive devices and fake book reviews.'"
— Alison Flood, The Guardian
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"If print could talk, it would surely be telling the world, Mark Twain-style, that reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated. The market for e-books grew exponentially after Amazon introduced the Kindle, and it’s still one of the most fascinating and unpredictable sectors of a once hidebound industry.
     But the early-adapter boom is showing signs of flagging and the growth of the e-book market appears to be leveling out. E-books are definitely here to stay, but it seems that many, many readers — a threefold majority, in fact — still prefer print.
     […] New self-publishing enterprises are a godsend for traditional publishers because they can take much of the uncertainty out of signing a new author. By the time a self-published author has made a success of his or her book, all the hard stuff is done, not just writing the manuscript but editing and the all-important marketing. Instead of investing their money in unknown authors, then collaborating to make their books better and find them an audience, publishers can swoop in and pluck the juiciest fruits at the moment of maximum ripeness. As Hughes points out, that’s exactly what happened with erotica blockbuster E.L. James."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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"Last October, when superstorm Sandy ripped through Connecticut, it flooded Bank Square Books in Mystic. Owner Annie Philbrick recalls walking inside to the smell of the ocean and a soaking wet carpet. […]
     Not to worry. Three weeks after superstorm Sandy, on Nov. 16 at 11 a.m., Bank Square Books reopened for business. 'We couldn't have done it without the help of our community,' says Philbrick. 'It was pretty incredible.'[…]
     That community support is by no means unique to Bank Square Books, and it may be the secret ingredient behind a quiet resurgence of independent bookstores, which were supposed to go the way of the stone tablet – done in first by the national chains, then Amazon, and then e-books.
     A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral.
     While beloved bookstores still close down every year, sales at independent bookstores overall are rising, established independents are expanding, and new ones are popping up from Brooklyn to Big Stone Gap, Va. Bookstore owners credit the modest increases to everything from the shuttering of Borders to the rise of the 'buy local' movement to a get-'er-done outlook among the indies that would shame Larry the Cable Guy. If they have to sell cheesecake or run a summer camp to survive, add it to the to-do list.

Wendy Welch and her husband
(from: Malaprop's Bookstore Café)

    '2012 was the year of the bookstore,' says Wendy Welch, co-owner of Tales of the Lonesome Pine in Virginia and author of the 2012 memoir The Little Bookstore of Big Stone Gap. In her memoir, she recounts how she and her husband, Jack Beck, created – sometimes despite themselves – a successful used-book store in a town that, by any business measure, is too small to support one."

— Yvonne Zipp, The Christian Science Monitor
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Word Processing

Assyrian cunieform sample in the British
Museum (Photo: Matt Neale)
from: Wikimedia Commons

"[…] How exactly does the technology we use to read change the way we read? How reading on screens differs from reading on paper is relevant not just to the youngest among us, but to just about everyone who reads — to anyone who routinely switches between working long hours in front of a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for their convenience and portability, but admit that for some reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who have already vowed to forgo tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading — but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity of such concerns paper-thin?

     […] we are not born with brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities, such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision.
     […] Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain — such as mountains and trails — and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters."
— Ferris Jabr, Salon
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Dented Cars and Bad Teeth

"This past summer, my novel, Broken Piano for President, shot to the top of the best-seller lists for a week. After Jack Daniel’s sent me a ridiculously polite cease and desist letter, the story went viral and was featured in places like Forbes, Time magazine and NPR’s Weekend Edition. The New Yorker wrote one whole, entire, punctuated-and-everything sentence about me!
   My book was the No. 6 bestselling title in America for a while, right behind all the different 50 Shades of Grey and Gone Girl. It was selling more copies than Hunger Games and Bossypants. So, I can sort of see why people thought I was going to start wearing monogrammed silk pajamas and smoking a pipe.

     But the truth is, there’s a reason most well-known writers still teach English. There’s a reason most authors drive dented cars. There’s a reason most writers have bad teeth. It’s not because we’ve chosen a life of poverty. It’s that poverty has chosen our profession.
     Even when there’s money in writing, there’s not much money."
— Patrick Wensink, Salon
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Buy his book here... please.

To be read

 "Most readers, I think, will by now have seen the 'Medieval Helpdesk' sketch from Norweigan TV, where an exasperated monk requires assistance to start working with a new-fangled and daunting 'book.'
     It's fun – if loopily anachronistic, the codex having been around since the 1st century AD. But it does rest on a presumption that I'm increasingly beginning to question: that technological changes to the way we read affect only the secondary, cosmetic and non-essential aspects of reading. There is a kind of bookish dualism at work. The text is the soul, and the book – or scroll, or vellum, or clay tablet or knotted rope in the case of quipu – is the perishable body. In this way of thinking, the ebook is the book, only unshackled from paper, ink and stitching. If the debate about the ebook is to move on from nostalgic raptures over smell and rampant gadget-fetishism, it's time to think about the real fundamentals."
— The Guardian
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Byte-size

"The Internet may be disrupting much of the book industry, but for short-story writers it has been a good thing.

     Story collections, an often underappreciated literary cousin of novels, are experiencing a resurgence, driven by a proliferation of digital options that offer not only new creative opportunities but exposure and revenue as well.
     Already, 2013 has yielded an unusually rich crop of short-story collections, including George Saunders’s Tenth of December, which arrived in January with a media splash normally reserved for Hollywood movies and moved quickly onto the best-seller lists. Tellingly, many of the current and forthcoming collections are not from authors like Mr. Saunders, who have always preferred short stories, but from best-selling novelists like Tom Perrotta, who are returning to the form. […]
     In recent decades the traditional outlets for individual short stories have dwindled, with literary magazines closing or shrinking. But the Internet has created an insatiable maw to feed."
— Leslie Kaufman, The New York Times
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Buy all of George Saunders's books here...

Biting the Hand

From: Coverbrowser

"Late last week, the [United States] Justice Department warned Apple and five of the nation’s largest publishers that it was planning to sue them for price fixing. At issue is the agency model, a method of wholesaling e-books in which the publisher sets the retail price and the retailer takes a 30 percent cut. Most print and many e-books are sold under the traditional wholesale model, in which publishers sell books at a discounted price, and the retailer can resell them for whatever price it likes.
     The unnamed player in this drama is Amazon, which had been selling e-books at a loss until two years ago, when the iPad came along and publishers used the emergence of the new device to pressure the online megaretailer into adopting the agency model, too. If Amazon wanted to sell e-books from the Big Six (as the six largest book publishers are called), it could no longer sell those titles for $9.99.
     Publishers actually make less money with the agency model, so why have they insisted on it? The change was designed to limit the growing dominance of Amazon over American book retailing. On Monday, Scott Turow — the bestselling author of “Presumed Innocent” and other legal thrillers, and the president of the Authors Guild — posted a letter to members on the Guild’s web site. In it, he pronounced the Justice Department’s actions bad news for authors, 'grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture,' and (contrary to first impression) ominous for book consumers. I called him up to find out more."
— Laura Miller, Salon
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paper/back/lash

"Amazon.com removed more than 4,000 e-books from its site this week after it tried and failed to get them more cheaply, a muscle-flexing move that is likely to have significant repercussions for the digital book market.
     Amazon is under pressure from Wall Street to improve its anemic margins. At the same time, it is committed to selling e-books as cheaply as possible as a way to preserve the dominance of its Kindle devices.
When the Kindle contract for one of the country’s largest book distributors, the Independent Publishers Group, came up for renewal, Amazon saw a chance to gain some ground at I.P.G.’s expense.
     'They decided they wanted me to change my terms,' said Mark Suchomel, president of the Chicago-based I.P.G. 'It wasn’t reasonable. There’s only so far we can go.' [...]
     I.P.G. told its publishers to immediately begin stressing that their books were available in other electronic formats, including from the Amazon rivals Barnes & Noble and Apple. It also told them to contact their local independent bookstores and point out that they could now sell something that Amazon would not."
— David Streitfeld, The New York Times/Bits
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Buy all the books Amazon doesn't have here...