Speakeasy

Pan Macmillan books are now available to download from your iPhone. The publishing company has partnered with the e-reader company Lexcycle and will offer a range of titles for download.

Editorial Anonymous has answered an interesting question somebody sent in about whether children’s books can be frivolous or not. Check it out here.

A counterfeiter in the UK has been convicted of illegally selling more than 1 million pounds worth of counterfeit audio books over the internet. The counterfeit books include the Harry Potter series, Lemony Snicket series. In 2005, counterfeiting in the publishing industry alone was estimated to account for £150 million of retail value goods every year, translating into an estimated criminal gain of £30 million (UK figures only).

If you thought Harlequin only publised romance books, think again. They have quite a few imprints like Mira Books, which publishes a lot of diverse stuff, Steeple Hill is their Christian fiction imprint, LUNA is the paranormal and fantasy imprint and Kimani Press publishes African-American fiction and nonfiction. Check out the list here. You might find an imprint that suits you.

The YES program (Young Entrepreneurs Success) is a business mentoring program that was designed to support innovation in business. It specifically targets the creative industries, ie film, television, design from all genres, art, digital mediums, dance, performance and more. They will be running a course in Brisbane on 10 December for any interested parties.

Money is money is money. Small royalties aside, if you are making money as an author then kudos to you, my friend. Do you want to know a good way to make more money as an author? Be a celebrity author.

There has been a minor blogging furor over reports that American comedian Sarah Silverman is to receive an advance of $2.5 million dollars while Jerry Seinfeld’s book proposal has received bids of $7 to $8 million dollars (I thought the publishing industry was struggling?). Moonrat breaks the number’s down for you - "let’s pretend the royalties are a flat 15% and cut out any escalator. Let’s also assume the book is $24.95. Seems fair, right? That means Jerry Seinfeld will earn back $3.74 toward his advance with each copy purchased by a consumer. That means that for his advance to earn out, he’d have to sell 1,871,658 copies of his book in the first year for the advance to earn out."

The CEO of Trident Media (Silverman and Seinfeld are their clients) has responded to the comments saying "[How is it any different] if you’re talking about a name-brand fiction author? Do you think it’s wrong for a publisher to spend a lot of money on Dan Brown or John Grisham or James Patterson? It’s the same thing".

Not really Mr CEO. Dan Brown and friends are writers that are celebrities. Not the other way round (especially when most celebrities that are "writers" have a handy-dandy ghostwriter to help them out).  Why don’t they increase author royalties rather than the advances? Does the money spent on books about Seinfeld give publishers a chance to fund an unknown writer? Any ghostwriters (or published authors) out there want to shed a bit of light on this?

In other news, Nathan Bransford is away from his blog at the moment, but he has a bevy of guest bloggers with some really interesting things to say. Go and check it out.

Sorry for the slackness of blogs lately, but you may have noticed a change over at AWMonline. Apart from the red colour, there are a few other changes as well. Go and have a sticky.
In other news, Google and the Authors Guild/Association of American Publishers have finally reached a settlement about Google’s BookSearch.
The settlement of $125 million was reached and now the program is up and running again.

Some of the good things to come out of this 3-year long settlement: a creation of a ‘Book Rights Registry’, increased access to out-of-print books and additional ways for consumers to purchase books, including building an electronic market.

You can read the full report here.

The Chinese government has been stepping up objections to certain print jobs. A lot of printing gets done in China (because it is so cheap) but lately they’ve been throwing their weight around by objecting to certain publications. A new atlas to be published by Millennium House, Earth, has been printed in Hong Kong after China objected to the way certain regions (namely Tibet and Taiwan) were treated by the publisher. The government had embargoed titles from Millenium House last year because of the publisher’s treatment of these two areas. Gordon Cheers, managing director of Millenium House, said objections to certain print jobs in China was “only recent – in the last 18 months”. Another book, Putting Queensland on the Map by Felicity Jack (published by UNSW Press), was also turned down by a Chinese printer earlier this year for the way it addresses the situation in Tibet.

If you’re only new to the writing game and are thinking it would be easier if you could just send your work straight to a publisher without trying to get an agent then STOP. Don’t do anything till you read Editorial Ass’s blog about your very problem. She lists quite clearly why you need an agent. And she’s an editor, so she’s not just trying to drum up a bit of business for herself.

Here at Justine Larbalestier’s blog. There’s a discussion of sorts in the comments, in which Garth Nix qualifies his position in response to some of the posts.

And, there’s been some interesting comments on our previous post on this issue.

As I understand it, anyway. And it’s an issue with many sides.

The beginning: The government is investigating the potential value of parallel importation for books. They’ve looked at it before, and it’s never been passed, but Rudd and co are taking another look at the situation.

What is parallel importation? As far as I can tell, it is the right to import books published overseas and distribute them in Australia, without infringing on Australian-held copyright. For example, if a book is published in Australia and the US, and the US version is cheaper for distributors to buy, under parallel importation the distributor can import the US version and sell that instead of the Australian product. 

Cheaper books mean benefits for booksellers, and also the reading public. Parallel import should drive down the overall price of books, and increase the variety and availability of books in general. In terms of the preservation of reading culture in Australia, it’s a good thing.

If so, why have the Australian Society of Authors, the Australian Publishers Association, Nick Earls and Garth Nix come out against parallel import? Well, to begin with, authors will probably receive fewer royalties if booksellers buy books at cheaper rates (there is an argument that this could be offset by greater sales, but that seems like a dodgy bet to me).

Local publishers are feeling threatened because, with parallel import, they will be forced to drop their prices to compete on the international book market. Most, especially the smaller publishing houses, are already in financially tight states, so this potential loss of income is a serious issue. Worst case scenario extrapolates this drop in income to less production, poorer quality products, and to local publishers signing even fewer Australian authors than they do now, as they won’t be able to afford it.

However, Bernard Keane has weighed in at Crikey with the argument that the Australian publishing industry should essentially get over it. Software and music import restrictions have fallen, and he asks why books should be any different.

Australian publishers, like other beneficiaries of media regulation like the FTA TV networks and music companies, have had to watch as their fortresses of protectionism have been bypassed by the internet, with consumers exercising the power it hands them to get what they want when they want it, legally or illegally. With a strong Australia-US exchange rate, there’s never been a better time to buy GST-free books from Amazon.

Keane goes on to argue that import regulation is actually a lack of trust in the Australian consumer, that publishers do not believe Australians will buy Australian stories, and the industry must be regulated to keep sales of Australian literature up. He compares it to the broadcasting industry’s Australian Content Requirements, and the theory that Australians wouldn’t watch Australian TV shows if the industry wasn’t forced to make them.

However, it’s not just about the content. Garth Nix makes an incredibly important point in his letter, one which should probably be the sticking point to the entire debate:

I am surprised there is support for an “open” market in Australia because it would be no such thing. It would actually be a “surrendered” market. The entire publishing world still works on the basis of territorial copyright and it will do so for a long time to come, despite electronic editions and the Internet, of which I will have more to say down the page. This is particularly the case with English language publishing. The USA and the UK have actually been strengthening their respective book copyright regimes, not surrendering them. What is “open” about Australian-published books not being able to be sold in the USA or the UK, but American, British or any other English-language edition from anywhere being able to be freely sold here?

Perhaps I’m missing the point, but why should we accept American and British versions of our books, when they won’t do the same? They’d all have American spelling, for one thing. And Australian authors would have nothing to sell Australian publishers; local editions of books by Australian authors will disappear. Australian writers will have to compete for the attention of international publishers, selling their international rights straight off the bat and getting their books published overseas. Then, they’ll be sold back into Australia.

To make this perfectly clear: "Australian rights" will become completely worthless. Australia will, as Nix points out, essentially surrender it’s copyright territory. No other country has done this, or is even thinking of doing this. Quite frankly, it doesn’t seem worth it.

Yes, the bookselling and publishing industry in Australia is in a precarious position, but there has to be a better way to fix it than parallel import. 

This article in today’s Australian talks about one of the key problems with Australian drama.

I didn’t know that most Australian TV dramas weren’t written by the same people every week. It explains a lot, really. And it really doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Why on earth would they get different people every week? What kind of series are they going to end up with, if half the writers have no idea what direction the show is heading? Shouldn’t the goal be a mesh between the weekly storyline, and the season’s story arc? It’d be the writers who’d incorporate all the little details into each script that add to the big storyline; why on earth wouldn’t you want them to do this?

Say what you will about TV in the US, for all the rubbish it puts out, they’re making some good, solid dramas at the moment. And I don’t know about you, but the best shows, the ones you can tell are really well-scripted, are constantly balancing the storytelling needs of each episode with the need to work up to a grand finale. 

Apart from anything else, that finale feels all the more satisfying when there have been subtle clues throughout the season, and the characters have been tweaked in all the right ways in the preceding episodes. It makes it feel inevitable. Not expected, but inevitable in that good way that means none of the characters are acting out-of-character, and you can think back over the events of the season and trace it all up to the climax. That’s usually what makes me want to come back for the next season, and I think it’s something Australian drama needs to work on.

…to an old article someone recommended to me. Just dug it up out of my inbox. Discusses the self-publishing boom from a business perspective, and looks at booksellers’ interaction with self-published stuff.

At The Guardian.