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 European Union launched a digital library recently and were swamped by 10 million hits an hour. The site was so popular that after it was first launched the site crashed and had to be temporarily closed. The website is a prototype project called Europeana and is Europe’s answer to Google Book Search, full of digitised versions of millions of books, artworks, manuscripts, maps, objects and films from Europe’s most important libraries, archives and museums, providing them free to download from one website – europeana.eu. The project is a response to fears that Google was dominating the internet. Europeana will go one step further and provide interactive content, audio and video as well as print sources.

Nathan Bransford has been getting some queries from people about when to tell your agent certain things, like if you had a previous agent, other offers etc and he’s been kind enough to answer them.

And continuing on from yesterday’s post, if you want to hear an author’s opinion about free content and the publishing industry, then head over to HarperStudio where they have interviewed Seth Godin, author of Tribes: We Need you to Lead us.
He says, “Publishing is far too focused on the pub day. The event of the publication. This is a tiny drip, perhaps the least important moment in a long timeline. As soon as publishers see themselves as marketers and agents and managers and developers of content, things change.”
If you’ve read The Book is Dead then you might feel the same way. I know I do.

Following on from the Google v Authors Guild settlement, Random has stated that they are going to change how they deal out e-royalties. Instead of basing royalties on the list price, they will base them on the actual net moneys they have received as publisher. Booksquare goes into this really well.
Their reasoning for why they are doing this? – “With the widespread use by consumers of electronic devices such as the iPod, the Amazon Kindle, and the Sony Reader, a significant market for e-books and digitally delivered audio content is finally ready to emerge," the letter stated. "In response, Random House is making major investments in our digital infrastructure and is creating digital files of active titles so that they are available for sales as e-books, as downloadable audio, and for Internet search and discovery."
This all sounds really good and promising doesn’t it? But the new royalty rate for sales will be only 25% of the amount received for all sales. For a breakdown of what authors should expect to get, Richard Curtis has put this in actual figures using a recent Random House contract and it doesn’t look good for authors.
According to his math: ‘A recent Random House contract states that on all copies of a work sold as an electronic book, the royalty will be 25% of the US suggested retail price until the book’s advance has earned out, and 15% of the list price thereafter. Under the current (pre-change) royalty structure, on a book retailing for, say, $10.00, the e-book royalty would be $2.50 per download at 25%, then $1.50 per download when the royalty rate shifts to 15%.By contrast, the new royalty of 25% of the net receipts comes to something like $1.25 per sale on a $10.00 book (25% of 50%).’
While Random’s line is that the new figures reflect the market and the rates offered by their competitors, they seem to be ignoring the big giants – Google and Amazon.
If e-royalties are getting you down though, you could do what Paulo Coehlo does and give readers free copies of his books to download. For him, it leads to an increase in sales of the hardcopy editions. Go figure.

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.

Following on from Faber Finds, James Brindle over at booktwo has taken the idea, tweaked it and made it a part of his attempt to bring publishing into the digital age. The project, Bookkake, is a print-on-demand publisher. It follows the usual rules of a POD - after you have ordered your book, it will be printed and shipped directly to you. Your very own novel made just for you. The first books on the shelf are all classics (be warned: they are all rather physical in nature) because there are no royalties that need to be paid (he is hoping to commission new work soon) . Brindle will give the books "individual covers with a unified design theme, [reset] the books in modern, digital-suited type and typography and commission new introductions to each one, from established writers". You can buy your very own copy online now or download it for free. Brindle says on his website, that "print-on-demand and direct sales mean that we cut out much of the warehousing, distribution, and discounting costs that are currently causing so much trouble in the trade".

This is such a great idea. Now if only somebody (any takers?) did that here…imagine all of the out-of-print Australian books that you could get your grubby little hands on…makes me drool just thinking about it.

The Gold Coast City Council has just started a great blog that the city’s young writers (aged between 12 and 16) can post on. Budding writers (appropriately aged) should jump onto the new site, ‘Blurb It‘.

An initiative of the libraries of the Gold Coast City Council, they are hoping ’Blurb It‘ will be a place for the city’s youth to post their own articles and access information, reviews, tips and tricks. If you want to get involved, create your own contributor account and then you can start submiting your own articles to the blog. Email esl@goldcoast.qld.gov.au for more information on how to get started.

This is such a good way for libraries to reach out to the tech-savy generations. At the moment they are running a three-month trial of the blog, so make sure you let everyone know about it so they can keep this going.

Just found an interesting post on that whole e-books issue (via The Book Is Dead). Steven Poole, British author and journalist, recently conducted a little experiment. He released an e-copy of his book, Trigger Happy, which was published in 2000. Punters could download it free, and there was a button for an optional PayPal contribution. His site registered 30,000 downloads, he gained a lot of publicity, but only 1 in 1,750 people paid him any money.

The verdict seems to be that putting up a free product with optional payment isn’t going to make you any money (unless you’re Radiohead or Nine Inch Nails, and you have squillions of fans and enough money to live on regardless of how the latest digitally-released album does). JK Rowling might be able to get away with it, and so could any other writer who has a day job with which to support themself. But a professional writer who needs the royalty money to pay the rent can’t afford to post their book online.  

And why should they? The expectation that writers should give their work away for free has been floating around a bit lately, with various copyright wrangles, and different authors releasing free e-books and making all the other writers look cheap when they say "But I wanted a royalty check this month…" I find the concept pretty annoying. Writing a book is hard work, it takes ages, and yes, there’s a lot of rubbish out there, but shouldn’t good work get paid? Writers get diddly under the current publishing model as it is, and like someone in Steven Poole’s comments says, I think we need to be very careful about setting up a new model that incoporates an expectation of free stuff, cause writers are the ones who are going to suffer from it.

Having said that, I do like the try-before-you-buy concept, with downloadable excerpts and stuff like that (as mentioned in this previous post). Just not the whole book.

Steven Poole also has a good later post on that all-important quality control issue, comparing the different production processes of books, articles and blog posts, and outlining the general problem with instant web publishing.

This is something that we blogged about back in October and now the NY Times has written about the Japanese mobile phone novelists as well. It seems to be pretty big news at the moment and 5 of the Top 10 bestseller novels in Japan last year were orginally cellphone novels, with the Top 3 all being written by 1st time cellphone novelists.

There’s a real buzz around this format which is basically just an extension of blogs becoming books, and in a technology-focused country such as Japan it was probably inevitable that this kind of instant novel would evolve - whether those in more literary circles like it or not.

We then came across this great blog about it - complete with an English translation of a passage of text from one of the ‘novels’ - so you can see what all the fuss is about! Can’t say it has left us exactly gagging for more but you can see the appeal (I think) - although it may be a bit longer before it catches on in the rest of the world…

Mike Shatzkin, US expert on digital change, has written this article for Publisher’s Weekly that identifies the 15 trends he thinks will impact the most on the writing and publishing industry in the near future. Not reading trends - he’s not predicting a rise in the popularity of historical fiction, or novels about Hiroshima - but larger trends in the way books are produced and published, and the way they’re read.

Digital publishing seems to be the odds-on favourite, with the Amazon Kindle, the Sony Reader, and Apple’s upcoming foray into e-books readers as products to keep an eye on. He does talk a bit about the Borders v Barnes & Noble skirmish, suggesting the ways each chain might develop to take a bite out of the digital pie. Online marketing for books will naturally increase, in more and more experimental ways (Shatzkin mentions video trailers for books; if you haven’t seen one, click here). And Print-On-Demand could apparently save the hardback.

All in all, quite an interesting projection for the publishing industry, and lots of solid points to use in the argument against those killjoys who keep telling us the book is dead.