Advance, or no advance: romance writer Jackie Barbosa divides the royalties pie.

This London Grip article on Emerging Trends in Business and Social Technology takes us from Consumers to Prosumers to Selfsumers to … sumer-wrestling, perhaps?

For Legal Reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music  – the new Sparklehorse and Danger Mouse album.  Such a great CD,  but if someone hadn’t accidentally dropped it onto the interwebz, we’d never have heard it. There’s a legal stream here.

And finally, new book smell in a can for e-readers? Don’t be ridiculous. "Eau, you have cats!"

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.