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.

Farhad Hakimzadeh, an Iranian scholar and head of the UK’s Iran Heritage Foundation which he formed in 1995, has admitted to defacing at least 150 books in the British Library. He used a scapel to cut leaves for the books from the library’s collection charting the history of European travel in the Middle East and China. Hakimzadeh could have been vandalising books from as far back as 1998.
The Iran Heritage Foundation was set up to ‘promote and preserve the history, languages and culture of Iran’. Dr Kristian Jensen, the head of the library’s early printed collections said ‘Hakimzadeh is eminently characteristic of our traditional groups of readers: he has a profound knowledge of the field. From my point of view, that makes it worse because he actually knew the importance of what he was damaging. What he did was use the cover of serious scholarly purpose to steal historic pieces and abuse our trust’.
This has been going on for 10 years and somebody only just picked up on this? The article didn’t state whether Hakimzadeh gave any reason for the mutilation but as someone in charge of preserving culture, what on earth was he thinking? Is there a black market out there for pages of ancient manuscripts? Apparently when police searched his home, they found some of the valuable pages hidden amongst copies of the less valuable editions that he owned. Does he believe the manuscripts belong to Iran not the UK?

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.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt recently announced plans to ‘temporarily [stop] acquiring manuscripts’. Apparently they want to do things ‘smarter’ and that it is not ‘an indicator of the end of literature’. The Vice President of Communications, Josef Blumenfeld, has said it is ‘not a permanent change’.

This might scare a few people, but I think it’s a good thing. If they want to act like Willy Wonka and shut down for a while, regroup, reorganise and have a think about where publishing is going and come back bigger and better than ever (minus the ompa lompa’s) then that will only be beneficial to the authors on their list and might even get other publishers thinking about how to do things ‘smarter’.

In other news, Rachel Johnson has won the Bad Sex in Fiction contest with her novel, Shire Hell. John Updike was awarded the Lifetime Achievement award for Bad Sex in Fiction for being nominated four times during his career. You can read an excerpt of his 2005 nominated novel, Villages, here.

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.

Speaking earlier of promoting your book, sometimes there isn’t much you can do when the marketing team decides to promote you as something that you aren’t in order to sell books. This can backfire especially when your target audience will avoid the type of cover that your book ends up having. Whether you want to admit it or not we all judge books by their covers. Diane Shipley wrote about ‘chick-lit’ covers on The Guardian’s blog a while ago. For an example of this take Louise Erdrich’s new novel A Plague of Doves. It is a novel that intertwines different voices and spans generations of Native Americans on one reservation. Topics covered include lynchings, racism, spousal abuse, kidnapping and quite a few other dark topics. Don’t be put off though, it is a fantastic novel but not normally one I would pick up because this is the Australian cover -

   (hardly looks like a plague does it)

Even though the American cover is more appropriate -

Well, Bookninja has decided it was time to turn the tables. He ran a contest for the best made up cover of a previously published title. The results are hilarious (and an excellent exercise in marketing for beginners).

And if you are in serious need of a belly laugh visit  the World of Longmire to see the opposite. She has taken a bunch of existing covers of romance novels and written new titles. Enjoy.

There has been a blogging frenzy at the moment on the topic of Borders (the bookstore) – in particular, their penchant for “skipping” titles. "Skipping" means that a bookstore does not order in a particular title; they "skip" it. Gregory Frost talks about having his new book Lord Tophet “skipped” by Borders on the Wild River Review, despite it being “the lead title from Random House’s fantasy/science fiction imprint, Del Rey Books [and] the sequel to Shadowbridge, a novel that Borders did carry”. Go read it here (cause it’s quite long). While he is aware that Borders is a business and that it can’t stock every title ever published, he thinks the solution to Border-skipping is to skip Borders and head over to your local independent bookstore.
Tobias Buckell also had his book “skipped” but he doesn’t seem as peeved as Gregory. He explains how a Borders store works: “Borders central chooses what books to roll out across the entire chain…Borders stores for the most part aren’t allowed to respond to in-house movement, and are not very independent. When I go around and sign stock (copies of any book stores happen to have on hand) and talk to managers, individual Borders are not able to change their orders.”
So while having Borders skip your book isn’t ideal, he understands it is a company decision. Also, they seem to have been losing money lately and selling the stores, now that could be a glimpse at the industry as a whole or it could be s sign of mismanagement. Other people’s comments on this have been that Borders does stock their books, while Barnes and Noble (another American chain) doesn’t so when it comes right down to it, it is every bookshops right to choose which book they want to sell.
From my point of view, the books that Borders sells aren’t necessarily the ones that I want to read, however you might love the Borders range.
This is just a catch-22 though isn’t it? While a bookstore can never predict how well a book will go, if your book is marketed well and extremely popular bookstores like Borders will want to stock it. But if your book isn’t in Borders, it might not become extremely popular. But that’s publishing for you. You all knew that when you got started didn’t you? If you want a really fantastic post on it all visit Andrew Wheeler’s blog, antickmusings.

Starbucks has entered the publishing arena through its Starbucks Entertainment division. They have a co-publishing arrangement with Farrar Straus Giroux and will publish The Traveler [sic] by Daren and Daniel Simkin.

Over at SFScope, Robert J Sawyer has listed his four ‘must-read’ books for fiction writers. They are (in no particular order):
Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card
How to Write Science Fiction and Fantasy also by Orson Scott Card
Writing the Breakout Novel by Donald Maass
and finally,
The Career Novelist: A Literary Agent Offers Strategies for Success also by Donald Maass.
Want to hear the great part about that list? The last book is yours for free as a PDF download. Sawyer says that The Career Novelist is “the best book on being a commercial-fiction writer ever written”.

The Man Booker Prize was one by debut novelist and odds outsider Aravind Adiga for his novel The White Tiger. At 33 years old, he is the second-youngest prize winner. If you haven’t read it yet, The White Tiger follows a poor servant from an Indian village who moves to the city, becomes corrupted by modern life and ends up becoming a murderer.

Want know what book is flying off the shelves in Germany at the moment?..I know you’re interested…Well, it’s Das Kapital. You know, Karl Marx’s communist manifesto. Bookshops across Germany are saying sales of his work are up by 300%.

The reason? Apparently this whole ‘global financial crisis’ (three words I’m sick of hearing) has got people dreaming of a simpler future, one in which we no longer have to worry about money or shares or assets. It’s what Germany’s finance minister Peer Steinbrück seems to be dreaming of when he was quoted in Der Spiegel saying, “Generally one has to admit that certain parts of Marx’s theory are really not so bad”.

What happens when a publisher decides, after publishing one book in a trilogy, not to publish any more? Kassia Krozser over at BookSquare has written an iarticle about just such a dilemma. Independent publishing really gives all power back to the author. If this were to happen to you, you could still get your books out to interested parties with print-on-demand or as an ebook download. All the onus would be on you to publicise it but that could be a good thing. Rather then publishing your second and third book with a publisher that may not be that interested in promoting a series they don’t really care about, you can take over everything and do it all yourself.  More work. But if you’re a writer, you should probably expect putting a lot in to get your work out there.