May 18 2011

Wednesday Midday Links: What do readers want from HP/Riva/Modern

By Jane • Publishing News • • Tags: , , , , , ,

Is Amazon doing some faint quality control? Amazon, in response to customer complaints, request took down a self published title be republished because of grammatical and typographical errors.

Dear Publisher,

Thank you for your submission of “Title Here” (ASIN: ASIN NUMBER HERE) to the Kindle Store through Amazon KDP.
During a quality assurance review of your title, we have found that there are typographical errors within your title.
Please make the necessary corrections to the title and republish it.

If you have further questions, please write to us at kdp-support@amazon.com. Please reference ticket number 10118228 when contacting us.

Best wishes,
Amazon KDP

Upon further inquiry, Amazon responded with this:

Thank you so much for contacting us about the errors within the book content of your Kindle title “The Kindness of Strangers.” I checked with our quality team and confirmed that there are a few typographical errors within your book content. Unfortunately, we’re unable to provide you with exact locations the errors reflect, however, our customers feel there are errors like the use of the verbs lie and lay were used incorrectly in various locations.

Hence, our quality team believes that few corrections are required to be made within your book content in order to avoid our Kindle readers coming back with a feedback of quality issue with your book. I hope this helps you in making the necessary corrections to the book content. If you have any further questions or clarifications, please feel free to write to us and we’ll be glad to assist you.

Thanks for using Amazon KDP. Have a nice day!

On the one hand I can see this being abused but on the other, I’m glad that Amazon is taking steps to exert some quality assurance. If anything, this tells me that I need to write Amazon and return any book that I feel is subpar. As a caveat, though, please note that Amazon has suspended accounts where there have been too many returns so readers should be careful when using the the return feature.

However, if Amazon starts doing more of this, even the scare of getting the book pulled down might encourage authors to use editors before self publishing.

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Reader Ridley and I had a minor disagreement on Twitter over Harlequin’s inclusion of the Modern and Riva books in the HP line. Mills & Boon Modern and Riva lines are purportedly different than the HP line and some readers prefer a delineation in the US. For me, I prefer them all clumped together because I have an HP subscription (8 books for $25 a month) but Ridley would like a subscription to just the Modern and/or Riva books. What do you readers think?

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I heard a rumor that there was a publisher who was going to put out 3 books a day, 7 days a week. I received confirmation of that today from Siren/Bookstrand:

Increased reader demand for new Siren-BookStrand titles continues to shift our demand curve outward. In turn, we will release more new titles to shift our supply curve outward.

One or two new releases a day doesn’t seem to be enough for our voracious readers. To accommodate this ongoing change in demand, we are on course to publish 3 books a day, 7 days a week, later this year.

Many of our authors benefit financially from our ability to attract new readers and to retain loyal readers who keep coming back to Siren-BookStrand for fresh titles.

We publish erotic romance in various categories, genres, and themes. One-third of our titles are ménage, one-third gay (man love), and one-third M/F (one man/one woman). The majority of our books are between 30,000 to 45,000 words. Many of our books are between 45,000 and 100,000 words.

I asked whether there would be an increase in staff to accommodate this increased output but haven’t heard back.

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With the bigger traditional publishers not participating in the digital library market (like Macmillan and Simon & Schuster) or imposing ridiculous limits (like HarperCollins 26 lending limit), libraries are turning to smaller publishers with digital first offerings to supplement the catalog. Libraries are working with NetGalley to receive ARCs of digital first books. The only digital first publishers participating in NetGalley right now are Carina Press, Avon Impulse, and Red Sage. I don’t imagine that Avon Impulse will have different lending guidelines. This could be a real boon for Carina Press whose books are sold DRM free and without library limitations. In other words, library users will have access to Maria Zannini’s latest book but not Kresley Cole’s.

As a result of these restrictions by big publishers, McCormack says librarians are turning to smaller presses, which are generally less restrictive about offering access to their ebooks. Library Journal‘s arrangement with NetGalley will introduce librarians to new titles from many of these smaller e-book-only romance publishers. Angela James, Executive Editor of Harlequin’s Carina Press, estimates that over half of digital-first content is in the romance genre.

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Amazon has launched its second imprint. This one is called Thomas & Mercer and will be publishing mysteries and thrillers.

The four launch titles are Resuscitation by D M Annechino, Stirred by J A Konrath and Blake Crouch, The Immortalists by Kyle Mills and Already Gone by John Rector.

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19th C Kindle

And under the category of too cool for words, is Rachel Walsh’s 19th Century explanation of the Kindle. She is an an Illustration student studying at Cardiff School of Art & Design and her project was to “Explain something modern/internet based to someone who lived and died before 1900”. Go and see it.

Send to Kindle

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