Archive for the 'Link Round Up' Category
TBIResearch believes that Amazon is losing quite a bit of money on the ebook market as it tries to drive down prices of books. Publishers are trying hard to maintain a higher price, but researchers and retailers believe that consumers will not pay a high price for ebooks. The good news according to the research paper is that publishers can still maintain a 10% margin with ebooks because of savings in manufacturing and shipping costs.
Publishers should be able to sell e-books to distributors like Amazon at $5 and still maintain the profit margins they enjoyed on print book sales. In turn, distributors like Amazon should be able to sell e-books at the current $9-$10 price and still enjoy a healthy profit.
The bad news for authors is that their royalties will decrease since they are based off of retail sales price.
It’s a pretty interesting article and includes a mock profit and loss statement. I wouldn’t agree with all the points in the article such as author royalties which are increasingly off the net making the publisher margin more manageable.
Three major writing organizations are urging Harlequin to make changes to the Harlequin Horizon business venture. SFWA …
Harlequin is launching Harlequin Horizons through a partnership with Author Solutions, Inc.
Through this strategic alliance; all sales, marketing, publishing, distribution, and book-selling services will be fulfilled by ASI; but Harlequin Horizons will exist as a division of Harlequin Enterprises Limited. Harlequin will monitor sales of books published through the self-publisher for possible pickup by its traditional imprints.
My guess is that if an author is selling well by herself, then Harlequin will see that and offer to bring it to a larger audience. It’s like a reader run slush pile. Some authors are dismayed by this, feeling it will hurt the publisher brand. I’m not so sure that they are wrong about this. From a reader point of view, since I buy primarily by line and author, I’m not certain if it affects me. Thoughts?
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A Canadian high school is the first to go all digital. Each student will be provided a Sony Reader with all the textbooks preloaded. The students will be using the Sony Reader Touch edition which has a 6″ touchscreen and the ability for a student to write on the device. Indigo books is estimating that …
Generation Y women like social networking and sharing their thoughts on the products that they buy. This is, apparently, news. It is not something that ebook manufacturers have caught on yet, though. The current ebook reader enthusiast is a 47-year-old married man with a household income in excess of 6 figures. But! researchers believe that the ebook market won’t take off until the women get a hold of it. Frankly I think the current ebook reader is the 47 year old male because that is whom the product was initially marketed toward. Ironically, as the article sent to me by Leah notes, women and romance fiction is pushing the ebook market forward.
But to go truly mass-market, e-books will have to appeal to women, who tend to be warier of new technology and more price-conscious, Epps says.
Harlequin, purveyor of those lusty supermarket bodice-rippers, has dipped into the market with an e-book subscription service for some series, like Silhouette Desire, “delivering the provocative passion you crave.” And no one can see you put it in your shopping cart!
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GalleyCat asks the question of whether an author needs an agent in the future. Meriam Goderich responds that any …
The new draft of the Google Book Settlement was due yesterday but the parties asked (and was granted) until Friday to present a new settlement agreement. Given that the biggest part of the GBKS were orphan works and that was what drew the biggest complaints, I wonder how any new settlement could address this.
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Amazon engaged in a “charm offensive” by flying out a number of top flight agents to its Seattle headquarters last week, as reported by Crains. This wooing of the agents seemed quite odd (has it ever been done in the past). One nugget was that agents and Amazon seem to be in agreement that publishers can make more money selling ebooks than hardcovers. I don’t know if that is true but it seems like publishers may be headed that route regardless. Certainly Harlequin has been able to be profitable without a hardcover division. But what to make of Amazon wooing agents? It means something.
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Speaking of Harlequin, Quill & Quire wrote up a piece about Carina Press. It notes that authors for Carina Press will need to play an active role in promoting their books and included this line about DRM. Q&Q, …
I ordered a bunch of Harlequin Stationary goods that feature the vintage covers. The stationary goods include little matchbook notepads, bound composition notebooks and address books. I liked the address books the least. They have a spiral binding and I found them to be a little too bulky. My favorites are the little matchbook notepads. They come three to a box. The composition notebooks are nice as well and feature very hard cardboard front and back covers so it would be easy to write on a non hard surface.
The postcard tins are a great gift item but I don’t have anyone to send snail mail to. Should I start up a prison correspondence?
I’m going to give the notebooks and the address books away on the blog (am keeping the notepads myself). Just as a disclaimer or non disclaimer, I purchased these myself and Harlequin, which does many nice things for Dear Author, did not pay for them or give me any kind of discount.
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Simon & Schuster saw sales increase in the last quarter to $230.4 million which is up 2.4%. The improvement in sales was offset by “higher write offs of advances for author royalties” which …
How good is Harlequin doing? Pretty good. In a dismal economy that sees revenues at its parent company dropping, Harlequin is bringing in the profit. David Holland, the interim CEO at Torstar, said that the decline in newspapers and digital were offset by continued growth at Harlequin. (Actually Holland stated it the other way around but I decided to put the positive spin on it). Harlequin posted $122.5 million in revenue which was up 3.7% from third quarter of 2008.
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After a dismal few quarters, HarperCollins experienced a small rise for the fiscal first quarter. Sales were slightly down (1.5%). Sales of ebooks accounted for 4% of the adult group revenue. Most of the profit came from restructuring and not from sales.
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The Wall Street Journal accuses Amazon of stockpiling cash by paying late on its bills by up to 72 days or longer. I understand that late payment is fairly standard in the industry and the writer of the article asserts that Amazon has never made a profit, something the SEC filings for the past five years would dispute. However, if Amazon’s posted profitability rests …
The winners of the CL Wilson, Queen of Song and Souls are as follows:
- Pamk
- stephanie
- Rexe
- Julie
- Sharon
I have sent you an email.
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Inside the Higher Ed blog has another piece on technology and scholarship. This time, Alex Golub laments the shift of readers from paper texts to digital texts arguing that scholarship includes making the texts part of your physical environment, something that the current slate of ereaders do not foster:
Except textbooks. I have to admit I am scared silly by the idea of a generation of students so alienated from material they are supposed to be immersed in that they rent digital textbooks that they do not intend to keep, cannot dog ear and underline, and otherwise feel totally alienated from. Even the current trend of students not underlining in books so as to preserve their resale value strikes me as appalling. Taking ownership of your education — and indeed, just learning how to read closely — means making your books part of your physical environment.
I never marked up my textbooks. I always took notes in a separate notebook and was religious in keeping my texts as clean as possible. The digital textbook would have appealed to …
Amazon filed for and was recently granted a patent to change words in a book in order to track down the source of pirating. John Scalzi called this a stupid idea because it violates his creative control over the work.
I think Amazon has the right idea. A change to the html css stylesheet, for example, could randomly create some kind of near invisible change that would allow the source of the pirated material to be tracked down. Courtney Milan suggested something like an italized period as that would be virtually unnoticeable. You could place the substitutive words in the Author’s Note or in the ordering of the metadata tags.
This type of social DRM could create an impediment to that “casual piracy” that content creators fear. I.e., how many people are you going to share a book with if that file contains something that can be tracked back to the original user. While the Amazon concept might seem like an anathema to some authors, I do think it’s a step in the right direction. I hope publishers and vendors can work together to create something like this that would remove the impediment to legitimate …
Mobile adoption is occurring at a faster rate than any other adoption of internet in the past. Further, at the leading edge of mobile adoption is the growth of the iPhone/iTouch market. Morgan Stanley is essentially telling investors that those that can anticipate and deliver products to the mobile space are those who will be winning the future.
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Dovetailing this report are the findings that Greystripe, a mobile ad network, is releasing about iPhone moms, mothers of young children who own iPhones. TechCrunch reports on the usage of the iPhone by moms. Moms are using iPhones to make their shopping easier (by locating stores nearest to them and keep track of shopping lists) to entertaining their kids (59% allow their children to use the iPhone) and for personal entertainment purposes.
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Brewster Kahle announced last week that over 1.6 million books have been scanned and digitized. All 1.6 million Internet Archive books to be available on the OLPC. Approximately 750,000 to 1 million people have OLPC. All books that have been scanned and digitized are in the public domain.
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The American Booksellers Association wants the government to save independent …
Barnes and Noble is launching its Nook today. Some people are saying it will be in stores this weekend for hands on fondling. It’s certainly one of the best of the latest crop of devices with its dual screen nature. The lower half appears to be a touchscreen LCD which will allow faster browsing of titles, input of notes, and color access. The price is $259.00.
Updated:
- BN’s Nook has 3G connectivity and wifi.
- You will be able to access an entire ebook for free while inside the BN store, just like a paper book.
- The lending feature will allow readers to share their copy with another person using Nook or ereader. software for up to 14 days. You will not be able to access the book during this period of time.
- The device will begin shipping November 30 and is available only through BN stores and BN.com.
- There is no affiliate links for the nook, only for individual books and for the nook accessories.
- Nook will accept DRMed versions of eReader and ePub.
- You can load mp3s but not Audible books.
This video shows off an OLED display for a dedicated e-reader. Yeah, …
Jessica from Racy Romance Reviews put out a call for readers to list their top 16 romances books in honor of Kathleen Winsor, the author of the very first historical romance, Forever Amber. Forever Amber was roundly criticized for its sexual content at the Massachusetts Attorney General requested that it be banned. Many readers around the ‘net have participated and Jessica is trying to round them up at her blog. DA didn’t participate, but not because we don’t think this is a great idea, but because we’ve been planning our own list thing since August and we will be unveiling it in December.
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Wal-Mart started a price war with Amazon over the cost of hardcovers. To combat the $9.99 ebook price, Wal-mart decided to slash the price of hardcovers of its top 20 pre-order books (including J.D. Robb’s Kindred in Death) to $9.00 and will be reducing a total of 200 hardcover titles to $9.00 for the holiday season. Amazon price matched that thus throwing publishers whose entire business model rests on making money off of hardcovers into a tizzy.
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The race to the bottom of the pricing game …
Rosario is one of the oldest (not in age but in internet years) bloggers in romance. She was one of my first blog stops ever. She took a few years off from blogging because she was attending graduate school but now she’s back, churning out a quality review almost every day. If you haven’t put Rosario on your feed reader or bookmarked her, you may want to give her a try. (Although, how could you give Anyone But You by Sarah Mayberry a C+? That’s my favorite Mayberry!)
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Siren of the Storm, a fan fiction writer, has a short 2 minute Regency read.
Heroine: Everyone knows that reformed rakes make the best husbands, because they have the four qualities women desire most in a husband: sexual prowess, commitment issues, promiscuity, and a diverse selection of venereal diseases!
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Motoko Rich from the New York Times published an article yesterday on the rise of digital lending. What caught my attention most was that MacMillan, the parent of St. Martin’s Press and Tor (among others), and Simon & Schuster were not allowing their books to be sold, in digital format, to libraries.
But some publishers worry that the convenience of
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Last night, author and reader Nadia Lee, tweeted me a link to JA Konrath’s most recent blog post. It is incredibly illuminating and a must read for anyone interested in publishing and ebooks. Konrath has been experimenting with releasing his own fiction (mostly short stories) on the Kindle. He had shared his success earlier this year. You’ll need to go and read the entire post to get a full sense of what is going on with Konrath’s Kindle sales. Suffice to say that in the first half of 2009, he’s sold 1237 ebooks of his New York published books netting him $2008. Of his self published titles, he has sold 9800 ebook netting him $6860. Konrath does the math to figure out what he would be earning if he sold his NY published titles directly on the Kindle and well, read it for yourself.
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Booklist Online is hosting a FREE webinar about the state of the romance genre in libraries and the marketplace.
Romance is hot . . . in the library, that is. Join Donna Seaman, Booklist’s romance fiction editor, and a panel of librarians, authors, and publishers to discuss the
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Sydney Morning Herald has a nice article about romance in conjunction with Beyond Heaving Bosoms, a guide to romance written by SB Sarah and SD Candy.
So thank Eros for two Americans, Sarah Wendell and Candy Tan, who dreamed up Mavis for their book Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches’ Guide to Romance Novels. It’s an unashamed celebration of their great passion, and they make no apology for it. “There’s nothing like a beautifully executed romance novel or the afterglow upon finishing an especially good one,” they write.
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Wall Street Journal op ed piece scoffs at the FTC regulations that are pointed at bloggers arguing that mainstream journalists receive so much swag that the office closets are groaning under the weight.
The specter of freebies has long haunted journalism. In the ’30s, ’40s and ’50s, Hollywood columnist Louella Parsons was famous for her swag intake. Come Christmas Eve she would “unwrap an avalanche of gifts” from Tinseltown royalty, according to screenwriter Anita Loos. “Two secretaries used to stand with notebooks to keep score so that Louella could remember the next day who had sent what.” Those notes weren’t taken to help her make proper disclosures to her readers.
Eric Felton, …
First, Microsoft has little interest in the ebook world. CEO Steve Ballmer thinks that the best gear to use to read an ebook is the PC.
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The Times has an article on the numerous ebook readers that are on or soon to enter the market and notes at the end that the tablet computers might threaten the dedicated reading device market.
And there’s the looming threat posed by next-generation tablet computers. Apple, the king of cool handheld devices, is rumored to be readying a tablet computer with all the functions of a laptop as well as iPhone-like touch capabilities for release early next year. Microsoft has been secretive about its plans for a tablet, but a video making the rounds of the blogosphere show a dual-LCD-screen prototype that closes like a book. “E-readers are a transitional technology,” says Rotman Epps of Forrester Research. Which means that just when the e-reader is taking off, it may be becoming obsolete.
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The publisher of Winnie the Pooh has agreed to allow Winnie the Pooh and other children’s classics to be digitized. The deal was struck with Nintendo and the companies plan to launch a digital Winnie the Pooh …
Copyright Licensing is a non profit copyright collective that represents publishers and authors. Yesterday (or was it Monday), CL began to digitize more than 300 of its most famous books and will be seeking the rights from publishers and authors to digitize others. These books will be made available to libraries, booksellers and educational sector.
Amazon has now announced it will ship the Kindle 2 on October 19 to over 100 countries (not Canada though) and will provide wireless access through ATT & its international partners. This announcement is accompanied by a Kindle 2 price drop from $299 to $259.00. Because the Kindle will be shipped from the U.S., international readers will have to pay a customs surcharge (usually over $50 USD) and international shipping costs. This will likely add around $100 USD to the price of the Kindle. Ironically the International Kindle will also ship with the US power adapter. The Kindle’s availability does not remove geographical restrictions. The same ebooks that are unavailable to international purchases yesterday are unavailable today. It is possible that the increased international exposure to ebooks will increase pressure on authors and publishers to …
Publishers Weekly has posted a special online issue devoted to virality and books. It’s very much directed toward the trade and focuses on what publishers and industry folks can do to “harness” the internet, including blogging themselves.
Publishing Trends has a multi-part series focused on the new world of book reviews online. I don’t know that I am being too bold or boastful to say that the romance blogs that offer reviews do as good of a job as any Publishers’ Weekly or Romantic Times’ review of a romance book.
“I see promising signs of creative and intellectual life everywhere I turn these days,” says Mark Sarvas, editor of The Elegant Variation and also a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review and the Philadelphia Inquirer. “I think we’re already at the point where the quality of what’s available online matches all but the best print publications.” Jane Ciabattari, NBCC President, agrees: “There is no dearth of passion, no lack of book coverage. I suspect the best approach for publishers is to find individuals with finely honed critical voices and keep them well supplied with advance galleys.” What else can publishers do, and where are book reviews
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September seemed to drag on forever. Finally October is here and with it, hopefully, a wonderful set of days. Don’t harsh on my new month buzz. I have a copyright rant below. Authors might want to look away lest it ruin your new month buzz.
Blogger Arachne Jericho points out that the main cost of creating an ebook isn’t the digital creation process but the book creation process. The savings for publishers will be streamlining the book process with the digital creation process and that may take some time.
The main cost of creating an ebook in fact remains the main costs of creating a book, period. The writing. The editing. The fact-checking and cross-checking. The images. The index building, oh gods, the index building. The cover. The marketing. The accounting. Making deals with the distributors. Negotiating with the goddess Ingram, goddess of the bottleneck of publishing. The poor bastards who have to clear copyright issues for, say, song lyrics.1 All of this adds up to the point where the cost of paper printing is dwarfed, as is the cost of creating ebooks (once we get a standardized workflow. Printing sure wasn’t fun before people knew what
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I woke up and Twitter was alive with the news that Simon & Schuster was making a huge change to its organizational structure. Simon Spotlight Entertainment and Pocket Books will be reconfigured. All the hardcovers and trade books that were once Pocket Books or SSE will now be Gallery Books. Pocket Books will focus solely on mass market releases. Louise Burke will be the Executive Vice President and Publisher at Gallery. No further layoffs were announced. Via PublishersLunch (paid subscription).
BordersMedia tweeted that it would be supplying free WI FI to its customers by October via Verizon so you can buy your Sony eBooks in the store like you can buy Barnes and Noble ebooks from the new iRex reader. What you won’t be able to buy, though, is the new Sarah Palin memoir which the publisher won’t release in ebook format until 6 weeks later. Kassia has more to say about this decision at Booksquare.
Speaking of ebooks, the Kindle + University experiment = unhappy students. The student newspaper at Princeton quoted students and professors alike being frustrated with the Kindle’s lack of features. It’s clear that the …
Kate Duffy was the backbone of romance at Kensington. As editorial director, she created the Brava line and discovered a multitude of authors. A no nonsense, tell it like it is, sort of person, Kate was so devoted to her job that illness took no place. Unfortunately, Kate succumbed to a difficult battle she had been having with her health. Kate was a tireless supporter of the genre and we will all be poorer because of her death.
CBS Evening News carried a piece on digital books which apparently means that it’s gaining some traction in the public consciousness. I expect that it will be a big gift this year. After all, how many iPods/iThings can you buy a kid?
It’s Banned Book week and there are several blog posts around the web:
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A British betting firm has set the odds for the Nobel prize for literature. A.S. Byatt, author of Possession (which is essentially a romance book), is on the list at 50 to 1 odds.
Washington Post tells the woeful tale of a newbie author who had almost no publisher support. Publishers are basically executing the Poor Law and driving authors from their books to the promotional table. (Yes, I am being sarcastic here). The tale has a happy ending, though. In the face of Dickensian oppression, the author is able to make a video and fund her own book tour which led to the sale of many books for herself. Lesson: Promo is your friend dear author because your publisher is not going to do it for you particularly when yours is just one of 560,000 books published in one year.
Poor Kelly Corrigan, first-time author, didn’t get invited to this weekend’s National Book Festival on the Mall to plug her 2008 memoir, “The Middle Place.” She won’t be rubbing shoulders with heavyweight authors such as Sue Monk Kidd, John Grisham or Pulitzer winner Junot D?az. No major newspaper bothered to review the
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In non shocking news, while first day sales of the Kindle version of The Lost Symbol were strong, digital sales represents only about 5% of the 2 million copies sold so far which was in line with what I thought last week:
Over time, obviously, the digital version cannot outsell the print version because of the limited number of digital readers (even assuming 50% of the digital consumers read on their laptops). What it does show, however, is that digital readers are important consumers.
Shelf Awareness had a nice piece about paper goods and how digital isn’t quite overcoming the desire for people to write with a pen in a nice journal. I personally love my moleskin notebooks (I use them to take notes in about my reviews) and I can’t wait for the paper products from Harlequin to show up somewhere…
Whether it’s a practical matter like ease of use or something more intangible, journals, day planners and the like continue to hold their appeal. “There are people who find it important to write things down,” said Whitelines’s Walters. “We can do digital artwork, but we still paint, we still draw, we still sculpt. The sense of expression in
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The good news is that I didn’t have to have a root canal. Instead my tooth is cracked and needs a cap. The bad news is that if the temporary crown doesn’t alleviate my problems, I’ll have to have that root canal.
In other publishing news, Ballantine has bought Jenny Sanford’s memoir. As much as I have sympathy for a woman whose bastard of a husband humiliates her non stop on the national stage, I wish these politicians would just stop spilling their guts about their private lives. I’ve had enough of the John Edwards’s story too.
Jessica of Racy Romance Reads guest blogs at Romancing the Blog about how art should not be judged on the relative morality of the artist.
Visual artists, musicians, film directors, and writers throughout history have been some of our most wretched human beings: liars, cheats, egomaniacs, thieves, heartbreakers, sellouts, and all purpose scumbags. A favorite example among philosophers is the painter Gauguin, who left his wife and family destitute so he could go to Tahiti and paint nudes.
Has, from the bookpushers blog, had a wonderful post about disabilities in romance at the Borders True Romance blog:
Reading ‘Lie with Me’ made me
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First up, the good news. Kresley Cole is releasing the first story (PDF link) in her Immortals After Dark series titled “Warlord Wants Forever.” It’s one of my favorite works of hers so if you’ve been wondering what kind of writer she is, you can download this FREE PDF copy of the book that ordinarily you would have to pay through the nose to get (and suffer through some really awful stories).
Flush with the news of the big sales for digital copies of Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol, the ebook community is slapped around with the latest news that etailers like Fictionwise and WH Smith are being forced to remove access to books that people have already bought because of geographical restrictions. I know you can’t see it but I’m shaking my fist right now. (okay, not right now because I am typing but I was before.) I don’t think a simple refund is going to make people happy. This sort of thing results in two actions: 1) piracy and 2) decline in adoption of ebook reading. Way to go!
Speaking of things encouraging piracy, songwriters, musicians, and composers are lobbying to get a …
Just to keep you updated on my tooth situation, apparently I will have to have a root canal. I said to my dentist “with all the advanced technology, this procedure will be totally painless, right?” He looked at me seriously and nodded his head in agreement. While I laughed semi hysterically, he tried to tell me that root canals have gotten a bad rap. That’s news, right? That root canals are totally painless and have gotten a bad rap?
Dear Author has a new feed address:
Main: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dearauthor
Comments: http://feeds.feedburner.com/commentsfordearauthor
The reason I did this was because I wanted to remove the Google Adsense Ads but I could not find ANY place to remove them. It was bizarre, like once you had signed up for the deal with the devil, there was no backing out. Finally, I deleted the feed and “reburned” it. So there you have it. Please update your feed settings.
Google is claiming that it’s gotten a bad rap and it’s CEO is complaining that all the critics just want to preserve the status quo. No, I think the critics don’t want private companies to engage in a complete revision of the copyright law …
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Open Threads at Dear Author. Want to know what new releases are out this month and what readers are excited about reading? Check out the threads below. 
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