Wednesday Late Nite Links of Fisting?
- Audible is offering a free download of almost any of the 50,000 titles in its catalog. You know that Audible is the only one not stripping its DRM from the offerings in iTunes.
- Alloy Entertainment is a packager and backed the popular Gossip Girl and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. They now want to make a name for itself in women’s fiction, young adult, middle grade and chapter books. They will acquire 12 books a year paying low five-figure advances. Authors will get a revenue split after they earn back their advance. (Kind of like traditional publishing?). According to the PW article, it looks like they will accept unagented manuscripts.
- Rumor is that Britney Spears is being paid $14 Million for her autobiography. How much does the ghost writer get paid? Unless it contains more crazy than is published at TMZ, I don’t know who will buy it.
- For those heroines that constantly want to serve as bait to catch the bad guys much to the mortification of the hero, you can now outfit your beloved in bulletproof clothing, like Obama reportedly was wearing yesterday.
- Speaking of the Obamas and what they did yesterday, a talk show host in Detroit tried to be funny in talking about the Obama’s fist bump and the potential of presidential nookie ended up creating an internet embarrassment for herself because apparently they show their love by “fisting” one another. Bwahahaha.
Yeah, er that was badly phrased. Yeesh.
Also on Audible if you are already a member they are offering the “Discover a new series” promotion. You can download the first book of many series for 4.95. Examples: Outlander by Diana Gabaldon unabridged or the first Sookie Stackhouse book “Dead Until Dark, also Nora Roberts “Morrigan’s Cross and JD Robb”Naked in Death” .. I forget what all I saw but there are 71 to pick from .
Some good deals!
Whoever the publisher is, they *deserve* to go bankrupt. Pity for all the good authors whom they’ll take down along the way.
Do they *never* learn?
Also, doesn’t Amazon own Audible now? Interesting that they sell DRM free music, but won’t strip the DRM off the audiobooks.
Damn it, Jane…that should have come with a ‘spew alert’.
I still like ‘fisting’ better than Fox Noise’s ‘terrorist fist bump’.
Huh. The Audible.com link takes me to an “Error: You are not eligible for this offer” message.
Re: Alloy—-The thing that authors who work with book packagers should know is, the book packager will pocket up to 80-90% of the revenue that a book earns, across print, film, TV, whatever. Packagers pretty much rape authors. Sure, they pull down million-dollar deals for what become huge books, but most of the resulting dollars go to the packager, not the author.
Re: Alloy: The “low five-figure advances” are probably exactly $10,000. That would be a decent advance for a work-for-hire YA novel, where the norm is more like $5,000 to $7,500, though.
Re: Britney: They’ll make that $14 million back. And the ghostwriter would probably get a flat fee of $200K – $500K, depending on how many other successful books s/he’s done.
The thing about celeb autobiogs is that they really don’t take away from the work offered to professional writers–they’re kind of like their own line item.
Who does own Audible? I thought it was Harlequin.
And the free ebook download from Audible is only for new members.
@TerryS I thnk Amazon owns Audible.