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Category: The E-book Industry

Opinions/rumors/news in the world of digital publishing.

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Published on 1 Comment on The Winner of Battle HoHo 09 May Lose The War

It looks like the Kindle will win the Christmas, 2009 E-War amongst the readers.  

From all reports, B&N's Nook has been selling well, but it looks like the company rushed the device to market before it had a good supply of the devices.  Nooks ordered now for Christmas gifts will arrive long after Santa's sleigh has returned to the North Pole.   Holiday sales do account for a large percentage of a retailer's sales.  Additionally, B&N likely felt that not getting its device out for the Yule season would mean the company surrendered the battle without fielding an army.  B&N didn't want to give Amazon more of an advantage than the company already had.

I haven't held a Nook, but I've held a Kindle.  The device is amazing.  It's like the keys to the kingdom for a life-long bookworm (like me).  The 3G wireless connection means a reader can order a new book anytime, anywhere.  No bookstore required.  And Amazon has had the device out for a couple of generations so it has had some time to work out those kinks.  My computer programmer hubby would, I think, always hesitate a couple of years before buying a Nook.  Hubby says that the first generation of a program is bound to have bugs that will get worked out later, and he doesn't like to play guinea pig.  (He also feels that if he writes a computer program that compiles on the first try that disaster looms ahead, but that's another story.) 

...continue reading "The Winner of Battle HoHo 09 May Lose The War"

Published on

This week one of the bigs broke ranks and insiders have gone postal. 

Harlequin, one of the biggest category romance publishers on the planet, announced a new publishing arm.  For a fee that varies by package, a writer can publish a book that Harlequin will distribute. The pay-to-play arm of the company was originally named "Harlequin Horizons."  All over the blogosphere, writer's associations went ballistic.  RWA, Romance Writers of America, issued a special announcement which basically tossed Harlequin out of the club, decreeing that Harlequin had become a non-eligible publisher and was no longer eligible for RWA-provided conference resources.

Harlequin responded by noting the extent to which its company has supported the RWA and has provided resources to the RWA.  However, because of the furor over the whole business, Harlequin took the unfortunate (and rather cowardly) step of saying it would change the name of its pay-to-play arm and that "Harlequin" would not appear in the name of the new division.

Harlequin didn't cancel the new venture and so far as I have been able to determine, RWA hasn't responded to the name change or welcomed Harlequin back into the fold. 

The whole debacle shows how terrified traditional bastions of publishing are over the future.  Many websites criticized Harlequin by calling it a "vanity press."  Vanity press is a prejudicial and demeaning term that carries a boatload of implied criticism.  The term basically means - or it used to mean - a place an author pays to be published. It was different from a subsidy press, which is one where the author participates in the costs of publication in any manner. The terms were created or endorsed by associations like RWA to differentiate "real authors" from "fake authors."   You're only a real author if you've played their game their way - you queried until you found a "worthy citizen" or agent to sell your work to the Royals in the big publishing castles.  Fake authors are allowed to be members of RWA, and fake publishers can associate with the real authors, but they don't get all the benefits. RWA hopes that because it deigns to allow them to belong to the group, the fake authors and fake publishers will see the error of their ways. 

RWA endorses or advocates only one path to publication - the sacred path.

  ...continue reading "Harlequin’s New Horizon"

Published on

I held a Kindle.

Yes, I actually had a real, live, working Kindle in my very own hands. My hands shook, my palms sweated, my fingers gripped it tight, so very, very tight. My brown eyes glistened with lust that turned to love at first grasp. But then came the time of horror, of desolation, of pain. My hubby, my own ever-loving hubby looked at me and said, "You have to give it back now."

My fingers held it tighter and I shook my head no, no, NO. And John said, "It's not yours. You have to give it back." He held out his hands, very carefully, like a cop trying to talk a deranged psycho holding a gun into giving it up. I could have made him fight me for it. I could have forced him to pry it out of my clinging hands. But then, the Kindle might have been hurt. I couldn't hurt the precious little device. So I untangled my fingers, and handed it back.

...continue reading "The Kindle – Love At First Grasp"

Published on

They say that even a broken clock is right twice a day.  My percentage may not be quite as good as that broken timepiece, but by The Great Green Toad Frog, once in a great while - I'm right too. 

A while back, I started blogging about my dissatisfaction with Mobipocket.  As you may know, Mobi is the ebookbase distributor that used to be THE place for indie publishers to sell ebooks.  The little French company was going gangbusters until 2005 arrived and the American giant, Amazon, gobbled up little Mobi.  Many thought that the purchase meant that Amazon's already immense assets and web presence would advance the brand, provide a killer venue to the indie publishers, and make the Mobi format the industry standard for ebooks.  But, of course, it didn't work out that way.

It was a strategic takeover for the Giant which was apparently already eyeballing plans for an ebook distribution service of its own.  The purchase meant that Amazon could cannibalize the company by siphoning off pieces and parts of the Mobi technology. I'm no gadget guru (my hubby wears that hat), but I suspect that computer folk would be able to examine the Kindle app's code and see the fingerprints of its Mobi forerunner.  Once the Giant licked all the red off the Mobi sucker, it could toss the sucker in the garbage. 

...continue reading "It's An Amazon World (After All)"

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Published on 1 Comment on Does Anyone Buy Paperbacks Anymore?

Our new project this week - the book trailer for Faerie (see post from hubby below, YouTube, Yahoo Video, & Coming Soon Everywhere We Can Think Of)  turns my thoughts to marketing and the state of the industry generally. 

Of course, it also turns my thoughts to Faerie which is my "rest of the story" spin on the famous legend of the Clan McLeod of the Isle of Skye in Scotland.  After Ian's handfast marriage to a faerie princess ended after a year and a day, per his agreement with her da, the Faerie King, the princess returned to the land of faerie.  Her braw, strong hubby watched her go, holding their infant son, without making a single protest.  Later, the babe cried and the princess returned to comfort him, leaving him wrapped in a faerie flag that could be used to protect the Clan.  Interesting story, but what laird worth his highland blood would let a beloved go without fighting to keep her?  And after she left, we have a fine laird with a castle and no lady wife.  When he marries, how will the princess feel?  Surely, the many tears she'd shed would anger her powerful father into appearing at the wedding reception and pronouncing a curse. 

Check out the trailer for A Faerie Fated Forever, and you'll get a glimpse of that handfast marriage that ended in a curse that the current laird must meet or risk living his father's tormented, unfulfilled life.  You'll also get a glimpse of the gorgeous terrain of the highlands and hints of the rest of the plot.  So watch the trailer and buy the book or the e-book. 

After watching markets recently, I'm betting you'd buy the e-book. 

...continue reading "Does Anyone Buy Paperbacks Anymore?"

Published on

Greetings and salutations, kiddies. One of the many reasons I haven't got Mary Anne's E-mail Enticement into paperback form yet (besides being an enormous slacker) is a little project she assigned me.

It seems the newest thing in publishing is the book trailer - essentially a short video to whet your appetite for a book. It's much like a movie trailer, except more of a pain in the gluteus maximus because you don't have any video footage to begin with and you do them for authors who just looooove words, words, and more words.

At any rate, with much fury, frustration, and cursing with Windows Movie Maker, I have finally completed Quacking Alone's very first book trailer.

Behold, A Faerie Fated Forever, the book trailer:

Published on

Amazon's strategy for marketing the Kindle makes me think of a dictator who decides he wants all the citizens of his country to live in one city. 

People being, well, people with individual patterns and practices, likes and dislikes, it's not likely that all them will ever live in one city.  But the dictator could certainly get more of them there by showing that his city is a safe place with the best streets and parks and the most jobs.  That would attract interest.  Then he could point out that his city opens its arms to everyone and respects their differences.  I'd bet that dictator could then watch the steady influx of folks from hamlets all over the land, willing to try city life because it lets them keep big parts of the things they loved about their hamlets while letting them have more jobs, more choices,  and more possibilities. 

Or, if the dictator is maddened with power and crazed with the determination to have it all his way, he could use a different strategy.  He could simply kill all the citizens who live anywhere except in his favored city.  Guess which strategy Amazon has chosen to market the Kindle?

...continue reading "The Amazon Strategy – If We Kill It, They Will Come"

Published on

If a genre is saving an industry, wouldn't you think it would be entitled to a little respect?  Well you'd think so, or most of us would, anyway.  But not so with Romance.

Romance is the Rodney Dangerfield of genres. 

A recent article in Time Magazine (which I found from Scott Eagan's blog - see my sidebar) credits romance novels with "helping some publishers hide from the worst of the recession."  According to the article, 1.4 billion dollars of romances were sold last year.  That was the largest share of the book market.  More than 1 out of every 4  books sold is a romance novel. 

If romance is the 1.4 billion industry that's accounting for a large portion of sales, you'd think it would be entitled to a little respect.  If romance is the drain plug keeping the circling publishing industry from going under, it should be entitled to respect - and a lot of it.  But like Rodney, romance don't get no respect.

...continue reading "Romance To The Rescue"

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Published on 10 Comments on Smash It Again, Mark

Once upon a time, a handful of publishing companies decided what Americans could read.  Those companies lived in the great literary castle.  No common writers were admitted to the castle.  The publishing royals would periodically admit certain citizens that they deemed worthy to petition them on behalf of the common writers. By and large, most of the worthy citizens had either worked in the castle in years gone by, or they had worked for other worthy citizens that the royals had known for years. It was an insider's paradise and no outsider need apply.   

The worthy citizens had the loathsome job of dealing with the commoners in the Kingdom.  Someone had to do it and it wasn't going to be the royals themselves.  After all, the royals couldn't dirty their hands by working directly with those who created the products that paid for their castle.  No, let the worthy citizens deal with the rabble.  Best of all, the worthy citizens not only protected the royals from the rabble, the royals didn't even have to pay the worthy citizens.  The worthy citizens took their fees from the rabble's proceeds.  A cut of the bounty paid by the royals to the rabble rightly belonged to the worthy citizens. ' Twas a small enough price for their having to deal with the commoners and sort through their barrage of products to find the work that worthy citizens thought would be deemed acceptable by the royals.

Most of the commoner's notions got rejected by the worthy citizens.  Those esteemed folks worked and socialized directly with the royals and knew what the royals would and would not deem worthy.  Or at least, they believed that they knew.  And the worthy citizens did not, as a rule, challenge the royals to accept something too new or too different.

And thus was born -- the sacred system.

...continue reading "Smash It Again, Mark"

Published on

To query or not to query, that is the question.

I stay about a project ahead. So right now, I'm doing a final, pre-publication edit on Boz's story, the third in my forever series - A Sixth Sense Of Forever.  My talented hubby, the graphic design guru, is working on the cover.  We hope to have it up and out very soon. 

I started editing Sixth Sense  after I finished my just-written legal-contemporary romance, Griffin's Law.  In the olden days of yore, before the gates of freedom and the rise of the internet made self publishing financially viable, I'd be working on a query letter about now.  That means, I'd be getting out my old, faithful list of literary agents and crafting the best letter in the history of letters to try to convince them that they want, need, bloody have to read the full of my MS.   This time around, I haven't even started the query. 

So I could be, perhaps should be, composing a letter to sell my MS to agents in the hope that one can sell it to a publisher.  The publisher would take a year or more to turn it into a book and then try to sell the book to Barnes & Noble, Wal Mart, Books a Million, etc.  If all of that succeeded, then the book might eventually, someday, be sitting on a shelf, trying to lure you -  all of you -- to put it in their basket and take it to the register.

Today, I can skip all the steps and put it out there for you to read and hopefully buy and more hopefully enjoy.  And it's not just little old me lured by the possibilities of getting it out there fast.  I understand that the Vonnegut estate is about to put the late, great literary geniuses' final work, short stories, out as an ebook first.  If the goal is to get the work in the reader's hands, ebooks do it a lot faster.

I love writing.  In my dream world, I'd get up every day and sit before my computer and write.  When reality and a day job don't intervene, I'm a pretty prolific writer.  I don't love trying to sell myself to an agent.  I don't look forward to getting a query letter together and getting it out there so that eventually agents can request material.  I'd then spend weeks and weeks, sometimes months, and in the case of my last contact with an agent - over a year and a half - waiting to get the letter that says thanks, but no thanks.  Oh, I suppose I at least progressed in the process.  My latter letters all generally said, you're a good writer, but....  Yeah, having folks who work with so many excellent writers say you can write is a compliment.  And I do and did appreciate it.  But it's a back-handed compliment at best - you're good, you're just not good enough for me and I've decided you're not good enough for publishers or the American public.

Self publishing is the ultimate act of democracy.  Am I good enough for the American public?  Will you enjoy the stories I so enjoyed writing?  Will you get my over-the-top style and understand it's a little bit "I wish men in love acted that way" and a little bit tongue in cheek?  Maybe or maybe not, but I don't have to convince a bunch of folks in the middle that I'm good enough to have the opportunity.  America is the land of opportunity and I can put it out there and let you decide. 

...continue reading "To Query Or Not To Query?"