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Category: The E-book Industry

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

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Wow.  Just absolutely - Wow. 

In the last couple of weeks someone hit the fast forward button on the ebook revolution.  Changes that bespeak of major industry shifts have occurred like a landslide. One rock goes, and then another and before you know it, at the foot of a mountain, there's a new road you can follow that will take you to the unexplored territory of the future.

First came the deal of the Jackal.  Andrew Wylie is a superagent whose "feral pursuit of clients and their interests earned him the nickname of 'The Jackal.'"  The Jackal's roster of clients reads like a who's who of publishing and includes Mailer, Updike, Nabokov, and Cheever. The Jackal apparently saw what many authors saw - publishers have been screwing authors out of their fair share of royalties for years.  The old book numbers were set in stone, the system likely crafted when books began to be mass produced.  But at the dawn of a new day in publishing power shifted to the hands of the creators who wrote the work. The Jackal was smart enough NOT to let history repeat itself.  This time he, on behalf of his clients, would craft a system that would be fair to the folks who made the system possible.  So The Jackal created a digital only imprint, Odyssey Editions (gotta love the name) and inked a deal with Amazon to sell electronic versions of work of 20 amazing authors.

To do the deal Wylie exploited a hole in older publishing contracts written before the era of e-books.  Writers and Wylie believe that the contracts leave those authors and/or their estates free to negotiate separate deals for the ebook versions.  The publishing royals read the contracts differently and believe the older deals should include the ebook rights - because they're the publishers and they've always had the power to set the terms.  Publishers have decided to punish The Jackal where it hurts - the pocketbook.  Random House held the print rights to many of the works in question and it's announced it won't do business with Wylie until the issue is resolved.  I'm hoping that the Jackal's clients are sending him champagne and telling him that they never liked Random House anyway.  After all, Wylie is trying to craft the terms for the new ebook industry at the dawn of the era, so that when they get set in stone, it'll be in the authors' favor.  In my opinion, Wylie is to be lauded, revered and much - much imitated.  The biggest literary award for the new e-book industry should be named for him - the Jackal or the Wylie. 

...continue reading "The Jackal, A Pioneering Royal & Nostradamus A La Amazon"

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This post may be a bit brief (for me) because we're editing the first part of Duke of Eden, the serialized novel I'm going to publish exclusively on Kindle for the amazingly low price of 99 cents per installment.  I've still got to write the product description but, Yes Virginia - the man tittie cover will hit Kindle next week.  Be sure to check out the book then!

The serialized publication/value price of Eden  actually relates to this post.  As I was working on edits yesterday, I clicked over to Google News - my home page for Internet Explorer.  I've customized my version to show certain types of stories, and yesterday up popped a Bloomberg Businessweek story of all things.  Naturally, I got distracted from my work and had to read the piece right away.  The romance genre meriting a piece on a prominant business site was worthy of notice, and its worthy of mention here.

The piece was titled:  Romance Fiction:  Getting Dirty In Dutch Country. It focused on how romance fiction is - even in this Friday the 13th of economies - on the rise.  The story mentioned the writer's opinion that  the many and varied categories of romance, including Amish, knitting and paranormal specifically, helped keep romance climbing towards the top.  I don't really disagree with the piece, I just don't think the writer attributed the rise to all the right factors. 

  According to the article, publishers say that book sales declined by 1.9 percent in 2009 after a 3 percent drop the previous year and books appear to be "suffering a slow and rather boring death."  The article doesn't talk about ebooks, which have been undergoing dramatic growth. 

The piece notes that despite declining sales in books overall, one genre has been experiencing "steady and unusual growth."  Yeah, that's right, ROMANCE.  The Romance genre increased to $1.4 billion, up by $100 million, or 7.7% from the prior year.  In a down market and a down economy people are buying more romances than ever.  Well, duh.  When have we ever, ever needed to believe in happy endings more than today?

...continue reading "The Used Car/Myrtle Beach Vacation of Genres"

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Angry Old Fat Dude here, and I've been especially steamed recently. Why? Because computers suck and everybody knows it, that's why.

How strange this is coming from a computer guy, right? 24 years in the industry. I was there at the birth of both the home computer and the publicly accessible Internet. You know what I never witnessed? The promise of a truly easy-to-use computer interface being fulfilled. If you've ever had to read instructions on how to simply make the computer do what it was designed for, then the computer isn't really easy to use.

You don't need to read a set of different instructions every year to operate a car. Even different makes and models of cars. They all work pretty much the same. They have practically the same interface.

How about other electronics? CD and DVD players work the same way, with the same sort of buttons coded in a universal fashion to tell the user how to operate the machine.

Before the smartphone, plain old phones all worked the same way. You input the unique number of the person you want to talk to, their phone makes a noise indicating that someone wants to talk to them, they pick up the phone and put it to their ears and mouths and you talk to them. This didn't change for over 100 years.

Now, hold on, you're probably saying "But AOFM, computers are open-ended devices! They're not designed with just one thing in mind! They can do ANYTHING!"

Well that's the problem in a nutshell. It's a machine that emulates other machines. To do this, a programmer must either utilize the most commonly attached devices - the keyboard, mouse, monitor, and printer - or propose an entirely new device - another machine to be bought, attached, and configured.

...continue reading "AOFM-MWU – It Should Just Work, Dammit"

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There's no doubt about who's winning the  American Indie Revolution.  The castle walls of the old publishing royals stand in ruins.  Even former staunch allies like Barnes & Noble have defected to the insurgent writers.   

“Digital publishing and digital book selling will soon become the most explosive development in the history of our industry and will sweep aside those who aren’t participating,” Leonard Riggio, B&N's founder and chairman, said during a recent presentation highlighting the company's expanding forray into the digital market. 

The e-reader market is in the midst of a price war that is putting more and more of the devices into the hands of the book-buying American public.  Fewer readers visit the brick and mortar bookstores as more readers demand that the bookstores come to them, via their PCs, Macs, e-readers, iPods and cell phones.  Via America's strong and ever expanding wireless networks ebooks get delivered to readers instantly. 

When American publishers lost control of the distribution system, they lost control of the readers and the writers.  Today authors like Joe Konrath have chosen to forego offered publishing contracts for some books, electing to get them out in print and ebook format on their own, thank you very much.  Books of writers doing it their way are, more and more,  transitioning readers to expect stories undiluted by editorial changes demanded by publishers.  An American indie book or ebook is becoming an intimate experience shared only by the writer and the reader.    

But even in the present economic downturn, America's companies invested the time and resources to build the pipelines that allowed the Indie Revolt to succeed.   Those pipelines are being strengthened as demand encourages more investment.  Our writers can now write their books, publish them, sell them to readers and get paid via those same magic pipelines that funnel money directly into their bank accounts. 

In the heady atmosphere of power and possibility now held by the creators themselves, it becomes rather easy to forget that America's Indie Revolt is not yet the world's.  Imagine an American publisher today saying the following:  “Everyone knows that almost all publishers cheat their authors on their royalty payments, and there’s ­nothing the authors can do about it.”

...continue reading "America’s Indie Revolt: Why It Matters & Will It Spread"

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It's a buyer's market for almost everything, right? 

So, lets say you are better off than most of us (me, especially) and you decide that this is the time to buy a house.  You hire a realtor and she drives you out to Neighborhood A to see a traditional ranch.   It turns out to be too traditional for you, but on your way to Neighborhood B to see the next house on the realtor's list you pass a cunning little craftsman with a "For Sale" sign in the yard.  It has charm and character and doesn't look turned out of a cookie cutter. 

So you draw your realtor's attention to it and tell her you want to see that house.  She hems and haws and tries to evade but when you insist, the realtor finally gives you an answer.  "No," the realtor says, "you can't see that house. "  She's already met with the committee at the office.  They reviewed who you were and what you would like and dislike and composed a list of acceptable houses.  The craftsman wasn't on the list so it's not for you. 

In reality, that scenario may not have happened to you on a house hunt, but in the past it happened every single time a reader walked into a bookstore.  All of the books on the shelves had been screened for the readers by the publishing royals - agents, editors and publishing companies.  The royals decided what readers should want and only put the acceptable books out there for the bookstores to stock and sell.  So if a reader wanted a book, he or she had to buy one of those in the store.  And when the sale was made, the royals patted each other on the shoulder and said, "See, we were right again."

...continue reading "What The Indie Revolution Means To Readers"

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Published on 1 Comment on AOFM-MWU – Gestalt, Zeitgeist, and Fruition

Hi. That Angry Guy here. Feeling better, hence more angry.

If you haven't heard about it yet, there is a huge price war going on among companies that sell e-reader devices. It seems that the Apple cart (via the iPad) has upset a bunch of people, mainly those people who thought they had the e-book and e-reader device market cornered.

I knew that the $400 price tags on Kindles wouldn't last long, because even though it put many different technologies together in a synergistic fashion, it was still a device with a singular purpose (as are its immediate competitors like the Nook) - in essence, a digital book.

The iPad, like the Amazon Kindle, didn't introduce any radical new technology; it assembled existing technologies into a neat little package that ends up being greater than the sum of its parts.

Tablet computers were conceptualized back in the days before GUIs were even invented, so Apple didn't invent the idea of a tablet computer.

Tablet computers, with varying degrees of interaction, had been manufactured by other companies since the early 1990s, so Apple didn't invent the form of a tablet computer.

But Apple did make a computer that utilized a number of robust interdependent technologies, and that computer had the right form and was introduced at the right time to break the collective inertia of the buying public.

And even though the competing devices may someday add other functions besides downloading and displaying e-books, the public perception of them is already set. The perception is that the Kindle, Nook, etc., are one-trick ponies whereas the iPad has no boundaries.

And, fortunately or unfortunately as the case may be, perception is reality.

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God knows, I understand that even in good times people need weekends to stay sane.  In my world of today, which is the polar opposite of "good times," sanity is mostly a fond memory, but I still need my weekends.  My family and that little two-day break from work are the only things keeping me from jumping. 

So I rarely hope anybody else has their tailhook at their desk over a weekend, especially a holiday weekend.  Rarely.  But this weekend is an exception.   This weekend every darned programmer and web guru in the Amazonian Kingdom best be chained to their desks - including the fathers in the group.   At least one of 'em deserves to be chained, and with a big new system change-over coming at the end of June where the whole staff is most likely working on bits and pieces of the new system, someone supervising the chain-deserving code monkey didn't do his or her job.  Somebody screwed up royally. 

Amazon's DTP Platform publishes Kindle pieces from indie authors and includes a dashboard to monitor sales.  The numbers don't go backwards unless there was a return or two OR unless a code monkey didn't do his job right.  Early Thursday evening (June 17th) over about a two hour span, the DTP numbers of indie authors went backwards without any returns.  Sales disappeared. 

...continue reading "Amazon’s FUBAR Agitates The Already Agitated"

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Is having breakfast for supper a Southern thing? 

Last night I decided that I wanted breakfast for supper.  Okay, maybe recalling that IHOP has those cheesecake stacker pancakes right now had something to do with it.  The other factor - if one needs more than the idea of cheesecake as an incentive - was that at suppertime we could get into IHOP.  You've got to remember that the family Graham resides in Myrtle Beach which is a tourist town. 

Tourists, God love 'em, come down on vacation talking a good game.  You'll hear them in line at the grocery store or passing by at the mall talking about how stupid folks are to travel to somewhere different and still eat at the chain restaurants.  Like I said, they talk a good game.  Anybody who lives in Myrtle and has tried to get into an Olive Garden for supper or an IHOP for breakfast knows that it's all talk.  Locals will drive up to those places, see the throngs crowding around, and leave and go somewhere else.

So there was a stroke of genius in my madness last night.  It occurred to me that maybe breakfast for supper was a Southern thing and maybe IHOP wouldn't be crowded.  And EUREKA!!  Once in a great while - I'm right.  It was so not crowded that my kids, seeing the nearly empty parking lot, wondered if it was open.  But it was and not only did I get my cheesecake stackers (strawberry), but we were seated in a nearly empty section that allowed the family to have a loud and raucous debate.  (Apologies to the one smart diner - a single man - who decided to leave and likely swore off the ideas of marriage and children for life.)

Mr. Quack brought up a debate we'd been having at home as he is in the throes of designing the man tittie cover for the serialization of my WIP, a regency historical.  He doesn't get my reference to "Eden Without The Apple."  He's also convinced that readers wouldn't get it either and would be confused by theological implications.  I replied that women drawn in by  man titties wouldn't be thinking about the Bible at the time. 

...continue reading "IHOP Insanity and Its Aftermath"

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AOFM here, not feeling too well. Bad lifestyle choices + piles of stress = world of hurt. We're going to have to make this one short.

As you know, Mary Anne wrote on June 6th about serialized books and how they could open up new (but actually very old) ways of making electronic distribution a little more interesting for the reader and more educational and fun for the writer.

Well, the very same day a bigwig in the e-publishing industry wrote about the very same thing, listing a subset of the same authors my wife listed in her blog post.

Same-said bigwig posted on the same topic on the bigwig's site the next day. That same day, the bigwig wrote about it on a bigwig political & news site.

Wow, that's an unbelievable coincidence, isn' t it?  Predicting on the very day the very topic and even the very list of authors that the bigwig was going to write about, before he did so!

It's like my wife is psycho psychic or something!

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Published on 1 Comment on The Perils of Quacking Alone

Many famous novels have appeared in serial form but, perhaps the most famous serial wasn't a novel at all.  In 1914 the motion picture serial, The Perils of Pauline, was shown in installments.  The title character is the archetype for "damsels in distress" as each episode featured her getting embroiled in various life-threatening situations - like being tied to the railroad tracks.  The heroine, of course, was inevitably rescued or escaped certain death - only to get herself into trouble again next time. 

Pauline aside, a host of acclaimed books have been serialized. One of the first was One Thousand And One Nights which introduced famous characters like Sinbad the Sailor and Aladdin.  One of the most famous serial authors was Charles Dickens who published each chapter as a serialized piece.  That's why most of his work is so long - more chapters equal more money.  Dickens' left off each piece with a cliffhanger.  Famously, for his chase story The Old Curiosity Shop,  American fans waiting at the docks to meet the ships bringing in the next installment shouted at the ships' crew demanding to be told whether Little Nell was dead.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created his Sherlock Holmes  tales as serial pieces for a magazine.  Thomas Hardy created many pieces via serialization, including Tess Of The D'Urbervilles.  More recent writers have also returned to the format.  Stephen King has dabbled in the genre.  King began offering "The Plant" in serial form on his website, charging $1.00 for each of the 6 chapters that he'd written.  However, in late 2000 he abruptly halted the project, leaving readers without an ending.  Tom Wolfe's Bonfire of the Vanities was serialized by Rolling Stone magazine, and Douglas Clegg got a 5 figure advance for serialization of his novel, Nightmare House. ...continue reading "The Perils of Quacking Alone"