Category Archives: Publishing

Bookselling, Publishing

What Is the Dispute Between Amazon, Hachette?

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James Stewart asked someone at Hachette about their dispute with Amazon. “This person said that Amazon has been demanding payments for a range of services, including the pre-order button, personalized recommendations and a dedicated employee at Amazon for Hachette books. This is similar to so-called co-op arrangements with traditional retailers, like paying Barnes & Noble for placing a book in the front of the store.”

Stewart report describes the efforts Third Place Books has made to capitalize on Amazon’s refusal to pre-order a popular book. They offered The Silkworm at 20% off with free, personal delivery the day it was released. The owner, Robert Sindelar, “along with several other store employees, delivered the books (although a surprising number of customers said not to bother — they wanted to come into the store for their copy). He also handed out what he called ‘Hachette swag bags’ with a T-shirt and advance copy of a coming Hachette novel. Some buyers also received a surprise visit from a local author, Maria Semple, who wrote the best-selling book Where’d You Go, Bernadette.”

Sindelar calls the promotion successful. He sold 60 books that day. Normally, he doesn’t believe he would have gotten any pre-orders and maybe a few sales on the day of the release. (via Shelf Awareness)

Publishing, Writing

Horwitz Not Thrilled with Digital Bookselling

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Tony Horwitz, author of Confederates in the Attic and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, writes about the thrills and spills of being a digital bestseller.

I finished writing in late January, just as the State Department prepared to issue a much anticipated report on the Keystone XL. If I were writing for a traditional publisher, I’d have to wait months to see my work in print. This time, I’d be read within days, right on top of the news!

Exhausted but exhilarated, I headed to the liquor store for a celebratory bottle and returned to an urgent call from my editor in Sydney. “Mate, we’re [bleeped],” she said. The Global Mail’s backer had had a bad financial setback at his firm and evidently decided he could no longer afford a folly like quality journalism. He’d abruptly pulled the plug just hours before I filed my copy, making The Global Mail a dead letter.

Worse still, for me, Byliner hadn’t yet inked its deal with the Aussies. Suddenly I had no platform for a very long story on a subject that was about to be all over the news. And I’d yet to be paid anything beyond my original travel budget (which I’d overrun, in any case).

At this point I called my literary agent, whom I’d foolishly failed to involve in the project. (Another fantasy of the digital world: Writers can do it themselves and dispense with all those middlemen.)

And there’s more.

Bookselling, Publishing

Apple Settles Its Ebook Case

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Apple has been fighting the accusation that it conspired to fix ebook prices unfairly. I believe I remember this class action lawsuit being wage on behalf of Capital Hill politicians who hadn’t felt properly, shall we say, appreciated by Apple over the years. Had a little more corporate lobbying taken place, maybe they wouldn’t be having to answer for themselves.

Now Apple is settling. The company is “also appealing the antitrust ruling against it for the same issue of price-fixing.”

Bookselling, Publishing

Amazon vs. The World: Next Episode

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A few days ago, we pointed out the news that Amazon was not taking pre-orders and delaying orders for books from Hachette. We’re talking books you have heard of, possibly read already, or may be looking forward to, such as J.K. Rowling’s next crime novel. (Read an excerpt through that link.)

Here’s a quick fact list on the Hachette dispute.

Now Amazon is refusing to take pre-orders for The LEGO Movie and other DVDs from Warner Home Video because of a contract delay.

Writers David Streitfeld and Melissa Eddy suggest the biggest bookseller on the planet actually needs the money: “Amazon hasn’t really explained what it is after, but here’s one compelling theory: The company just doesn’t have enough money to finance everything it wants to do. Rather than trim its ambitions, it is putting one side of its business through the wringer to pay for another.”

Bookselling, Publishing

Amazon Plays Hardball with Publisher Hachette

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In 2010, Amazon disputed its arrangement with Macmillan on ebook prices and removed the publisher’s books from its site. Today the largest book dealer on the Internet is refusing pre-orders on new books from Hachette and delaying shipment on existing titles. Stephen Colbert is one of the authors with un-new books on the shelf, and he isn’t amused by the delay of what he says could be 30 of his books sold in a year. J.K. Rowling’s new book is coming out soon, which means thousands of readers would have pre-ordered it through Amazon by now, but cannot–not for ebook or print.

Since Amazon has 65% of the ebook market, working a deal with them is important to any publisher, but they aren’t the only ebook dealer. Barnes and Noble, Powell’s, and others are available, and maybe conflicts like this will make any argument for DRM pointless. If I have a Kindle and want to buy an ebook, do I need Amazon to sell it to me?

Publishing

6 Ways Publishing May Not Be Dead

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Mage's lonelinessAlastair Horne observes some things happening the science fiction world that may point to good ideas for publishers. In brief:

  1. Crowd-funding cross media: Publisher Gollancz contributed to a Kickstarter campaign for the video game “Elite:Dangerous” on the contingency that they have the rights to publish tie-in novels.
  2. Bundling ebooks with print and perhaps book-selling location.
  3. Digital conversion of mid-list books: Again Gollancz has taken an impressive lead for its readers.
  4. Dropping DRM on ebooks: Baen and Tor have already done it.
  5. Accepting fan fiction.
  6. Publisher subscriptions for a year of books, something Cruciform Press has been doing since the beginning.
Authors, Publishing

John C. Wright on the death of freedom in Science Fiction

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By way of our friend Anthony Sacramone (I’d link to his blog, but he’s in one of his hiatuses. Hiati?) an excellent article from Intercollegiate Review, “Heinlein, Hugos and Hogwash,” by John C. Wright concerning the sad state of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, an organization from which I have also withdrawn:

The purpose of all this hogwash is not to aid the plight of minorities. The purpose is power. The purpose is terror.

One need not ignite a suicide-bomb to enact a reign of terror. One need only have the power to hurt a man’s reputation or income, and be willing to use the power in an arbitrary, treacherous, lunatic, and cruel fashion. For this, the poisonous tongue suffices.

At one time, science fiction was an oasis of intellectual liberty, a place where no idea was sacrosanct and no idea was unwelcome. Now speculative fiction makes speculative thinkers so unwelcome that, after a decade of support, I resigned my membership in SFWA in disgust. SFWA bears no blame for all these witch-hunts, or even most; but SFWA spreads the moral atmosphere congenial to the witch-hunters, hence not congenial to my dues money.

Read it all here.

Bookselling, Publishing

Christian Book Awards

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Crazy Busy: A (Mercifully) Short Book about a (Really) Big Problem, by Kevin De Young wins the Christian Book of the Year Award from the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association. Ron Charles of the Washington Post gives a brief rundown of the book and lists other awards given out yesterday at the ECPA banquet.

Publishing, Writing

Do Literary Writers Succeed in Digital Publishing?

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Do literary writers find readers and make money in digital publishing? Not yet. Porter Anderson writes:

Literary fiction, by contrast, has no content guidelines, makes no promise of one topic or another, varies vastly in style and form. Not surprisingly, then, it’s perennially difficult to define without a fight. Claims of serious intent and/or artistic achievement may be asserted by fans of literary fiction. Its detractors love to charge that it focuses on language over plot; “navel gazing” poetics over entertainment; precious reflection over storytelling.

But Jane Friedman says you can see some successful writing if you look beyond the book length form. She says, “Thoughtful, intelligent ‘literary’ work is doing quite well digitally if you step away from book-length or novel publishing and into journalism-driven or nonfiction-driven publishing. Most of the following outlets and platforms include some fiction, too, just not a lot.” These platforms include: Byliner, Atavist, Medium/Matter, Symbolia, The Magazine, Storybird, and Hi.

In general, she says, people don’t want to read short stories or poems on no-name sites like Brandywine Books. Big name sites, like The Poetry Foundation, get readers, but not others. I think the field may still be in flux as more readers read everything onscreen. I also think literary writers should reflect on the poverty of our recent literary traditions and develop a new perspective based more on Shakespeare and Milton than on Freud and Beckett.