Aug
8
Electric Literature’s Model May Save Short Fiction
Filed Under E-books, Fiction, Publishing | Leave a Comment
As a publishing choice, short stories vie with poetry as the quickest way to drain a publisher’s bank account.
Yet, a year-old publisher of short stories, Electric Literature, may have found the magic formula.
The company’s mission “is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence in popular culture.”
Stitched together by two writers, Andy Hunter and Scott Lindenbaum, Electric Literature is essentially a quarterly literary magazine. Each issue has five short stories by known and unknown authors.
Authors benefit too.
According to Electric Literature’s website each Electric Literature author is decently paid. This is unlike most literary magazines—some pay in copies only. Better pay should guarantee a healthier slush pile, and, theoretically, a better magazine with a larger readership.
Not unnoticed.
The pair has garnered attention from heavy hitters in the print world including The New York Times, USA Today, and The Washington Post which called Electric Literature, “A refreshingly bold act of optimism.”
Timing is everything.
The quickening of our daily lives and the proliferation of mobile devices have seemingly combined to produce a ready crop of readers for Electric Literature. As Hunter and Lindenbaum point out, the short story is especially well suited to our increasingly hectic lifestyles: “A quick, satisfying read can be welcome anywhere, and while you might forget a book, you’ll always have your phone.”
Here’s their blueprint:
To publish the paperback version of Electric Literature, we use print-on-demand; the eBook, Kindle, iPhone, and audio versions are digital. This eliminates our up-front printing bill. Rather than paying $5,000 to one printer, we pay $1,000 to five writers, ensuring that our writers are paid fairly. Our anthology is available anywhere in the world, overruns aren’t pulped, and our back issues are perpetually in print.
Electric Literature may be leading the pack among literary magazines, but it isn’t the only, or even the first, publisher to use the POD/digital formula exclusively—today publishers of every ilk do, and it’s a model I’m sure we’ll see more of.
Just a write thought.
Aug
5
NPR Poll Helps Fiction Authors and Publishers
Filed Under Fiction, Publishing, Writing | Leave a Comment
Thank goodness market research for writers and publishers includes keeping up on one’s reading. When family members see us sprawled on the couch, book in hand, we can claim, oops, I mean explain, we are working.
And, in this endeavor, NPR is here to help.
NPR conducted a poll titled “Killer Thrillers” to help you decide what next to read.
Six-hundred nominations were collected. Seventeen-thousand ballots cast.
In the end, there were few surprises. Most of the authors’ names in the list of the top 100 are familiar: Stephen King, Truman Capote, James Patterson, Dan Brown, John Grisham, as are the titles of the books, even when the author’s name may be difficult to recall: Rosemary’s Baby and Fail-Safe for instance.
Below are the top 20. To see the whole list click here.
- 1. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
- 2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
- 3. Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson
- 4. The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
- 5. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
- 6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
- 7. The Shining, by Stephen King
- 8. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
- 9. The Hunt tor Red October, by Tom Clancy
- 10. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- 11. Dracula, by Bram Stoker
- 12. The Stand, by Stephen King
- 13. The Bone Collector, by Jeffery Deaver
- 14. Jurassic Park, by Michael Crichton
- 15. Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown
- 16. A Time to Kill, by John Grisham
- 17. The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton
- 18. Mystic River, by Dennis Lehane
- 19. The Day of the Jackal, by Frederick Forsyth
- 20. Rebecca, by Daphne du Maurier
I find polls like this one often reflect what those polled are currently reading—Stieg Larsson has three in the top 100, Lee Child, four—so I was pleased to see books by Agatha Christie, John D. MacDonald, Dashiell Hammett, and Ian Fleming in the ranks.
So, your duty is clear, go out and buy a half dozen of these and hit that couch.
As an aside, Barnes & Noble yesterday said the bookstore chain is on the market. B&N’s stock price has been suffering lately even though, as I understand it, profits haven’t been. One has to wonder, does the management at B & N see a bright future in brick and mortar bookstores in light of the budding popularity of e-readers?
Just a write thought.
Jun
28
“If you want to see how a society thinks, look at what it searches for.”
—George Bernard Shaw
Allow me to slightly rewrite Shaw’s wise counsel: “If you want to know what a society is thinking about, look at what it searches for.”
As writers of nonfiction books, magazine articles—even novels—it behooves us to be on top of whatever is about to break into the collective consciousness. In other words, to be able to predict what a majority—or at least a large segment—of us are going to be interested in next week, next month, or next year.
Easier said than done
I don’t know about the rest of you, but it seems to me that, by the time I notice a trend exists, it’s already fading.
So how do you figure out what will be hot and thus what you should be pitching to editors? Check out the “Top Searches” lists supplied for free by the many Internet search engines. Most of them keep the lists updated, and archives of past lists are even available.
Check out more than one list. The searched-for items that appear on each list are undoubtedly what people are interested in at the moment and these subjects may be old news by the time you do your research and write about them, so look for subjects that are just beginning to show up here and there on these lists. Editors love fresh and new.
By the way, George Bernard Shaw is the only person to have been awarded both the Noble Prize for Literature and an Oscar.
(Full Disclosure: If this post sounds a bit familiar that’s because it’s a slight rewrite of a post I wrote in December 2007 for the old Quill Driver Books’ blog.)
Just a write thought.
May
24
Books Can’t Be Free
Filed Under Books, E-books, Free Speech, Publishing, Writing | Leave a Comment
Amazon.com has plans to split their bestseller list into two, one for free titles and one for paid books. This will likely please authors and publishers and add a tenth of a basis point or so to Amazon’s bottom line.
It also points out that “free” isn’t the price point for delivery of content. Authors, publishers, and retailers need to make money if readers are going to have a robust selection of informational and entertainment material available to us at any price.
Just a write thought.
May
13
Can You Buy Your Way into Being a Published Author?
Filed Under Books, Promotion, Publishing, Writing | 1 Comment
Yesterday an elderly gentleman was in my office asking what he should do with his fourth book. He’d paid a “publisher” out of Southern California $25,000 to publish his first book and $5,000 to publish his second. The publisher published the third for free. None of them sold any copies to speak of even though the publisher said he sent out a bunch of review copies.
To make matters worse, my visitor had heard that millions of books were sold on the Internet so he paid to be included on a book-selling website that told him he would “earn consistent income from the site selling 4,000 to 5,000 books a month.” He sold 21 copies. He thinks friends bought most of them.
A member of the hope-springs-eternal crowd (as we all are), he was there to ask if he could pay me to publish his book.
If you are an author, and you are paying to get published or for services that guarantee to sell your books, chances are you will have a bad experience. Is this always the case? Almost. What can you do about it? Learn the industry—learn what works and what doesn’t—before you open your checkbook.
Just a write thought.
May
8
Kobo joins Kindle, Sony, iPad, and Nook
Borders, the nation’s second largest bookstore chain today jumped into the fight for the e-reading public with a new e-reader from a Canadian company Kobo, Inc (used to be Shortcovers). Borders owns a significant portion of Kobo, Inc.
The big advantage over Amazon’s Kindle, the Sony E-reader, Barnes and Noble’s Nook, and Apple’s iPad is price. Kobo retails for $150. The big disadvantage is that you have to download a book to a computer then transfer it to your Kobo via cable. The others all use 3G or WiFi technology allowing the user to download material directly to the device. The Kobo supports only the e-Pub and PDF formats which is somewhat limiting.
The Kobo, which has been available in Canada for a few weeks, comes preloaded with 100 classic titles.
Here’s a short video introducing the device:
Will your favorite book be available on a Kobo?
Borders says it will offer over 1 million books in its e-book store which it plans to open in June. The Kobo people say there are millions of books currently available for the Kobo from various sources, including 1.8 million free books from Kobobooks.com.
Eventually nearly all books will be available for each mobile device, so make your choice by considering the device features you like and its price point.
Just a write thought.
Mar
16
Churchill on Writing Books
Filed Under Books, Fiction, Nonfiction, Writing | 1 Comment
The quote below—which I’d never heard until Bill Secrest, Jr., a QDB author and friend, sent it to me—is worth its own blog:
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement; then it becomes a mistress, and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.”
—Winston Churchill
Hot tip: Want to make your writing tighter? Take a look at each time you have used the word “that.” Most can be deleted to your reader’s benefit.
Just a write thought.
Feb
23
Books and Cell Phone Apps?
Filed Under Book Marketing, Books, E-books, Promotion, Publishing, Writing | Leave a Comment
The O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference, held this year at New York’s Marriott Marquis Times Square, is the place to try and keep up with the technological advances currently flooding the book publishing industry.
I attended three workshops yesterday. The first was titled “Selling in Mobile Markets” and was presented by Rana Sobany author of the O’Reilly book Marketing iPhone Apps.
She gave some interesting history:
The 1980s, she said, was all about carriers establishing the substructure necessary for cell phones. The first cell phone call was made in 1983.
The 90s were about cell phone size with, in 1999, Motorola unveiling the StarTAC, the first cell phone to weigh in under one pound.
Today there are a reported 4.6 billion cell phones in use. This approaches the population of the world, which is approximately 6.8 billion, but there are lots of third-world countries without land lines to most places, forcing the use of cell technology and, apparently, many people carry more than one cell phone.
Sobany, an articulate woman in her 30s (I’d guess) who is passionate about her subject, said she’d bet many in the audience were carrying more than one. I doubted that, but later in the conference I was speaking to the sales rep for Publishers Weekly and he fielded calls on at least two as we spoke. I felt underprivileged with only a single iPhone in my pocket.
What does that proliferation of cell phones mean for authors and publishers? It means we had better plan on having a presence in the mobile world. It is predicted that within a few years more people will access the Internet via mobile devices than from PCs. Mobile apps are today—and will be more so in the future—important ways to support book sales.
Here, in no particular order, are a few new nuggets I gleaned from Sobany’s talk:
• She says this decade will be the “iPhone” decade. Not meaning that iPhone will be the only player, but is the one currently defining the industry.
• Publishers, in designing apps for mobile devices need:
—a brand vision, by which I took she meant working single titles would result in loss of momentum and subsequent impact. She said, at the least, use a common logo. This would suggest book authors should consider writing series or leave the apps to your publisher.
—to make data-driven decisions. Metrics, metrics, metrics…one great thing about mobile devices and the web in general is that you can obtain lots of data. Using it to ferret out what actions are best is still art as well as science, but ignore it at your peril.
—iterate quickly. Updating to keep your app current to the needs of today’s user is important if you don’t want your app to be replaced by another’s.
—keep in mind that the attention a user gives to his device is given in short bursts of about three and a half to four minutes. This isn’t all bad, it is a highly-focused three and a half to four minutes, but an app that requires 10 minutes of concentration….
There was much more. I’ll try to get to some of it later, but, an interesting prediction I heard more than once at this conference is that Twitter will, in essence, be a thing of the past by the end of the year. Twitter, a short-lived fad? Who could have predicted?
Just a write thought.
Jan
20
Now Authors Can Easily Accept Credit Cards
Filed Under Writing | Leave a Comment
Early on at Quill Driver Books we discovered that an author who could take credit cards would sell three times as many books as one who was stuck accepting checks and cash only. Today, with everyone using debit cards, it’s even worse.
So, when one of our authors was speaking at a large event or was going to put up a table at a book fair or similar event, we would pack up one of those machines that took the card’s imprint and the multi-part forms the machine used and send it all off to our author . We would also send instructions on how to use the machine and a request to please have the buyer write his phone number on the form.
After the event, the author would return everything back to us including the completed forms. We would run the charges, credit the author’s account with the revenue, and write the author a check.
Often things went wrong. The card either didn’t imprint legibly, was rejected by the bank, or the customer would forget they bought the books and challenge the charge through their bank when they got the bill. Those were invariably the charges for which the author had failed to get the buyer to write down a phone number.
For years we continued to do this because, one, we wanted to sell the books and, two, for many authors, the income from sales of their books (we give most authors a 50 percent discount on their books and also pay regular royalties on books they buy) is an incentive to attend the event. If the author sold 50 books he or she would reap something like $500. Ok pay for a three- to four-hour gig that also promoted their book.
Eventually, for some reason that isn’t clear to me now—maybe it just got to be too much of a hassle, we drifted away from this practice. Both Quill Driver Books and the author are the poorer for it.
Enter technology. Now, thanks to a new start-up company named Square, any author with a smart phone can easily take credit cards. Watch this video by Kevin Rose and be amazed at the ingeniousness of it all.
Just a Write Thought.
Dec
30
I was going to take a shot at predicting what we would see by the end of the approaching decade but, with the speed things are changing and evolving, I decided it would be safer to limit myself to just one year. My 2010 predictions are:
1. The interest in mobile readers (iPhone, Kindle, Nook, others we haven’t heard of yet) will continue to snowball with as many as 50 percent of people regularly getting part of their news, work, and entertainment reading via a mobile device.
2. By the end of 2010 no one e-reader device will have cornered the market, but the majority of books, magazines, and other material available on one will be available on the others. The difference will be the quality of the experience with the better ones offering a robust mix of media including color, images, sound, video, and text.
3. We will see new, exciting, innovative, and useful ways “aggregators” will slice and dice others’ digital material and deliver it to market. For instance, your favorite movie star may piece together an e-cookbook using copy-righted material obtained piecemeal from other cookbooks residing in print-on-demad digital repositories. The repositories will then forward a small royalty to the original cookbook publishers each time a copy of the star’s e-cookbook is sold. (Madonna’s Guide to Barbequing Au Natural?) This will also work for professors who want to mix individual book chapters and magazine articles from multiple sources to form their own textbooks.
4. Our ability to quickly—and cheaply—obtain information of all kinds will continue to expand. This will put pressure on those used to charging for this information to find a new economic model, which they—or others, if they fail—will.
5. The Pope will remain Catholic.
The last one is insurance so, come 2011, I can claim at least some degree of prophetic success.
Happy New Year.
Just a Write Thought.
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