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.

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.

Wylie is no slouch of an agency.

Odyssey Editions plans to publish e-book editions of some of Wylie’s author’s backlist titles that have yet to be published as e-books. These include books by literary heavy-hitters Salman Rushdie, John Updike, Philip Roth, and Norman Mailer. Wylie is said to represent more than 700 authors and author’s heirs.

Agency founder Andrew Wylie, is apparently frustrated by two things:

1.) The stance Random House and other publishers have taken that e-book and other digital rights are included in older contracts signed before digital rights existed and thus were not explicitly listed in a contract. (Most contracts spell out exactly what rights the author is licensing to the publisher, such as hardcover, trade paperback, mass market, or foreign language, and retain any rights not mentioned for the author.)

2.) What Wylie sees as e-book royalty rates that are too low to be fair to authors.

Is this ok?

Beyond the contract and the royalty rate issues, there is a lot to question about an agency becoming a publisher.

First and foremost is the appearance of a conflict of interest, if not an actual conflict. How will the agency-publisher-author split be figured?

Will there be advances paid? Is the agency prepared to do all the things a publisher does? Will the e-book be an exact duplicate of the printed book if the final editing is done by the print book publisher?

How likely is the printed book publisher to aggressively promote and market the printed versions knowing some of the cream of its endeavors, in the form of e-book sales, will be skimmed off the top?

Wait, it gets weirder.

Wylie further confused the issue by saying he planned to give Amazon.com exclusive rights to Odyssey titles for its Kindle editions for two years.

It is commonly thought that Amazon isn’t paying for this exclusivity since that would likely trigger “favored nation” clauses present in contracts Amazon has with other publishers. So what benefit does the author receive by limiting the titles to one e-book edition? What benefit does Wylie receive?

IMHO

Publishers should remain publishers and literary agencies should remain literary agencies and never the twain should meet.

A word about e-book royalties

It’s my experience that royalty rates on e-books appear to be settling in at about 25 percent of net proceeds. I don’t think this will stand.

Our plan for The Write Thought’s “Classic Wisdom on Writing” e-book series of reissued writing titles, to be launched in 2011, is to pay authors 50 percent of net proceeds.

With pressures from the big authors and their agents, I imagine a figure closer to 50 percent than 25 percent will eventually prevail in most publishing agreements.

Just a write thought.

Often I only read the headline, a perilous habit. Today, a headline announces “E-book Sales Outnumber Traditional Hardcover Sales.” From this one could mistakenly assume that e-books were outselling printed books everywhere. Particularly if one misinterpreted the word “hardcover” to mean “printed.”

The story is a rehash of a New York Times article with the headline, “E-Books Top Hardcovers at Amazon.”

In the New York Times article, we learn that Kindle (Amazon.com’s e-reader) editions have outstripped Amazon’s sales of hardcover editions of books—this doesn’t include paperbacks which, it is safe to say, outsell hardcover books by a huge margin. A milestone to be sure, but not the same as is perhaps suggested in the Slatest headline.

Other interesting tidbits gleaned from the NYT article:

• Over the last three months 143 Kindle editions were sold for every 100 hardcover editions sold by Amazon.

• The pace is accelerating with Kindle editions, in the last four weeks, selling 180 copies for every 100 hardcovers sold.

• Acute industry observer Mike Shatzkin predicts, “within a decade, fewer than 25 percent of all books sold will be print versions.”

• According to the Association of American Publishers, hardcover sales are up 22 percent this year. (Now that is a surprise and one wonders if it could be correct.)

• E-book sales have grown 400 percent this year through May.

• Sales of Kindle have tripled since Amazon lowered the price to $189 from $259 earlier this year. (The increase may not be completely price-driven. E-readers and tablets like Apple’s iPad have gotten great press lately.)

IMHO e-books are in the process of leveling the book-publishing playing field. Smaller publishers and lesser-known authors will benefit.

 On another note, I’ll be presenting at the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival in Bali in October and at the Space Coast Writers Conference in January. And, at the end of this month, the Mendocino Coast Writers Conference. Tough duty, but I’m up to it. Be sure to say hello if you’re at any of these.

 Just a write thought.

                                     —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.

 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.

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.

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.

This is hardly an example of what most indie publishers will attain, but it is an example of what you can do with clever people, a home studio, a somewhat hefty budget, and two minutes and ten seconds.

 Much of the actual videotaping is quite professional and may be beyond most publisher’s expertise, but many devices used in this video, like the simple title cards (some on masking tape!), the replaying of parts of scenes, and the sound effects (most available free on the Internet—Google “free sound effects”) could be used pretty easily.

It is inspiring, does give us a target to shoot for and besides, it’s fun to watch.

Just a write thought.

HP’s Slate is rumored to be on the chopping block too. Perhaps something to do with HP bailing out Palm last week. According to this rumor, HP didn’t like the Windows 7 touch screen technology and felt that Palm’s webOS was better.

Does this mean eventually there will only be one or two players on the field? Nope. The market is too big and there are still a number of heavy-weight companies with product in the pipeline including Dell with its 7- and 10-inch iPad-look-alikes named “Streak.”

Perhaps even Microsoft is still in the game. According to Frank Shaw, a corporate vice president, quoted in a Business Week aritcle, “[the courier’s] technologies will be evaluated for use in future Microsoft offerings.”

What is the eventual impact for authors and publishers? Virtually every book—self-published or not—will be available to download to virtually every reader from dozens of sources. This broadens and levels the playing field for authors and independent publishers who today have to battle the many gatekeepers in the distribution chain.

Just a write thought.