Hot on the heels of Amazon’s announcement that they are now going to license fan fiction:
See it here: http://chainsawsuit.com/2013/05/22/fanfic-forever/
[Comic] Fanfic Forever! (via @krisstraub)
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Category Archives: Publishing
What Writers Can Learn From Dan Brown’s Inferno (via @thecreativepenn)
I made fun of Dan Brown a bit last week, but by all accounts he’s a lovely fellow, so today is a more constructive piece about Dan’s latest work, by the ever-helpful Joanna Penn. She covers the book (sans spoilers) in three sections:
- Write what you love and don’t get trapped into expectations
- Book title, marketing and theme need to resonate
- Don’t confuse the reader
I think Joanna really nails it in that first section when she says:
Inferno might satisfy the expectations of the publisher, and some fans for another Langdon book. But in reading it, I felt like Dan Brown did not have a fun time writing it, and in fact, he would rather be writing techno-thrillers.
This reflects the experience that Kim Wilkins shared at the recent launch of her book Year of Ancient Ghosts (Ticonderoga Press). She said that she’d become stuck in the role of writing profitable romances as Kimberley Freeman, but she yearned to be able to write something that she wanted to write just for herself.
Anyway, read Joanna’s full article here for some tips on what she thinks went awry: http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2013/05/18/dan-brown-inferno/
New Smashwords Survey Helps Authors Sell More eBooks (via @markcoker, HT: @thecreativepenn)
Mark Coker from Smashwords has collated the results of a Smashwords author survey, and there’s a whole bunch of fancy graphs and juicy data in there.
I’ll just post the headers for each section, to give you an idea. It’s really great information, and if you want to optimise your strategy for selling books you certainly can’t go wrong with some Cold, Hard Survey Result Facts.
- Ebook Sales Conform to a Power Curve
- Viva Long Form Reading: Longer Books Sell Better
- Shorter Book Titles Appear to Have Slight Sales Advantage
- How Indie Authors are Pricing Their Books: $2.99 (USD) is the Most Common Price Point
- How Price Impacts Unit Sales Volume: Lower Priced Books (usually) Sell More Copies
- The Yield Graph: Is $3.99 the New $2.99?
- A Closer Look at the Yield Graph Reveals Why Indie Ebook Authors Have a Competitive Advantage over Traditionally Published Authors
There really is too much for me to post without spoilering the lot (yes, spoilering is a word now*), but I found this an interesting comment from Mark:
Already, many successful indies, borrowing from the playbook of publishers, are assembling freelance teams of editors, cover designers, formatters and distributors. Tell me again, what can a publisher do for the ebook author that the author already do for themselves faster, cheaper and more profitability?
In general I’m in the camp of ‘assemble a team of freelance professionals to produce a book’. I realise that some authors are capable of being the person who does that assembling, and that other authors are more than capable of doing all those tasks themselves, and I’m also aware that this approach is quite expensive. I think it produces the best books though. Not that I have any evidence of this.
Anyway, read the survey results and Mark analysis. It’s very interesting: http://blog.smashwords.com/2013/05/new-smashwords-survey-helps-authors.html
(*send your hate mail to Shakespeare)
Self-Publishing is the Worst (HT: @annetreasure)
I was going to present this without comment, but any of you who know me realise that was a lofty goal indeed.
I … I don’t want to put the boot into Ted Heller for writing his article. But…well…he actually has an agent, and some books that the NYT has actually looked at. Despite the woes detailed in the story I think he’s actually not got it so bad… Ted does acknowledge that towards the end of the article, though:
Now, I happen to know a few people at magazines and newspapers; I’ve had novels published and I have an agent. But what is this experience like for Jane and John Q. Self-Publishing Author way out there in South Podunk, who don’t know anybody at all and who have zero connections? My heart goes out to them. I know why I do it (I enjoy the piss out of writing, I believe I might be good at it, I don’t know how to do anything else, and I was laid off from my last job). I cannot explain how I do it, but I really don’t know how those other people — the 99 Percent of Writerdom — can do this. Where do they find the time and the stomach?
Read it in full here: http://www.salon.com/2013/05/03/the_future_is_no_fun_self_publishing_is_the_worst/
How To Record, Produce And Distribute Audiobooks (via @thecreativepenn)
Joanna Penn writes this back in March, but it’s a good look at audio books. She interviewed J. Daniel Sawyer about his experiences producing audio books:
Your book is not just a physical book or an ebook. There are plenty of other subsidiary rights that you can exploit and audiobooks are high on the list because of the rise in popularity of listening during commutes or workouts, and the increased penetration of smartphones. In today’s interview, we explore how you can get into this market.
My experience with audiobooks is very limited. I listened to all of ‘World War Z’ read out by various actors, and it was great; I listened to Carl Sagan reading from ‘The Demon Haunted World’ and it made me sad.
There’s a podcast of the interview, as well as a transcript, so if you’re interested in the process of producing audiobooks it’s a good place to start. Take, for example:
Essentially, you will always make mistakes while reading. A single read when you’re really good will take about 4: 1 editing time. So for every finished hour of audio, you need at least 3 or 4 hours of production. If you’re just starting out it can be more like 10 hours production to 1 of finished audio. This is why it can be expensive to produce good quality audiobooks.
Read it here: http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2013/03/06/audiobook/
Tor’s DRM-free ebook experiment, one year later (HT: @nztaylor)
Tor kicked the expensive, unworkable DRM locks off their digital books just over a year ago:
For our particular readership, we felt it was an essential and fair move. The genre community is close-knit, with a huge on-line presence, and with publishers, authors and fans having closer communication than perhaps some other areas of publishing do. Having been in direct contact with our readers, we were aware of how frustrated many of them were by DRM. Our authors had also expressed concerns at the restrictions imposed by the copyright coding applied to their ebooks. When both authors and readers are talking from the same page, it makes sense for the publishers to sit up, listen and take note—and we did!
Have a read through to see what their customer and author responses were.
Read it here: http://www.tor.com/blogs/2013/04/tor-books-uk-drm-free-one-year-later
From Self-Publishing to All Sorts of Amazing Publishing Deals (via @PublishersWkly)
Just an interesting article about Colleen Hoover, who managed to turn her self-publishing into a step to more traditional publishing contracts, including movie deals.
Although publishing, as we’ve said many a time before, is often a game of chance, there might be something in Colleen’s story that helps or inspires you:
Soon after self-publishing, people she didn’t know were downloading the book — even after it was only available for a fee. Readers began posting reviews and buzz built on blogs. Missing her characters, she self-published the sequel, “Point of Retreat,” a month later. By June, both books hit Amazon’s Kindle top 100 best-seller list. By July, both were on The New York Times best-seller list for e-books. Soon after, they were picked up by Atria Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint. By fall, she had sold the movie rights.
All sounds pretty easy, right?
When Hoover finished her third book, “Hopeless,” in December, she initially turned down an offer from Atria and decided to digitally self-publish again. By January, that book too was a New York Times best-seller and she signed that month with Atria to publish the print version, but kept control of the electronic version. The paperback is set to come out in May.
Although we can’t expect to hit the same streak as Colleen, I do find it interesting that here she has agreed to contract out the process of distributing, printing, and managing physical books, while retaining her electronic rights. To me, this seems perfectly reasonable, but I have the impression that the idea that authors would have this much power to negotiate with a publisher would have been utterly alien even a few years ago…
Fair Use (via @jakonrath)
Joe Konrath:
I define “fair use” as: You can do whatever you want with my intellectual property, as long as you’re doing it without intending to make money. Once you want to make money from it, get in touch and we’ll try to work something out.
This was prompted by a photo and caption he saw on twitter:
“Copyright is fundamental to creative industries, those who believe it’s not relevant are mistaken”
I find that interesting on a few levels. And by “interesting” I mean “bullshit”.
I agree entirely with Joe here. It’s utter bullshit. There are many creative industries, such as the fashion industry and the culinary industry, that do not ‘enjoy’ copyright protection. They are doing VERY well indeed. Copyright is not fundamental to creative industries in any way, and to claim it is is to be utterly wrong.
In fact let me rephrase it as my own quotable quote: Copyright law is fundamentally antithetical to creative industries, and those who believe it isn’t are fundamentally mistaken.
And before anyone starts yelling at me, copyright is distinct from moral rights (ie. the right to be acknowledged as the creator of a work), and certainly isn’t a requirement to make money from your art. See, as I said, the entirely copyright free fashion industry.
Read Joe’s full piece here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/fair-use.html
Barnes & Nobles launches Nook Press for Self-Pub (via HT: jdalrymple)
I’ll skip the intro and jump to the details:
The Nook Press platform includes features such as a web-based content tools for authors to write, edit, format and publish their work and online forum for writers to share their work in a secure environment. Authors also have potential merchandising opportunities in the Nook Store and upcoming Nook Press Nook Channel on Nook HD and Nook HD+. Select content will be in social media campaigns, e-mails and newsletters directed to NOOK customers, Nook Media said.
Any opportunity to get work out there is good, but my cynical senses prick a little at things where writers get ‘potential merchandising opportunities’ and ‘select content’ chosen for social media campaigns. I imagine these kinds of services turning into a literary pit fight:
Bloodied scraps of manuscripts and clothes and authors’ skin drift upwards from the pit in a draft made of the heat of dying bodies, only to be snatched by a gnarled, beringed finger.
“Hm, yes.” It’s a deep, hungry, contemplative voice. “This seems ready. Bring her up. We have some social media campaigns she might like to feature in.”
Read it: http://www.bizjournals.com/newyork/news/2013/04/09/barnes-noble-launches-new-nook-press.html
I’m a Self-Publishing Failure (via @salon)
John Winters discusses the other, more common side of self-publishing:
An article in the New York Times claims that 81 percent of us believe we have a book in us. This sounds painful – both anatomically and for the readers of this potential deluge. In fact, extrapolated across the entire U.S., this 81 percent equates to 200 million books. Most of them no doubt about beloved dogs or written by celebrity chefs. I confess I was long among these wannabe authors. My cabinets and drawers are littered with more pages of fiction than the archives of the Nixon Library. However, recently I completed my first novel and subsequently set out after that dream of every writer: publication, followed by royalty checks of the six-figure variety.
I want to quote so much from this article, as John pushes his novel onto Amazon and gets bitten by the promotional bug after selling a few copies, pursues the dream of shooting a book trailer (“The Internet is full of tips on how to market your self-published book, and a trailer is high on the list.”) and generally continues along a path of increasingly expensive self-destruction.
There was one more avenue I’d yet to try in my pursuit of literary fame: give it away. That’s right; many self-published authors simply give the e-book version of their novel away in hopes of building word-of-mouth interest that will in turn result in sales. Roughly 800 people took advantage, and afterward there was even a sale or two.
John writes with a charming and dejected wit, so do yourself a favour and read the full article: http://www.salon.com/2013/04/02/im_a_self_publishing_failure/
