Tag Archives: publishing

Brand Recognition in Publishing (via @steampress)

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Martin Latham blogs on
http://www.thebookseller.com/
 about publishers squandering significant brand recognition through mergers.

Nobody knows who published Stieg Larsson. By this, I mean no normal customer—even a Larsson fiend—could tell you the publisher. This matters because readers follow particular publishers, and this silent relationship is a rich source of whole genres. For instance, Picador can take chances because it has a following of customers who expect edgy, often unpleasant tales, such as Ian McEwan stories in the 70s, and Emma Donoghue’s Room in 2011.

It’s an interesting thought: do you expect a certain quality of material, or a certain approach to a genre, based on the publisher?

Few other imprints have kept their audience so carefully. Pan, with its satyr flautist logo, gave us Ian Fleming and lurid thrillers. Collins, with its fountain logo, meant wonderful non-fiction. These two names have lost their discrete identity, but customers would still get their wallet out if they suddenly reappeared.

I know that Angry Robot Books has a reputation for quality writing. So does this mean that the indie presses are beginning to take over the distinctive qualities of old?

Read the rest here:
http://www.thebookseller.com/blogs/making-imprint.html

Demographics of eReaders in the US

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This is a short Nielsen report on the changing demographics of eReaders (that is, the electronic devices). Most tellingly:

In the U.S., as recently as last Summer, tablet and eReader owners tended to be male and on the younger side. But according to Nielsen’s latest, quarterly survey of mobile connected device owners, this is no longer the case.

Read the article (with pretty graphs!) here:
http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/changing-demographics-of-tablet-and-ereader-owners-in-the-us/

What are the publishers doing for us? via @pubperspectives

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This is an article from Publishing Perspectives covering the inaugural Publishers Launch London conference recently.

One of the quotes that stood out to me is relevant to last week’s discussion about cover design. Jonny Geller of Curtis Brown says:

“The reason we have so many jackets looking the same is that publishers will say ‘oh, we can’t choose that one because Tesco won’t like it’”

It’s easy to wave at the rebirth of self-publishing in this digital era and dismiss the traditional publishing industry’s contributions, but:

Stephen Page, Chief Executive of Faber, suggested that publishers perhaps don’t do as good a job as they could of communicating to authors the value publishers offer. “We forget the difficulty of the remote position that writers occupy.”

This hearkens back to the discussions we’ve had here about the perceived value of the digital container, and so highlights a deficiency in the publishing industry – communications. I’d hazard a guess that traditional publishing houses have not had a requirement to explain themselves for decades, nor any dearth of quality submissions. It seems to me that in a world where authors have increasingly varied avenues to publishing, they really need to improve this aspect if they want to continue to attract the best talent.

The article also contains some perspectives from both sides regarding territorial rights and the place of digital formats.

Read the rest of the article here:
http://publishingperspectives.com/2011/06/authors-what-are-publishers-doing-for-us/

Take a look at T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, converted into a premium digital container (via @touchpress)

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I stumbled on the TouchPress website recently, and onto a really interesting example of adding value to classic texts by translating them into a digital format. By utilising the power of the digital format, TouchPress hope the create more powerful interactive experiences.

You’ve heard all this before, of course, but it’s nice to see a practical implementation.

Books are one of the great defining inventions of our civilization—and today they are poised for a revolution. Our goal is to create a new kind of book that makes use of emerging consumer platforms such as iPad, as well as the latest computation capabilities and high-performance visual media.

A prominent example of the kind of digital book they’re talking about is their The Waste Land:

This new digital edition of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land brings alive the most revolutionary poem of the last hundred years, illuminated by a wealth of interactive features. The title’s groundbreaking design carefully respects the typography and integrity of the original poem, yet offers spectacular new ways to explore The Waste Land‘s significance and influence

Listed as features of this book-as-app are:

  • A powerful filmed performance of the entire poem by Fiona Shaw, synchronised to the text
  • Complete audio readings of the poem, also synchronised to the text, by T. S. Eliot himself, Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, and Viggo Mortensen
  • Comprehensive interactive notes to guide the user through the poem’s many references
  • Over 35 expert video perspectives on the poem, filmed in partnership with BBC Arena, including contributions from Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson
  • Original manuscript pages revealing how the poem took shape under Ezra Pound’s editing

I’ve spoken to Virginia from booki.sh about adding value to the digital container in the past. She had commented:

Improving the container – beautifully designed ebooks, rather than some of the fairly appalling dross we’re seeing at the moment – is something I’m very interested in, but there’s a huge amount of inertia in the publishing industry.

Although I’m not generally a fan of books as applications, there is a point where you have to ask whether this kind of innovation can be provided by a generic digital format such as .ePub. To make an eBook more than a digital version of ‘real-life’ books, are hyperlinks sufficient, or does this kind of added value requires its own custom container?

You can preview the Waste Land application here:
http://www.touchpress.com/titles/thewasteland/
. It’s definitely worth checking out.

You can find it on the Apple store here.

The Indie bookseller vs The Amazon Imprint

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Hm, I don’t entirely agree with this, but I’m not an independent bookshop and can only view it from a writer/reader perspective.

Basically the Seattle Mystery Bookshop has posted a polite series of emails they had with a writer being published through Amazon’s new publishing venture. The writer asks for a stocking/signing opportunity and is politely rebuffed.

It’s an interesting insight into the shifting relationships between traditional publisher/self publisher/self-promoter/book seller. As the author says:

I know your mind is set, and I do not expect my email to change it. But I do want you to know that my experience with Amazon as an author has been second to none. They are incredibly supportive and responsive and beyond author-friendly. They flew me to NY for a book signing at BEA, something unheard of for a first-time author in my genre. And the list goes on.

Although book sellers are affected directly by the market strength of Amazon, Amazon does offer a radically different publishing relationship for writers. So is the bookselling industry shooting themselves in the foot by rejecting work from writers who want better publishing terms? It’s not as if a boycott has any practical effect, it is purely an ethical position.

It’s a worthwhile read:  
http://seattlemysteryblog.typepad.com/seattle_mystery/2011/06/cant-shake-the-devils-hand-and-say-youre-only-kidding.html

Finding an editor (and treating them well) – via @BothersomeWords

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I found this blog post via Angela Slattery’s blog (to which you should also subscribe, as it is quite useful).

Bothersome Words is a provider of literary services (eg. proofreading, editing), and wrote an article comparing hiring editors to hiring any tradesperson. This in itself is a worthwhile read, but what particularly struck me (reading writing-related posts with Literarium ever-watchful over my shoulder), was the introduction:

There are many ways to go about hiring a freelance editor to help you with your fledgling manuscript or document. You can trawl through the Yellow Pages, check Google, contact your local Writers’ Centres or dip into the directories of numerous Societies of Editors.

Just as there are hundreds of tradespeople to choose from, so there are hundreds of editors. So you narrow it down. You look for editors who specialise in your subject area. Maybe you take advice from fellow writers, get recommendations.

Finally, you have a list of people who you think would suit your manuscript. So what next?

What’s next is you hire the services of someone like Bothersome Words. But of course, finding Bothersome Words is one of the problems we hope Literarium will solve.

Lucas and I are aiming to be able to provide that directory of services, sortable and searchable by as many different tidbits of metadata that we can think of. Do you have a fantasy romance novella of 15,000 words? We can bring back all Editors in your state that accept fantasy and/or romance and work with projects of that size. Literarium will speed up that initial process, cutting out all the clumsy googling, yellow-page hunting, writing-list bothering and friend haranguing.

Why? I’ll end by quoting from my own comment on the post:

[...] I see a massive boom in self-sourced literary professionals now that self-publishing digitally is a much more viable path; illustrators, typesetters, proofreaders – all the services that would once have been provided inside a publishing house. [...]

That’s why. :-D

Digital Rights Management – Some Problems via @DouglasCootey

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This article was brought to my attention by Sean from bookonaut.com.

Although long blog posts about DRM are always boiling beneath the surface of my skin, they aren’t really appropriate for Literarium and more likely to appear on my personal blog.

Make no mistake, though: Literarium does not support digital rights management of files. Chiefly because it doesn’t work, doesn’t achieve its goals, and treats readers like criminals. It’s also expensive and frustrating. But let’s move on…

Douglas Cootey details his experience in dealing with the most common flavour of DRM currently inflicted on legitimate ebook customers, Adobe’s Digital Editions. Tragically writers rarely have much of a say in how their publisher decides to package their work electronically, but imagine placing one of your loyal readers into Douglas’s shoes. At the end of this harrowing ride, is the reader going to be angry at your publisher or you?

Have a read of:
http://douglascootey.com/trouble-with-adobe-drm-too-many-activations

I think Douglas might have a follow up in the future, and I’ll try to let you know how it turns out.

Consumers vs Perceived Value

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I found a link to an interesting article about customer reactions to perceived unfairness in ebook pricing. My good friend Mike McRae (@tribalscientist) left a pertinent comment in last week’s blog post about ebook pricing.

Dan Ariely discusses how customers reacted in a particular case of perceived unfair ebook pricing by rating the book ’1 star’ on Amazon.

If you haven’t read it yet, it’s a good insight into some of the economics of customer expectations:
http://danariely.com/2011/04/10/the-rationality-of-one-star/

After last week’s range of comments on the subjects, I do think that large publishers have missed an opportunity to drive the pricing issue in a collaborative rather than antagonistic manner.

What is an ebook actually worth to you? When the container has no value – via @Cacotopos

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This post links to an article from my personal blog, where I also occasionally address issues relating to the publishing industry, coloured by my private perspective.

In Australia, ebooks have yet to gain the kind of traction that they have in America. Consequently, the market is still experimenting and adjusting itself; on the one hand we have publishers trying to force a model onto readers with which they’re happy; on the other hand we have readers looking at the exploding market in America and screaming blue murder at imposed regional limits.

Into this ebook culture I made a comment about local ebook pricing on twitter, which prompted a discussion with Virginia from booki.sh.

This eventually resulted in an extensive article on the value breakdown of digital books:
http://cacotopos.wordpress.com/2011/06/10/when-the-container-has-no-value

I hope you find it interesting, as it certainly helped me feel more comfortable about my book evaluating process in general.