BilmBlog500

Dear KDP Author, Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year. With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new p...

Haven't done a blog post in way too long… On the subject of Hachette vs. Amazon of which too much has been written, let me make a few points: When Amazon says that e-book sales will grow if only they are priced cheaper , I consider this to be bullshit. John Scalzi is much more polite .  He disagrees by saying that he thinks it might well be a true statement for Amazon, but that it might not be true for everyone else, or for the broad publishing ecosystem in general, but that he has no reason to think Amazon is making up the numbers for Amazon. I don't feel like being that polite. Amazon's argument is essentially an updated variation of the famous "Laffer Curve" which Ronald Reagan used to justify the argument that lower taxes meant higher revenues.  Which if it is true at all is true only at certain high extremes of tax rates, because after a point you just can't keep getting more by charging less, whether it's e-books or government or chewing gum.   It a...

In the final of my current series of posts about the e-book business, we're going to talk about the food chain a little bit. The average run-of-the-mill self-published e-book author is kind of at the bottom of the food chain.  This person goes on-line, accepts the terms of service, the KDP or Nook Press contract, and away they go. We at JABberwocky, I must admit though I hate to do so, are not that much further up.  We get to be in something called the Kindle White Glove program for agents.  We represent many authors, we have the ability to put up books by multiple published authors, we have people we can talk to. Above us, I'd probably put small publishers that may be able to provide a few thousand titles, that may have dedicated legal teams to negotiate with Amazon, that may have have a few core titles in a particular category that would be important for Amazon to sell. Then you've got Open Road or Rosetta Books, dedicated e-book publishers with lots and lots of ti...

Two interesting developments in the e-book marketplace in recent days.  One of which shall be used as a springboard today, this being the announcement that Richard Curtis has sold his e-Reads business to Open Road.  Like myself and several other leading agents in sf/f, Richard is an alumnus of the Scott Meredith Literary Agency, around twenty years prior to my time there.  He started e-Reads in 1999 when the e-book business was barely in existence, and interestingly, I've traveled in some familiar circles with agents with an interest in the e-book business.  My boss for 15 months at Scott Meredith after Scott died was Arthur Klebanoff, who founded Rosetta Books a couple years after Richard founded e-Reads. The reason Richard Curtis gave in the press about the sale was that there was a perceived need to do more marketing of the e-Reads list, which would have meant stepping up the investment in the business, and that it seemed better to find a company that could ...

So if all of the people who are so committed to the idea that the whole wide world of writers should be self-publishing their books on Amazon would devote just a wee bit of their energy to getting some more of the developers near our current office to shovel the sidewalks of their development sites so my employees don't slip and fall on ice sheets, I'd be very happy. Where does one begin to dissect this incredible piece of self-publishing "science" by Hugh Howey ... First, the science doesn't rest on actual figures of how much anyone is making.  Rather, the starting point is to look at a list of Amazon bestsellers, and to determine the future from this list, and this list alone.  Ugh!  I had my first experience with bestseller list quackery in 1990, when a book that I knew wasn't selling very well in hardcover somehow managed to appear on the Locus bestseller list for multiple months.  More recently, Myke Cole has been aiming for the #1 bestseller in the Space...

Usually I try and refrain from posts that will ruffle too many feathers, but I can't tell everyone else we should be talking about the dissolution of Night Shade in public and then not do so myself. For those of you who don't know, Night Shade Books is a highly regarded -- well, artistically highly regarded -- publishing company specializing in sf, fantasy and horror.  It has published many excellent authors, with beautifully packaged books, published with great love.  It was a company that I wanted to be in business with very, very much. Unfortunately, the company was poorly run. In 2010, this became public knowledge.  There were issues with late royalties, and with e-books being published by Night Shade when their contracts did not give them e-book rights.  We were aware of those issues already, and we had stopped submitting to Night Shade.  It wasn't just that they were so often late, but that we never felt entirely comfortable with the excuses or forthrigh...

I guess it's that time of year when we talk about the year that was... On the business end of things: When you're a literary agent, your work often comes ahead of the reward.  With the time lag between a book selling and the royalty reports coming along, a book that sells in January might not bring a royalty until November or with reserves against returns until the following May.  So in 2009 and 2010, we were getting paid for when there were 8 or 9 Sookie Stackhouse books on the bestseller lists in 2008 and 2009.  We were getting paid a lot.  It was also a bit like a one-legged stool, a bit unstable because so much of the income was coming in just a couple checks each year. In the years since, the business has become more stable.  The Charlaine Harris business is still huge, not as big as when there were 9 books on the bestseller list but still big.  Other authors have gotten bigger in the past few years, Brandon Sanderson or Peter Brett or Jack Campbell. ...

Back in 2011 I did a blog post about some controversy I didn't entirely understand regarding Harlequin's broad efforts to add in or update e-book royalties on some older contracts.  One of the things I discussed was Harlequin's ability to play around some with e-book royalties by self-dealing with various of their international subsidiaries.  And now, lo and behold, Publishers Weekly reports on a lawsuit about just that... This comes not long after Google and publishers announced a settlement of a lawsuit on pretty much the exact terms I'd suggested might be nice. My stopped clock has now been right its two times in a day, but maybe it will be right again anyway!

Some time back I did a blog post about the controversial and eventually overturned settlement between Google, the Authors Guild, the major publishers and others about the Google project to scan zillions of books and make them available. Read that post here.  http://brilligblogger.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-settlement.html This week, the major publishers settled their case with Google, you can read the Google press release about that settlement here. http://googlepress.blogspot.com/2012/10/publishers-and-google-reach-agreement.html Just to say, I called this one. The main part of the settlement here is that the publishers get Google's file for their use. Which is exactly what I said was missing from the larger agreement. If they had done that same thing three years ago for the broad settlement, our ebook program would have long ago had a lot more books, our clients would have been making a lot more money all along the way.  Instead, the Authors Guikd is still spending how...

I hope to blog a bit more extensively about the anti-trust case on e-book pricing. In the meantime, here is a vapid press release that just arrived from HarperCollins. It can be summed up as "our behavior was wonderful and delightful for everyone, so we decided to settle instead of defending it." Erin Crum Vice President, Corporate Communications HarperCollins Publishers (212) 207-7223 Erin.Crum@harpercollins.com FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE HarperCollins Publishers Settles e-Book Pricing Dispute with the Department of Justice New York, NY (April 11, 2012) — HarperCollins Publishers today announced that it has reached an agreement with the United States Department of Justice to end its investigation into HarperCollins’ contracts for the distribution of e-books. HarperCollins did not violate any anti- trust laws and will comply with its obligations under the agreement. HarperCollins’ business terms and policies have been, and continue to be, designed to give readers the greatest choi...