Publetariat

Amazon Announces Intent To Start Slashing Kindle Book Prices In Wake Of Antitrust Settlements

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Today the New York Times is reporting:

As soon as the Department of Justice announced Wednesday that it was suing five major publishers and Apple on price-fixing charges, and simultaneously settling with three of them, Amazon announced plans to push down prices on e-books. The price of some major titles could fall to $9.99 or less from $14.99, saving voracious readers a bundle.

But publishers and booksellers argue that any victory for consumers will be short-lived, and that the ultimate effect of the antitrust suit will be to exchange a perceived monopoly for a real one. Amazon, already the dominant force in the industry, will hold all the cards…

The government said the five publishers colluded with Apple in secret to develop a new policy that let them set their own retail prices, and then sought to hide their discussions…After that deal was in place in 2010, the government said, prices jumped everywhere because under the agreement, no bookseller could undercut Apple.

On Slate, Barry C. Lynn argues that these developments will ultimately ruin the entire book business and supply chain:

On the surface, the DoJ’s action may seem perfectly reasonable. The antitrust enforcers charged that five big publishers conspired with Apple to raise the prices of e-books by creating a new regime in which the publishers, rather than the retailers, priced their books.

Absent any other consideration whatsoever, higher prices do indeed result in a bad outcome: namely, fewer books in the hands (or on the screens) of American citizens.

But while cheaper e-books might be a good short-term outcome for some readers, and for those companies pushing for wider adaption of e-readers, there are significant downsides on the horizon…

Lynn goes on to paint a doom-and-gloom scenario in which Amazon systematically drives every other bookseller (and many publishers) out of business, then begins the inevitable process of ratcheting up its prices to a by-then captive audience of consumers. Commenters on the article don’t seem all that worried.

Similarly over-the-top accounts can be read in The Atlantic’s The Justice Department Just Made Jeff Bezos Dictator For Life and Forbes’ Amazon’s Greed May Prove Its Undoing In E-Book Price War.

Salon offers a completely different view of Amazon in its story about Amazon’s little-known largesse in offering grant money to small publishers and literacy programs, totalling up to approximately $1 million annually.

For another informed counterpoint, see this post by author JA Konrath, who takes big publishers to task for failing to offer reasoned counterarguments to his and others’ rebuttals of their various Amazon-will-be-the-death-of-us-all scenarios.

So is Amazon the Big Bad Wolf, or an aggressive, though misunderstood, corporate good citizen, just looking out for the best interests of its customers and literacy at large? Read up, and judge for yourself.

 

Five Reasons Great Horror Stories Work

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This post, by Joe McKinney, originally appeared on the Moonbooks site on 4/11/12.

There is a fine art to scaring people, and like all art, it is the product of raw talent honed by craft and technique. No one can teach raw talent, of course. You either have it or you don’t. But craft and technique can be taught, and in the following few sections I’m going to walk you through five basic characteristics that all great horror stories share. Learn to incorporate these into your stories, and you’ll find your stories make more sense and, hopefully, sell better.

Creating Insularity

First, let’s talk about your story’s setting.

The key to good, memorable horror is much the same as it is in the business world – location, location, location. Many beginning writers come up with potentially great settings, be it an abandoned town, or a graveyard, or a mill, or a big scary house, and then fail to carry through on its potential. As a result, their great setting never rises above the tired old mainstays of B grade horror.

Think about all the great works of horror you’ve ever read. My guess is that, in every single one, you can point to the setting and say, “That right there sealed the deal for me. When the mother and child were trapped in that Pinto in Cujo, I was scared. When the priests entered Regan’s room in The Exorcist, I felt her bedroom door close behind me. When Pennywise the Clown spoke to the children of Derry, Maine through the drains in their bathrooms, I wanted to escape.”

But why does Stephen King’s story about a creepy old hotel in the middle of nowhere get the scares, and Joe Schmoe’s story set in a similar creepy old hotel fail to deliver? Well, think of some of the words I used in the previous paragraph. “Trapped.” “The door close behind me…” “Escape.” In every sense, the effect created is one of insularity. Through the characters in the story, we get a sense that we are closed off from the rest of the world, that we are no longer free or able to run away, that we are shut in with something very bad.

This explains why old graveyards, or cabins deep in the woods, or small towns, are such common destinations for the horror story. But it doesn’t explain why they work. The challenge, you see, is to show, through your characters, the setting going through a change. The way your characters perceive the setting is key. Think about the movie Jaws for a second. Remember when Brodie, Quint and Hooper are headed out to sea, and they get drunk and trade sea stories? They’re laughing and having a great time. Some might say they’re simply whispering in the dark, but the result is effective nonetheless. The sea seems a peaceful, welcoming place. But the next day, as they engage the shark, and it starts to wreck their boat, they begin to feel small and helpless, fighting for their lives in a hostile, brutal environment. The sea has not changed, obviously. It’s the same sea that seemed so comforting for them the night before. What’s changed is their perception of the sea. The characters in all great horror stories show this changing reaction to the settings in which they find themselves.

To achieve this in your own writing, you need to make readers feel that what was once familiar and comforting has suddenly become oppressive and menacing. In other words, you need to change your characters’ attitude toward the setting, and you do this by showing the setting before and after the horror takes the stage. If you’re sending your protagonist into a small town, you might start off by making that small town feel comforting, friendly, perhaps even nostalgic. Once you’ve established this, you’re free to turn the thumbscrews.

There’s no set rule on how long you have to take to create this feeling of comfort, of normalcy, but you do need to create it. Horror is, after all, the intrusion of the extraordinary into the ordinary, and if you’re going to make that work you have to first create normalcy. A comfortable, familiar setting that suddenly becomes hostile and claustrophobic is the best way to do this.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes four more keys to success in horror, on the Moonbooks site.

Apple / Agency 5 Antitrust Suit: Settlement News From the Trenches

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It was announced today that the U.S. Justice Department is filing its long-anticipated antitrust lawsuit against Apple, Inc. and the "Agency 5" publishers who are charged with colluding with Apple to fix prices on ebooks. Three of the five publishers immediately moved to settle out of court, though Penguin, Macmillan and Apple itself are digging in their heels and maintaining they are innocent of the charges.

Bloomberg News is reporting that when the U.S. Justice Department officially moved to file suit against Apple and the “Agency 5″, all but Apple and one of the publishers named in the suit negotiated a settlement. From Bloomberg:

The U.S. sued Apple Inc. (AAPL), Hachette SA, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster in New York district court, claiming the publishers colluded to fix eBook prices.

CBS Corp. (CBS)’s Simon & Schuster, Lagardère SCA’s Hachette Book Group and News Corp. (NWSA)’s HarperCollins settled their suits today, two people familiar with the cases said…

Apple and Macmillan, which have refused to engage in settlement talks with the Justice Department, deny they colluded to raise prices for digital books, according to people familiar with the matter. They will argue that pricing agreements between Apple and publishers enhanced competition in the e-book industry, which was dominated by Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN)…

You can read the full Bloomberg report here. A report on Fox Business offers some settlement details:

If the settlement reached with the other three publishers is approved, retailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble could once again set the price of books sold via their outlets. The settlement also requires the publishers to terminate their anticompetitive most-favored-nation agreements with Apple and other e-books retailers, Holder said.

“In addition, the companies will be prohibited for two years from placing constraints on retailers’ ability to offer discounts to consumers.  They will also be prohibited from conspiring or sharing competitively sensitive information with their competitors for five years,” the statement reads.

 
Over on Slate, no less than three news and opinion pieces have been posted in the wake of today’s news. In If Apple and Publishers Plotted, They Didn’t Need to, Reynolds Holding argues:
 

If Apple and a clutch of publishers plotted together, they didn’t need to. U.S. trustbusters say the iPad maker and five electronic book producers conspired to raise download prices. But the model they came up with makes sense even without collusion, giving the publishers perhaps their best chance of survival. 

The book business has changed radically in recent years. The old model of selling wholesale and letting retailers set prices worked fine in the world of printed books and bricks-and-mortar stores. But the arrival of digital tomes allowed Amazon, for one, to slice prices to $9.99 per e-book, providing relatively cheap content that helped make its Kindle e-reader gadgets popular. Prices like that ate into publishers’ profit margins.

But Holding is mistaken. Amazon’s pre-Agency deal with publishers had Amazon paying publishers’ their usual wholesale cut, which was based on publishers’ suggested retail prices. When Amazon slashed prices on mainstream bestselling Kindle books to $9.99 or less, it meant no less profit for publishers, but that Amazon had to take a loss on almost every one of those sales. Amazon is no stranger to the loss-leader strategy of obtaining market dominance however, so it was prepared to take the hit—for years, if need be.
 
This is partly why consumers and consumer watchdogs have been crying, "Foul!" over the claims of publishers and their supporters that Amazon’s pre-Agency ability to set its own pricing was in some way harming the publishers.
 
 
 

Taking Initiative

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This post, by Zoe Winters, originally appeared on her blog on 4/7/12.

I’ve gotten lax in a lot of ways. I used to be all over the internet. Of course a lot of that was arguing which was of only questionable benefit. Annoying potential readers to death seems like a less than awesome business plan. I’m just saying.

Now it seems like I’ve gone too far in the opposite direction. There was a time when I would be the squeaky wheel because I HAD to be or nobody would know I existed or read my books. It’s really easy for somebody to say: “God, that person self-promotes all the time, it’s so annoying”, but if we don’t have “somebody else” doing it for us, or some big advertising budget or front table space at Barnes and Noble, how are readers going to find out about our books?

Is an angel going to descend to tell them about it? Will somebody famous stumble upon the book and then tweet it to their five million followers? We all hope for magic and luck like that but the reality is that writers who want to be read, tell people about their work. I do hope some big lucky break happens for me at some point (like major high sales rankings where suddenly everybody is buying my book for themselves, their friends, and their neighbor’s abnormally smart dog), but… while I’m waiting for some magic to happen I’m going to publish a bunch of books… and talk about those books, and try to figure out the best way to engage without being off-putting.

One of the difficult things with mediums like Twitter and Facebook is… people are on at all different times, so if I tweet something 5 times in one day, someone who is on Twitter all the time and doesn’t follow a ton of people might be “annoyed” because they saw the tweet five times. But what about all the followers who only see it ONE time because they aren’t on Twitter all the time, they follow a bunch of people, and they don’t read every single tweet that happened while they were away?

So it’s a balancing act. When I say something 5 times, it’s not to tell the same person five times. I figure if you want whatever I’m offering you will go get it. And if you don’t, you won’t. I’m just trying to reach different people who are on at different times. My hypno-direct-to-mind beam is only in the prototype phase so… these other methods of communicating with you will just have to do. :P

 

Read the rest of the post on Zoe Winters’ blog.

The Last Victim – A New Novel About the Consequences of Obsession, Lies, and Deception

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Novel

Plot summary: From the first moment Sophie Rothman lies to her husband about the child she is carrying, the lives of everyone in her family are changed forever.

Driven by a twisted obsession to accumulate money for its own sake, Sophie forces her family to live beneath their means and drives her husband, Harry, away. During his absence, Sophie’s loneliness leads her into an illicit affair and an unwanted pregnancy. When her lover leaves, Sophie begs Harry to return and then deceives him into believing the child she’s carrying is his. If Sophie keeps her secret, no one will be hurt. Or will they? It’s a question Sophie will have to answer one day.

Jeanie, the product of Sophie’s affair, grows into a beautiful, strong-willed woman who defies her mother at every turn and becomes an archaeologist. Destiny takes Jeanie to Masada—one of the greatest archaeological digs of all time—where she falls in love with David. When Jeanie announces her plans to marry, Sophie is forced to reveal her long-guarded secret and forbid the marriage.

The events set in motion by Sophie’s revelation catapult Jeanie to a near breakdown and tear the Rothman family apart. On Jeanie’s final journey, she draws on all her courage to confront her mother and break the bonds that bind and sometimes destroy.

The Last Victim is a riveting saga about the consequences of obsession, lies and deception. It is a story spanning three decades—from the streets of Brooklyn, New York in the 1940s to the streets of Jerusalem and the harsh desert sands of Masada in the 1960s. Here is a multi-layered portrait of Jewish-American life during a turbulent time in America, and the deep connection to Israel’s fight to survive in the Middle East. Against this rich historical background, powerful characters clash in conflict after conflict as they struggle to fulfill their dreams.

Get the paperback novel, “The Last Victim,” for only $14.95
Get the E-Book novel, “The Last Victim,” for only $9.95

* The E-Book is available in 3 file formats – (PDF, EPUB, MOBI) and readable on all devices. You get all 3 files for $9.95.

* The E-book is also available for purchase on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Goodreads.

*Visit www.elainebossik.com for more information.

Author

ELAINE BOSSIK had three careers: as magazine editor, medical writer and teacher in the New York City school system. She received BA and MS degrees from Brooklyn College (City University of New York), and now serves as a staff columnist for Scriptologist.com, writing how-to articles for aspiring screenwriters under the name of Elaine Radford. 

While her professional experience helped shape her writing, her fascination with people—their motivations and the everyday dramas they create—is the inspiration for her fiction. She believes that really great stories begin and end with provocative characters.

Growing up in Brooklyn, NY and as a young adult traveling in Israel, she found the rich details for the events that take place in this novel.

Do Indie Authors Deserve More Respect?

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This post, by Suze Reese, originally appeared on her site on 2/16/12.

NOTE: Let me add to this post that I am a BIG FAN of indie writers and indie fiction. This post is totally pro-both! My hope is add to the discussion of how to help indies who are serious about their work compete in the market place and not be unfairly branded as junk.

Earlier this week, while preparing for Tuesday’s I HEART YA Blog Carnival, I was dismayed to see that my list of exciting, upcoming 2012 YA releases did not include many indie authors. There have been predictions that 2012 would be the year of the indie author. And maybe it will be. Or maybe Amanda Hocking and and John Locke are anomalies whose success won’t be repeated.

Are readers becoming more discriminating with their dollars? Do they expect a fully-edited manuscript even if they only pay a buck? One can hope so. There are some authors out there who tout the lack of a need for editing indie books. I’ve even heard it said that editing means nothing more than removing an author’s voice. I won’t make that an exact quote, but I will say I think that it is pure rubbish.

Let me make this perfectly clear: I believe every manuscript deserves to be edited, and no author can edit their own manuscript. The author already knows what happens next, or what the main character is thinking. There is just no way they can see the flaws of their own story. And you can quote me on that.

IndieAuthors.com recently gave four reasons for Indie Authors not getting respect. I suggest reading the full article, but I’ll make a quick summary:

 

Read the rest of the post on Suze Reese’s site.

KDP Select's Effect on a Reader Who Writes

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This post, by Dan H. Kind, originally appeared on his Read Write Myth Dharma blog on 3/2/12.

 Yeah, sure, I’m a writer. But before that I was a reader, which I still am to this day. It’s my hobby. It’s my escape. It’s my Water of Life. And I wanted to tell you what KDP Select has done for me as a lifelong lover of stories told through the written word.

Two months ago my Kindle Touch was nice and light, filled with stuff I’d bought with hard-earned cash and really, really wanted to read, even if I paid a mere dollar for it. These days it’s a bloated, word-filled beast I drag around the house with me like an old wooden leg.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve read and enjoyed some of the free offerings I’ve picked up recently, and gone and purchased other stuff by that author (Ann Charles, notably, on the list below, who I probably wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, cozy mysteries not usually being my thing, but the book was fun and well-written). Those with one book . . . give me more! And I’ll buy it next time (which is what people did a distant few months ago to get books). I will gladly pay for a book from an author I know will entertain me for a few hours. I don’t think this recent glut of free has changed that attitude in many readers.

Below are the books I’ve downloaded onto my Kindle since January 1st. The books in boldface I purchased; the books with links I’ve read. I only download stuff that I’m pretty damn sure I’ll like, even if it’s free.

If my count is correct, [my chart contains] 105 total downloads since January 1st.

22 paid, 83 free.

Of the 22 paid, I’ve so far read 7, just started on the 8th.

Of the 83 free, I’ve read 10—and 5 of those are short stories by the same author, Christian Cantrell, which I very much enjoyed and whose new offerings I will be purchasing from now on.

And the percentage winner is . . . the paid stuff, hands-down.

It used to be at least fairly easy to pick out what I’d be reading next. Now, I’m drowning in a sea of free. And I’m a bibliophile. I usually devour a novel in a day or three. Or four. Or seven. It all depends. But it might take me years to get to some of this stuff, especially since there are many authors, both established and indie, who if they come out with a new book I’ve gotta dash out as soon as payday hits and buy it and read it and funk everything else that’s been sitting on the bookshelf, physical or digital, for however long.

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes the chart listing all of Kind’s downloaded ebooks, free and purchased, since January 1st, on Read Write Myth Dharma.

The Hunger Games, Hype and Adults Reading YA

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Like so many people, I’ve just read The Hunger Games. I read it because I wanted to know what all the hype was about. The books on their own were a big success, then big budget movie moguls took them on and the production company engaged in a massive online hype campaign. Also, a friend suggested I read them, as he thought they were pretty good. So I did. Meh.

[Publetariat Editor’s note: strong language after the jump]

I probably won’t go to see the movie, but, in case I did, I wanted to read the book first. The book is always better than the film, after all. And so many people have waxed lyrical about The Hunger Games, I thought it must be worth a try. In all honesty, I was underwhelmed at first. The book drags interminably with an unnecessary amount of worldbuilding and backstory. It’s called The Hunger Games, for fuck’s sake – the games really should start before I’m halfway through the book. They do, just, at around the 40% mark or so, but that’s way too late. I was moaning online about it and one person said, and I paraphrase, “Yeah, I read that book. I’m sure there’s a pretty good novella in there somewhere.”

That was a fairly accurate comment. However, when the games got underway, and kids were running around trying to survive and kill each other, my interest was hooked. In case you’re wondering what the hell I’m on about, The Hunger Games is the story of a post-apocalyptic kind of future where the masses are entertained every year with one boy and one girl from each of twelve districts dumped into a wilderness arena where they have to hunt and kill each other for televisual shits and giggles. There can be only one and so on. Also, if you haven’t heard about The Hunger Games, how’s that rock you’re living under?

So, as I said, the games themselves were good. It was interesting stuff, exciting in its own way and I finally found myself enjoying the story. I could understand what some of the fuss was about. It wasn’t brilliant, certainly not worth the level of hype, but it was pretty good. That first 40% of the book, however, should really have been, at most, 10%. The whole thing would have been much better. And as a book for young adults, it doesn’t need to be a huge tome.

So I could kind of understand where the affection for the books came from. Whether I’ll bother with parts two and three remains to be seen. While I ended up enjoying the last half of the book on a very superficial level, it didn’t take away from the many, many flaws. The vast majority of the worldbuilding and the concepts on which the entire story is built are very contrived. There’s a lot of forced convenience in the telling. But this is okay when you’re just having a casual read. It’s not claiming to be anything else.

The dicussion on Facebook also raised another point, when someone said, essentially, “You’re reading a book for children, so you should be bored”.

I was astounded at that. There’s a vast chasm between writing/storytelling that is simpler and less sophisticated than adult fiction and writing/storytelling that is boring. Kids get bored too. To suggest a book for teens should bore an adult is asinine. It would bore a child too. A story aimed at a teen/YA audience certainly won’t have the depth and complexity of an adult novel, but should still be an engaging and entertaining story. When you read something like Harry Potter or His Dark Materials, there’s nothing boring about those. Except the last Harry Potter book, which should have been called Harry Potter And The Interminable Emo Camping*. Seriously, that book should have been half the size and it would have been great. But that’s a whole other rant.

The Harry Potter stories and the Dark Materials books are not boring, even though they’re aimed at a YA audience. They’re interesting and well-paced throughout, and they deal with subjects which challenge the thinking of their YA audience, just like YA fiction should. We should never write down to young people – they’re smarter than you might think. The Hunger Games deals with themes which should challenge YA readers too – kids as young as 12 running around killing other kids as young as 12 for sport, for instance. The whole premise of the book seems well outside a YA purview. Perhaps that very fact alone is what’s made The Hunger Games so popular. And that story, contrived and flawed though it may be, isn’t boring. The first 40% of the book is boring, however, and it shouldn’t be. To suggest we ought to find it boring as adults reading YA is ridiculous.

It should simply have been a shorter book, with all that worldbuilding and backstory tightened right up so that we got into the excitement of the Games themselves sooner. At least, that’s my opinion. And you all know how much I like to share an opinion.

SPOILER AHEAD!

One more thing before I go – I have one MAJOR issue with this story. I’ve saved this for the end, because it’s a real spoiler if you haven’t read the book. So, if you want to read it, maybe you should skip this last bit. I mean, the whole story is utterly predictable from the outset. That’s the lack of sophistication I was talking about earlier, which doesn’t have to be boring in a well-written story. But…

We know damn well that Katniss is going to survive. We know almost certainly that Peeta will survive too, somehow, or die doing something to ensure Katniss survives. From the very opening scenes, we know how this thing is going to play out, but we’re happy to go along for the ride.

There are several problems with it, which I really can’t be bothered to go into now any more than I have already and, in truth, it doesn’t matter. I still enjoyed the book and I’m glad it’s popular and getting young people reading. Top work.

But, right towards the end, there’s a surprise twist thrown in that’s just fucking mental. What the holy god-dancing shit is that thing with the dead tributes all coming back as werewolves? Or something. Seriously, what the shit, Suzanne Collins? All these kids had been killed in various ways. Many of them we don’t know how they died, but they did. Then they’re suddenly all werewolves come out to screw around with the final battle between our heroes and the one surviving tribute. It’s utterly bizarre. Why are they werewolves? How are they werewolves? What the fuck is the point in suddenly throwing that in at the end?

Sure, if you wanted some extra excitement, throw in some random attacker to mess with the balance of things. Even a pack of genetically modified wolves or something. But why the dead kids from before? Dead, remember? No longer freaking living.

And, just as a matter of detail, if Katniss, Peeta and Cato hadn’t managed to get onto the Cornucopia and have their last little scrap up there, that pack of wolfchildren would have torn all three of them to pieces and there would have been no victor, so letting those werekids out at all makes no sense.

Anyway, I’ll stop ranting now.

* I can’t take credit for that title. I can’t remember where I heard it, but it’s perfect.

 

 

This is a reprint from Alan Baxter‘s The Word.

I Was Wrong: Sometimes A Sex Scene Really IS Needed

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This post, by Andrew E. Kaufman, originally appeared on The Crime Fiction Collective blog on 4/3/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with that site’s permission.

I recently reached the halfway point in my next novel. I sat back, smiled, and drew in a giant breath of relief…

Then I almost fell out of my chair. Swear to God, if you were there, you would have seen the whites of my eyes. Yes, folks, there was horror: plain, raw, and oh, so very real.

Horror because I came to a shocking realization, that I had to do something I vowed I would never do in one of my books. Not only had I made that vow, but I’d made it with fists pounding, lips pursed in utter defiance, right here on this blog, indelibly written for all of cyberspace to see.

I said would never put a sex scene in one of my novels.

And I quote. On November 8, 2011, I said this:

Sure, a romp in the hay would be good fun and all, but there’s a time and place for everything, and if some killer’s got a bullet with their name on it, they’re not going to be thinking about getting it on; they’re going to be thinking about getting the hell out. Period.

And this:

Besides that, in suspense, pacing is everything, and it seems to me this would only slow things down, and if it doesn’t serve a purpose, isn’t it just gratuitous?

And, of course, there was this:

And then there’s the predictability factor. It’s just too easy.

Ouch.

Little did I know those words would come back to bite me on the ass with the sort of vengeance only an author could dream up, and that I’d be forced to eat every one of them with a fork and spoon.

So here I go. I’m just going to come right out and say it now.

I was wrong.

There, I said it.

It’s not like I want to have sex (in my book). The fact is, during my relatively short career as an author, I’ve managed to avoid it at all costs (Well…there was that one part in my first novel where the two protagonists almost did, but I gently avoided that trap by ending the story just in time).

However, this time around, there will be no avoidance. My. Characters. Must. Have. Sex. Not only must they have sex, but they must have mad, passionate, crazy-assed sex. Why? Because the plot dictates it, and if they don’t, I’ll lose my credibility as an author (and trust me when I say, if there were a way out of it, I’d so be there).

I’m not going to give away the story, but let’s just say there’s this certain femme fatal. She’s bad news. Real bad. And during the heat of passion, she reveals a deep dark secret about herself. Of course, my protagonist being a typical dude, is too busy enjoying the pleasures of the flesh to pay any attention to it, and it’s only years later that it comes back to haunt him.

 See what I mean?

The fact is I’d do anything to not have to write this scene (have I mentioned that?). I don’t even like to read them. But life does have strange and interesting ways of teaching us things, and this, without a doubt, has to be one of the strangest. And humbling. So when the truth reveals itself, you can do one of two things: you either swallow your pride and try to learn something, or you go the way of fools. Guess which way I’m headed.

So what has Drew learned?

   1. I will never say never again (because one day I just might have to).

   2. Yes, there is a place for sex in suspense thrillers (he said, rolling his eyes).

   3. It’s important to admit when you’re wrong: I was wrong (he muttered, grudgingly).

Now I need to figure out how to write the damned thing.

A Feast Of Data To Interpret In New Pew Survey Of Book Readers About Ebooks

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This post, by Mike Shatzkin, originally appeared on his The Shatzkin Files blog on 4/5/12.

There are a few gems to interpret in the just-released Pew survey of ebook reading.

1. We are getting very close to half (they report 43%) of Americans 16 and older saying they have read a book or other long-form content in digital format in the past year. As other data in the survey suggest, this number is still rising rapidly.

This number is an index of how much of the reading public can be reached without print. Since elsewhere in the data it is reported that only 78% of the people 16 and over have read a book in any format in the past 12 months, it appears that more than half the book readers can be reached without print already.

2. Pew tracked some startling growth around Christmas. Just before the holiday, 17% of Americans 18 and over (sometimes they seem to measure “adult” from age 16, sometimes from age 18) had read an ebook in the previous 12 months. But right after the holiday, that number had jumped to 21%. Remembering that 22% of the population hadn’t read a book at all in the past 12 months, that means that about 27% of book readers report having read an ebook recently. And that number jumped nearly 25% in a month!

3. One of the most startling data points reported is that both tablet ownership and ereader ownership had just about doubled over Christmas, from 10% in mid-December to 19% in mid-January in both cases. With overlap accounted for, Pew estimates that 28% of Americans 18 and over own one or both.

Device ownership is still climbing fast, although it is likely that the overlap, a single person owning both devices, grew faster over this Christmas than it had before. When people get a second device, a replacement or a complementary device, they probably don’t indulge in the same buying spurt as they do when they get their first device. The data summary I saw didn’t correlate the rise in ownership of each of the two devices with the rise in ownership of either of the two devices, which limits our ability to forecast how much content growth we should see following the increase in device penetration.

 

Read the rest of the post on The Shatzkin Files.

Twitter 10,000

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This post, by Joel Friedlander, originally appeared on The Book Designer on 3/26/12.

When I checked my Twitter account this morning (@JFBookman) I had 9,951 followers. Over the next day or two I expect this number to click over, like the odometer in your car, to 10,000. This comes with a variety of responses:

  • Surprise: What took so long?
  • Incredulity: You mean you really like me?
  • Malaise: Does anyone care?
  • Humility: That’s a lot of people to answer to!

Does having a lot of people listening influence me? A little bit, but I’ve been pretty focused on curating my Twitter stream, keeping it on the topics I write about. In that sense, I do think a lot about readers, and what’s most useful that I can provide.

Maybe because of that care, Twitter is my most important social media investment, the place I enjoy spending time and where I’ve put in the most work to establish a robust “outpost,” made the most new friends, created the most connections.

But here’s what’s really interesting to me. It took me two years of almost daily work to reach this milestone. Does this seem like a good thing? You could get 10,000 Twitter followers today:

twitter followers

So what’s the difference? Why spend all that time and energy if you could just spend a couple of hundred dollars and be done with it?

The Difference, Explained

What makes a community of interest? That’s the question that has guided me on Twitter over the last couple of years.

Sure, I enjoy Facebook once in a while, there’s no better way to find that cute girl who sat behind you in American History class all those years ago. That’s fun.

But for me at least, it doesn’t equate to business, and there’s no community of interest in that kind of connection.

You can also find community on Google+, a service that allows for longer text and lots of other goodies, but that isn’t where I’ve spent my time.

Twitter seems to attract certain types. As a long-time word buff and writer, the 140-character limit to your posts on Twitter seemed more like a delightful challenge than a restriction. It reminded me of the strict rules certain kinds of poetry require and the fun of working your words into a form.

A Little History, Please

Although I signed up for Twitter early in 2009, I never used my account until later that year. The stimulus was starting my blog in the fall of that year.

At the time, the people who had massive followings amazed me. How did they get all those people to listen to what they had to say?

Now, celebrities of all kinds are on Twitter, and tweets appear every day on cable news shows and at presidential debates. Twitter continues to make news as the communication medium of choice for social upheavals as well as for companies who want to use social media to influence buyers’ behavior.

But for bloggers (and authors who blog), Twitter has two blockbuster attributes that make it a desirable destination:

  1. There’s no better way to connect to influencers and thought leaders in your niche, whatever it is
  2. There’s no easier way to find that community of interest that can multiply your communication efforts

How to Find 10,000 People Who Want to Follow You

Compared to the really big Twitter followings, 10,000 isn’t much. Kim Kardashian (@KimKardashian 14,214,322 followers) probably gains or loses 10,000 followers in a typical day.

In book publishing, Jane Friedman (@JaneFriedman 149,080 followers) towers over most of us. Michael Hyatt, blogger and head of Thomas Nelson, is doing well (@MichaelHyatt 115,988).

In the indie publishing niche, my pal Joanna Penn (@TheCreativePenn) makes me look rather mouselike, with her 25,721 followers.

But here’s the thing: 10,000 is a heck of a lot of people. The biggest group I’ve ever spoken live to was about 400 people, and that filled a pretty good-sized room.

So, how do you get all those followers? Here’s my simple 3-step formula:

  1. Find people who are interested in the same topics you’re passionate about
  2. Follow those people
  3. Post useful, amusing or educational content with links to resources, mostly not your own

That’s not too hard, is it? Just rinse and repeat for a couple of years.

This is slow, by the way, unless you’re willing to spend hours at it each day. Most of us have other things to do.

A lot of this regular day-to-day posting can be handled through nifty software like HootSuite, which allows you to schedule a bunch of posts at one time that will then be delivered at specific times.

What I like about this slow growth is this: I know that virtually every follower on my list is involved in writing, publishing, design or a related field. That’s what I was looking for when I began the search for that community of interest.

And it works! Twitter is the second-largest source of traffic to my blog, and I consider the people behind all those accounts part of the community here.

In the End, Gratitude

More than anything else, I’m left with a feeling of gratitude to all the people who’ve helped me along the way. People who re-tweeted my posts when I first got started, people who posted great content themselves that was ready to pass along to others.

And the people who served as models of how to engage on social media in general, and Twitter specifically. You can’t help but learn when you follow great people, the ones who care about helping other people to succeed.

And also to my assistant, Shelley Sturgeon of E-Vantage Business Services, who attends to all those things I seem to forget about.

Looking Forward

When authors ask about diving into social media, I always tell them that they’ll be most successful with the service that they enjoy the most.

Long term, you’ve got to be getting something more from a social media site than drudgery. Try them all to find the one that feels most comfortable to you.

I believe Twitter will eventually grow to “utility” status, like gas, electricity or telephone service. It’s such a neutral communication medium that it can be used in lots of different ways.

Apple seemed to be moving in the same direction since integrating Twitter functions into the operating system for its mobile devices like the iPhone and iPad.

Maybe someday soon we’ll all be connected to each other seamlessly, and everyone will have their “@” address issued at birth. But by then, the whole concept of “followers” will have faded into history.

Since that day isn’t here quite yet, I’m going to go raise a glass and toast the power of social media. I think there’s no place else you can see so clearly the wisdom of marketer and motivational guru, Zig Zigler:

“You can have everything in life that you want if you just give enough other people what they want.”

 

This is a reprint from Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer.

7 Similar but Distinct Word Pairs

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This post, by Mark Nichol, originally appeared on Daily Writing Tips.

Look-alike, sound-alike words can cause confusion. Note the distinctions between each pair of terms listed below:

1. Abjure and Adjure

Abjure, from Latin by way of French, means “to deny” or “to renounce,” or “to avoid.” Adjure, which took the same route to English, means “to confirm” or “to command,” or “to advise or urge.” In some senses, therefore, they are near antonyms. (That’s logical: Ab- means “from” and ad- means “to.”) However, they do share a root syllable, the same one that is the basis of jury, jurisprudence, just, justice, and other terms from the realm of law.

2. Chafe and Chaff

Chafe, ultimately derived from the Latin term calefacere, “to make warm or hot,” originally meant just that, but then, from the added sense of “rubbing to make warm,” it acquired the negative connotations of “make sore by rubbing” and then, by association, “irritate.” Chaff, an unrelated word, comes from Old English and refers to seed husks and, by extension, anything discarded as worthless. By association with the cloud of husks and other debris produced during threshing of grain, bursts of tiny scraps of metal ejected from aircraft to interfere with enemy radar is called chaff.

3. Discomfort and Discomfit

These similar-looking words have similar meanings, but it was not always so. Discomfort is the antonym of the word ultimately stemming from the Latin term confortare, meaning “to strengthen.” (Fort is also the root of, well, fort, as well as fortitude.) Discomfit, from the French word desconfit, meaning “defeated” (its Latin root means “to make”), was weakened by false association with discomfort to mean “frustrate” or “perplex.” Unlike the antonym for discomfort, comfit (“to make”) is not an antonym; it refers to candied fruit. Comfiture, however, is a rare synonym meaning “an act of support.”

 

Read the rest of the post, which includes four more word pairs, on Daily Writing Tips.

Prices For Ebooks On Kindle Could Tumble As Deal In Apple Book Price-Fixing Case Is Just 'Weeks Away'

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This article, by Rob Waugh, originally appeared on The Mail on 4/2/12.

  • Justice Department could halt price deal which prevented Amazon discounting
  • Deal between Apple and five publishers
  • Ebook prices risen up to 50% in last two years

Book prices on Amazon’s Kindle and other e-readers could tumble after a deal in a major price-fixing case is said to be ‘close’.

America’s Justice Department is in the closing stages of a deal with Apple and major publishers.

The deal would call a halt to a deal struck by Apple which prevented publishers selling books via Amazon and other online stores at lower prices than via Apple’s iTunes Store.

The deal has seen prices for eBooks artificially inflated so that many cost the same – or even more than – their paper counterparts.

Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, for example, has been priced higher than the paper edition on ebook stores.

The deal could mean that pricing control over eBooks shifts from publishers to retailers such as Amazon, which would then be able to discount and offer sale prices to its consumers.

The news came in a Reuters report quoting unnamed sources.

‘It would be a positive for Amazon because the company’s greatest strength is as a high-volume, low-price retailer and the wholesale model plays into that,’ said Jim Friedland, an analyst at Cowen & Co.  

It’s unclear what sort of knock-on effect this deal would have for European consumers. The European Commission is already investigating alleged price-fixing in the eBook market.

The Justice Department is seeking to unravel agreements Apple secured from five publishers about two years ago, as the Silicon Valley company was launching its iPad and was seeking to break up Amazon’s dominance in the digital book market.

The publishers are Simon & Schuster Penguin Group, Macmillan, a unit of and HarperCollins.

 

Read the rest of the article on The Mail.

Does Agency Pricing Lead to Higher Book Prices?

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This post, by Smashwords founder Mark Coker, originally appeared on the Smashwords blog on 3/28/12. In it, Coker rebuts the widely-held contention that agency pricing drives up ebook prices.

According to a March 9 story in the Wall Street Journal, The U.S. Department of Justice is considering suing Apple and five large US publishers for allegedly colluding to raise the price of ebooks.

At the heart of the issue, I suspect, is concern over the agency pricing model. Agency pricing allows the publisher (or the indie author) to set the retail price of their book.

Although Smashwords is not a party to this potential lawsuit, I felt it was important that the DoJ investigators hear the Smashwords side of the story, because any decisions they make could have significant ramifications for our 40,000 authors and publishers, and for our retailers and customers.

Yesterday I had an hour-long conference call with the DoJ. My goal was to express why I think it’s critically important that the DoJ not take any actions to weaken or dismantle agency pricing for ebooks.

Even before the DoJ investigation, I understood that detractors of the agency model believed that agency would lead to higher prices for consumers.

Ever since we adopted the agency model, however, I had faith that in a free market ecosystem where the supply of product (ebooks) exceeds the demand, that suppliers (authors and publishers) would use price as a competitive tool, and this would naturally lead to lower prices.

I preparation for the DoJ call, I decided to dig up the data to prove whether my pie-in-the-sky supply-and-demand hunch was correct or incorrect. I asked Henry on our engineering team to sift through our log files to reconstruct as much pricing data as possible regarding our books at the Apple iBookstore.

We shared hard data with the DoJ yesterday that we’ve never shared with anyone. I’ll share this data with you now.

As background, Smashwords is one of several authorized aggregators supplying ebooks to the Apple iBookstore. On day one of the iPad’s launch, we had about 2,200 books in the iBookstore, and our catalog there has grown steadily ever since.

Henry was able to assemble a complete data set going back to October 2010. We created once-a-month snapshots of the Smashwords catalog at the Apple iBookstore between October 2010 and March 2012. Our data captures the average price of our titles in the iBookstore, and the number of titles listed.

I’m sharing four data sets. The first data set, …at left, shows the number of Smashwords titles for sale in the Apple iBookstore. As you can see, the numbers have grown steadily. I’m not aware of any other agency pricing study that worked against such a large body of data.

 

Read the rest of the post on the Smashwords blog.

What Book Publishers Should Learn From Harry Potter

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This post, by Mathew Ingram, originally appeared on GigaOm on 3/27/12.

After months of anticipation, the e-book versions of author J.K. Rowling’s phenomenally successful Harry Potter series are now available through Rowling’s Pottermore online unit, and as my PaidContent colleague Laura Owen has noted in her post on the launch, Rowling has chosen to do a number of interesting things with her e-books, including releasing them without digital-rights management restrictions. Obviously, the success of the Potter series has given Rowling the ability to effectively dictate terms to just about anyone, even a powerhouse like Amazon, but there are still lessons that other book publishers should take from what she is doing.

 

One of the encouraging things about the Pottermore launch is that the books will be available on virtually every platform simultaneously, including the Sony Reader, the Nook from Barnes & Noble, the Kindle and Google’s e-book service (which is part of Google Play). And in keeping with Pottermore’s status as a standalone digital bookstore in its own right, users will be able to buy the books from the Rowling site and then send them to whichever platform they wish. As Laura points out, even Amazon has bowed to the power of the series and done what would previously have seemed unthinkable: it sends users who come to the titles on Amazon to Pottermore to finish the transaction.

As we’ve pointed out before at GigaOM, one of the problems for users when it comes to the e-book landscape is the clash between competing platforms — with Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble all trying to create their own walled gardens, where users can only access titles from publishers that have deals with the platform they happen to be using. Amazon and Apple in particular both seem to see books and other media content primarily as loss leaders that can help them lock users into their proprietary platforms, and recent skirmishes have seen Apple reject books that have links to Amazon’s store, and Barnes & Noble block Amazon titles from its store.

 

Read the rest of the post on GigaOm.