AussieCon runs this week, Thursday to Monday, with about a bajillion panels on everything from fantasy cities to cyberpunk feminism. I've gone through the program, marking the panels I want to attend (and wishing that I had a few shared-mind clones to see the ones that clash), and wondering how the whole process is going to work for people who can't take an entire morning off to register tomorrow... eek. Ah well.

In actual news, Wylie's lost his fight against Random House for the ebook rights. The rights return to Random House - a strong reminder to read your contracts carefully for which rights revert when and why.

Jessica at Dystel and Goderich muses on intellectual property vs creative commons. There's long been the argument that IP exists solely to protect a wealthy nation's ability to make money at the expense of poorer nations. While the argument's obvious with pharmaceutical companies, it also covers authors' copyright. While I'm a strong advocate of copyright, there does seem to be an issue to resolve, here.

Joe Konrath is musing on some of the possibilities that self-publishing grants in terms of creative control - releasing different versions of books, for example, or revitalising the 'choose your own adventure' style of novel into a more literary concept. I'll admit, I'm intrigued by the notion of playing with the format like that.

Henry Baum gives us a brief impression of his day on Kindle Nation - complete with supposed SNAFU by Amazon. Amazon disabled his buy-button in the middle of the promotion because Kobo had undercut the price of the book in a way that wasn't in Baum's control. Mini-Macmillian-dummy-spit all over again.

And on a completely unrelated note, because someone asked me the other day: Nathan Bransford explains to us what 'High Concept' actually is - and it's not what it sounds like.

Yet more developments in digital publishing: Michael Stackpole has a great post about protecting yourself from having publishers just sit on your e-pub rights, and clauses you should have in your contract to prevent that, and another interesting one on the concept of measuring books by 'hours of reading pleasure (for the average reader)' rather than page-count, heft, size or other measurements better left to print-media.

In a smilar vein, Steve Saus has yet more comments on DRM and the problems with creating non-portable products that arguably should be portable. I fully agree with his sentiments - I see the format locking nonsense at the moment as equivilent to only being able to play my DVDs in a Sony DVD player - if I buy an LG player, or Sony changes their format, all my DVDs will stop working. That does not, in any way, stop me from pirating them should I choose to - in fact, it encourages piracy, because I'm certainly not going to go and re-buy my DVD collection just because my old DVD player wore out and I needed to buy a new one. Open-format is better for the industry, for readers, for authors and for publishers - hopefully common sense will prevail in time.

And finally - an upclose and personal comparison of the kindle screen versus the iPad - and you'd be surprised which one comes out second place.

According to the WSJ, Dorchester, one of the largest mass-paperback publishers, will be going all-digital, apparently effective 'Monday', in response to hard times / falling paperback sales / the end of publishing as we know it. All their titles will be released digitally or using print-on-demand, shipping books to bookstores 'as demand rises'.

Kristin, over at Pub Rants, has some reservations about the move, since apparently Dorchester has been "having difficulty reporting monies owed to the author for electronic book sales", difficulties that apparently still haven't been fully resolved for said authors. Eeek.

Keeping with the digi-book theme, Steve Saus over at IdeaTrash has had a pirate week - not talking like them, but discussing how they really affect authors, and what authors (not publishers) can do to help mitigate any harm done. Essentially - DRM doesn't work and is annoying, make a personal connection with your work - people will happily pirate from a faceless corporation, but baulk at taking money from a person, and if you keep producing, the pirate-appreciate-buy cycle actually works for you, getting you more sales than you lose to piracy.

And finally, Jared Axelrod gives authors a so-simple-it's-foolproof guide for which questions you should be hammering yourself with, depending on what stage your story's at.

So, Amazon's just struck a potentially killer blow for Apple in the ebook market - revamping the Kindle to a slimmer, cheaper model. They now claim seventy to eighty percent of the e-book market (though how they're measuring that - seeing as Bookscan doesn't handle ebooks, and no one is tracing books sold from author websites, etc - I'm not sure) - see the link for an interesting discussion with Ian Freed, vice president in charge of the Kindle.

Where Apple seeks to make things that work on Apple products only (wherever possible), Amazon is seeking to conquer every system and piece of technology that could possibly display an ebook. It's a difference in business strategy - Apple is leveraging the ebook market to sell more devices; Amazon is leveraging devices to sell its content. More at the link - there's some interesting discussion on the potential of the strategies, there. As purveyors of content-based products (books), I think I'd rather side with the monster who's interested in selling my content, rather than the monster who wants to use my content to sell his product.

Then again, if the net result is that my books are sold, does it really matter who by?

On a completely different note - Tim Ferris writes about the lure of the Superstar, and how to utilise it for yourself. The article's long, but well worth the read.  For those in a hurry, though, the cliff notes:

1. People who are THE BEST in their profession receive accolades and rewards disproportionate to their level of achievement relative to the second-best. 2. This effect holds no matter how small, insignificant or unknown the niche in which you are THE BEST in. 3. Therefore, to be seen as above the pack, find a specific niche in which you can be THE BEST with a modest amount of effort. 4. Accolades, appreciation and rewards shall be yours.

So the publishing industry's wobbled again. This time, with Andrew Wylier and Odyssey Editions. Essentially, an agent publishing his client's backlist titles exclusively with Amazon, and the Big Boys are less than impressed, saying it's against the interests of everyone from the author to the man who makes the coffee down the road - a little hard to fathom, really, given the current deals offered by the Big Six for ebooks, and their habit of sitting on intellectual property that could be making money for both them and the authors, but alright. Mike Shatzkin has an excellent post on the issue over here.

At the same time, we have IndieProse, a site that's claiming to be the gatekeeper for self-publishers. Definitely a wait-and-see, in my book - the authors pay to be listed on the site, and as Henry Baum points out on SelfPublishingReview, with no costs other than bandwidth, and no financial consequences should they back a less-than-stellar title, it's difficult to see how they're resist the temptation to accept that sign-up money from all authors regardless of quality.

Lastly, colour e-ink capable of displaying movies is edging closer, with the development of electro-wetting, a concept that uses coloured oil droplets suspended next to a water layer that move within 10 milliseconds in response to current directed through said water layer. I think I've mentioned this tech before - I've certainly seen it before, but unfortunately there still doesn't seem to be a working demonstration available, for all the claims on liquavista's site.

So agents are turning publisher, new gatekeeping models rear their heads, and the technology marches on. It's going to be a fascinating few years.

I looked at one of these mythical iPads in the city yesterday. It was chained to a bench and surrounded by teenagers, and by the time I got my grubby mits on it it was plain that a thousand mits of equal or greater levels of grubbiness had been there before. The screen had been near-obliterated under a a hundred thousand fingerprints, and I had to resist the urge to wipe it down before I had a play.

I had to say, I didn't experience any of the "magic" I was promised by Lord Jobs. I put it back with a 'shrug' and a 'meh', still convinced it's just a big brother to my iPhone.

Apple has finally announced how individual authors can sell their works in iBooks without having to go through an intermediary like Smashwords. The requirements aren't too stringent (from MacLife):

Their books would have to adhere to these criteria: each one would need to have a 13-digit ISBN, be in ePub format, validate against epubcheck 1.0.5, and contain no unmanifested files. If you are not familiar with any of these Apple suggests working with their aggregation partners.

Pretty simple, really. It looks like soon, authors who're prepared to manage fifteen different accounts could easily cut out the new middlemen (Smashwords - not that I'd advocate that, they seem to offer a good product) and do it themselves across iBooks, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, etc.

There's a weird little addendum to those requirements, though:

 

Write a damning article about a successful mostly-self-published author's latest publishing deal complete with snide comments, backhand remarks and egregious factual errors. Publisher's Weekly sure are anxious about J.A. Konrath (whose rebuttal of the article corrects their howling mistakes). Or rather, anxious that his apparent success becomes less apparent. And rightly so, I guess - if everyone takes Konrath's path, the wallets of agents and traditional publishers (and bookstores)  - that is, the people who read this magazine - will be getting much, much thinner. Sky's not falling, folks, not to fret.

But still, there's biased-journalism and then there's just lazy idiocy. Most of the facts they had wrong can be found in about sixty seconds on Konrath's site. Writing that kind of slam about someone makes you look petty. Writing a slam based on nonsense? We have a word for that on the internet.

Troll.

The latest gadget in the all-in-one techno craze. Ereaders with stores, ereaders with bluetooth, wireless, 3G. Ereaders that find your keys, walk your dog and sync with your coffee machine so your cuppa is timed perfectly for the end of the chapter*. 80% of people** are under the impression that there are only two "real" ereaders on the market - the Kindle and the iPad. 20% tentatively ventured "wasn't there that one that let you share things?", which I believe referred to the Nook - interesting, as this is Australia, and the next most easily available reader would be the iLiad, being sold in Dymocks. But the general consensus was that the reader market was pretty much a two-party system. Hah.

I was thinking of doing a comparison of readers, hoping to bring to light some of the nifty options in the E-readers-that-aren't-kindles-or-iPads category, because there are some (like the iLiad and the Adam) that show a lot of promise for some of their features, like open-source goodness, but don't have the marketing machine behind them to get their names out there. However, preliminary research (read: the Wikipedia page on ereaders) showed a far better comparison than I was planning to do for a morning blog post (and a whole lot of readers I'd never heard of, either). So instead, I thought I'd talk about some of the key differences, and what they mean in 'real' terms.

*That last one's made up. But it's only a matter of time.

**Statistic taken from the five people I surveyed on the train this morning.

 

J. A. Konrath, he who makes us want to open a Kindle store and watch the moolah roll in, has a great post about ebook piracy. In short - it's going to happen, 1000 pirates does not mean 1000 lost sales, and it often even helps rather than hinders your book sales. The actual article has some great answers to the standard knee-jerk questions and demands - go read it. I'll wait.

I'm far more familiar with the piracy/DRM debate in the video game industry - at a rough guess, I'd say they're about a decade ahead of publishing, and possibly even close to emerging from the other side of the DRM-tunnel. I'm really hoping the publishing industry can learn a little from the music, movie and game industries as a whole - that, in short, DRM and lawsuits are useless. Just make a great product and focus on getting the sales you can get, not the ones you think you've lost.

There's been some hooplah lately in the blogs I read about giving your work away for free. Arguments for, against and sideways abound, and it's getting so that use emerging authors feel totally lost when it comes to advice about promotion and free stuff.

As I see it, there are two basic arguments, and a whole host of nonsense:

Giving stuff away for free can raise your profile, help build a following, get people interested in your work. It lowers the cost of entry for people to try your stories and writing, which will (assuming you've given them the good stuff) lead to more readers, and hopefully paying readers. Giving stuff away for free snarfs your first publiaction rights, so your chances of a traditional publishing deal with that material are pretty much lottery-level.

There's been a lot of carping that the idea of 'first publication rights' is antiquated, and doesn't fit with today's online era. That we authors need to show publishers the error of their ways in adhering to this outmoded idea. Excuse me while I snort into my coffee.

Vanity publishing has been around probably as long as publishing itself. In an industry where the cost of entry is so high and so lauded, it's hardly surprising that a predatory sibling grew to gobble up the unwary fish. Can't get editors into your book? Come with us, ignore them, let's just focus on making a really great book. Of course, you understand, really great books don't come cheap...

Most authors who've bothered to do more than a modicum of research have the brains to avoid those kinds of deals. But there are other versions of the vanity publisher and similar predatory practices still cropping up today.

It seems to be the general thrust behind a lot of articles and publisher's new contracts and policies. E-books are going to demolish print book sales, and leave publishers swinging in the wind, and they're anxious for us to know that producing an e-book isn't that much cheaper than a print one. A New York Times article even has a nice article comparing the relative cost of ebooks, concluding that where a publisher can expect about $4.05 from a $26 hardback, their e-book revenue is from $4.50 - $5.50 - more, but less than the general public expects.

Which is a nice bit of statistical chicanery, really. Good for an article, but utterly useless for a realworld comparison.

 

From the last two posts, we can summarise that while making a self-published career successful is a lot of work, it's actually not that much more work than making a successful traditionally-published career. You still have to do a lot of the same things, you swap once set of annoyances for another, and trade brick-and-mortar sales for more control and a bigger cut of the pie (though it may well be a smaller pie).

So far, it seems largely a question of how much work you want to do by yourself. Does the idea of designing, producing and selling your own books excite you, or fill you with dread? Does the notion of asking permission from hundreds of gatekeepers if they would deign to consider your work offend or inspire? Do you long to see your work on the shelves of B&N, or would you happily watch the numbers roll into your paypal account?

Who said it had to be either/or?

 

Following yesterday's post about what publishers really offer in the quasi-digital age, let's take a look at what you can manage without a traditional publisher behind you. There've been some excellent and inspiring posts out recently. So, what benefits can you gain from going solo?

The whole Amazon/Macmillian/Apple kerfuffle, and the less-than-savoury antics of many publishers regarding author royalties for ebooks has given me some pause for thought in my general business plan. I'd always assumed - like most writers out there, I suspect - that traditional publishing was really the only bar in town, and that self-publishing was for people whose writing / book was so bad, they couldn't get the 'real' kind, or books that you didn't really expect anyone to actually buy.

Which is really a load of prejudicial bullsmatter.  I've discovered through various blogs that a number of authors are quite happily publishing their own stories via kindle and various self-publishing avenues and making a tidy profit. Not megabucks, but certainly more than you'd expect. I recently discovered Smashwords, an online business that allows you to publish to all manner of e-book formats, and list yourself in Amazon, B&N, and other major online book stores, giving you a generous 85% of the royalty.  Hopefully when Apple gets iBooks up and running, they'll integrate there, as well.

So, if it's now not only possible, but almost easy to publish your own works, what does a traditional publisher give you for that 90% of the list price you're handing over?

There's a lot of hooplah going on at the moment about Amazon and Macmillian. The digest version is:

Amazon said "we'll match Apple's profit-cut for e-books if you agree to price books between 2.99 and 9.99, and not offer a cheaper one anywhere else." Macmillian said "9.99 is below what we sell them to anyone for, and will harm the brick-and-mortar industry, and the publishing industry in general in the long run. You can either allow us to price books from 12.99 to 14.99, or we'll just release the e-books after the hardback sales have finished, so as not to undermine the printed books." Amazon said "nuh-uh!" Macmillian said "Them's your options, pick one." Amazon said "If you won't play by our rules, we won't sell ANY of your books! So there!" Macmillian said ".... that's the stupidest thing I ever heard. What use is a bookseller that only sells 5/6ths of the books? People will just buy our books elsewhere. PS: you're not actually a monopoly." Amazon said ".... um... oh yeah. Okay, you can sell at 14.99, because you're a big mean bully who's hurting the publishing industry with unsustainable expensive prices."

The big questions here are - what should be the price of an e-book, and how will the publishing industry have to change to manage that?

So I'm starting a blog. And - ironic, as a writer - I'm stuck with the first entry. It's like walking into a party where you know about three people, and they've all gone out to get more booze. Do you introduce yourself first? Do you just start talking to people like they already know you, and hope no one will interrupt to ask "but wait, who are you, and why are you talking to me?" Do you lead with a joke, and hope you don't hear crickets after the punchline? Or maybe just buy everyone a round, and hope they're drunk enough it lands you some unshakeable friendships for at least the next half-hour while you learn enough names to make it sound like you belong?