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Welcome
to the Vol. 8, No. 6 June 2010Index (scroll down for stories)
1. Making sense of Bowker’s count of new U.S. book titles in 2009 1. Making sense of Bowker’s count of new U.S. book titles in 2009 The mid-April announcement by Bowker that it counted more than one million new book titles published in the U.S. during 2009 caused considerable comment and consternation in publishing circles. Let’s try to put the number in perspective.
First off, titles produced by offset printing (usually involving fairly large
press runs) were essentially flat, at an estimated 288,355 in 2009 vs. 289,729
in 2008. The production of print-on-demand books first surpassed traditional book publishing in 2008.
The 764,448 new titles issued in 2009 are nearly three times the 271,851
"nontraditional" titles found by Bowker issued in 2008. But that’s because
Bowker made a big change in the way it counts these titles. What changed in 2009 was Bowker's inclusion of POD “book factories” in the count. Book factories - three of which account for 687,500 new titles in 2009 - are bringing titles back into on-demand printing by the hundreds of thousands. The three accounting for most of the 687,500 new titles are BiblioBazaar, Books LLC and Kessinger.
Most of the titles these three firms make available on a print on demand basis
are out-of-copyright classics and orphan works, although the three are known to
produce vanity press titles through separate operations. Bowker exec Kelly
Gallagher roughly estimated that 70 to 80 percent of the nontraditional titles
by these firms are on-demand public domain books, and another 15 percent are
microniche titles, aimed at the tiniest of audiences.
Many self-published books don't make Bowker's count at all. Blurb tends not to
use ISBNs, and most Lulu.com authors go without ISBNs as well. Blurb says they
shipped 1.2 million books in 2009 - which could account for anywhere from 10,000
to 100,000 unique titles. In the past, Lulu alone has claimed 2,000 new books a
week (104,000 per year). 2. How BiblioBazaar produced 272,930 titles in 2009 Bowker's 2009 book industry statistics released in April made the seemingly preposterous claim that BiblioBazaar, a publisher of whom few people had ever heard, had published 272,930 titles in 2009. Is it possible that a small, unknown company could produce that many titles?
Yes, it turns out. Davis, along with BiblioLife CEO Bob Holt and CFO Andrew Roskill, were founders of BookSurge, the vanity press bought by Amazon in 2005. After that deal, Davis spent two years at Amazon in Seattle, working as a condition of the acquisition to help with the integration of BookSurge into the Amazon division now known as CreateSpace. (Source: Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly, April 15, 2010)
3. Sarah Silverman’s confession: She was a bed wetter into teens The candid autobiography of potty-mouthed comedian Sarah Silverman is winning praise from critics. Wetting the bed is not a topic about which many people feel comfortable talking in public. Indeed, even in private it is a source of embarrassment and shame, a dirty secret hidden in the dark and washed away with the sheets each morning. But not for Sarah Silverman. Perhaps the most taboo-breaking comedian working in America today, Silverman, 39, has not only confessed that she was a teenage bed wetter, but she has even made it the title of her new autobiography: "The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee." Silverman, one of the most successful comedians of her generation, has blasted even the publishing industry which is making her book a best-seller. The book contains a savage indictment of the publishing world and the celebrities who feed it.
"I'm not writing this book to share wisdom or inspire people," Silverman writes.
"I'm writing this book because I am a fa Silverman outrages much of Middle America for exactly the same reasons. Now, she's has done perhaps the most unexpected and outrageous thing yet: she has written a heart-warming and revealing book that has critics swooning. Silverman's humor is not for everyone. Take the "Chink" gag she used on the Conan O'Brien show, which had the emcee and network apologizing in every direction. The joke was that Silverman's character wanted to get out of jury service. A friend suggested she writes something offensive on the selection form, like "I hate Chinks.” The punchline is that Silverman does not want to be seen as racist. "So I wrote, 'I love Chinks' - and who doesn't?" Silverman's book explores the fallout from her appearance on the O'Brien show. The Bedwetter is at times painfully honest about the troubles she had growing up, which later came to form the basis of much of her humor. Silverman was a bed wetter until her high-school years. She also plunged into clinical depression, joining the long ranks of comedians, such as Peter Sellers and Tony Hancock, whose private demons spurred their comedy. The onset of her depression is something Silverman writes beautifully about. "It happened as fast as a cloud covering the sun. It was at once devastatingly real and terrifyingly intangible. I felt helpless, but not in the familiar bedwetting sense. As quickly and casually as someone catches the flu, I caught depression, and it would last for the next three years," she writes. It is the bed wetting - and overcoming it - that provides the most fascinating link between Silverman's private life and her public comedy. She was brought up in a loud and loving Jewish family in New Hampshire. It could have been idyllic, but being a bed wetter was clearly excruciating. She recounts an incident where she prepared to go on a school camp and her mother prepared a sleeping bag stuffed full of Pampers. While The Bedwetter paints a poignant portrait of a troubled woman finding a comic voice to overcome her problems, it also contains much of Silverman's trademark comic style that is still guaranteed to offend: it has an afterword, allegedly written by God, where he boasts of being proud of creating HIV and cancer. 4. Breaking news from the book barons
Jeff Bezos, Amazon's chairman and CEO, sold two million shares of his company
May 3-5,
netting approximately $267 million. Bezos sold the same number of shares - two
million - in February for about $234 million.
The Puget Sound Business Journal, which based its report on a filing on
May 5 with the SEC, noted that "Bezos is still a big owner of Amazon, holding
90,158,027 shares of the company." Not surprisingly, Kitty Kelley’s unauthorized biography of Oprah Winfrey was not selected as an Oprah book club choice. The biggest bombshell revealed in the pre-publishing buzz for the book was that the Queen of All Media had briefly lived with John Tesh. The book alleges that Oprah had been, at one time or another, a prostitute, a crack addict, a glutton, self-hating, an asexual freak who lightened her skin because she dreamed of being white and an ice queen who froze out friends and colleagues as easily as she gives away Blackberries and cashmere scarves. The book features 44 pages of footnotes indicating the extent of the research conducted to write it. Kelley and her staff reviewed every interview Oprah ever gave. There’s also a lot of comment from ex-friends, former associates and a few bitter family members, including her father. As would be expected, persons close to Oprah declined to be interviewed by Kelley for the book. Oprah’s oppressive confidentiality agreement given to anyone who works for her or comes on the show, says Kelley, started after Oprah’s sister sold her out to the tabloids. The book’s central theme is of a girl raised poor - but not as poor as she likes to let on - in the South, who pulled herself up by her bootstraps, armed with determination. The book covers the supposed lesbian affair with her best friend Gayle King and the never-realized wedding to longtime beau Stedman Graham; the early trash talk shows that gave way to her current St. Oprah of the Cars persona; the childhood sexual abuse that resulted in the birth of a baby who died shortly after delivery. Also included are highly unsubstantiated tidbits, like her affair with Tesh that he allegedly ended because he couldn’t tolerate an interracial relationship, and her supposed crush on Diane Sawyer. 6. NYT breaks embargo to review Laura Bush’s ‘Spoken from the Heart’
Once again, the New York Times broke a publisher embargo by obtaining a
pre-release copy of Laura Bush's memoir Spoken from the Heart. The book
was scheduled for May 4 publication.
Like the NYT, the AP "obtained" a copy too, and filed a shorter review. Among
their points, Bush "dispels rumors that she ever considered leaving her husband
over his drinking, saying she never told him it was 'Jim Beam or me.'" 7. George W. Bush memoir 'Decision Points' due out Nov. 9 Crown Publishers, a division of Random House Inc., has set Nov. 9 as the release date for former President George W. Bush's book Decision Points The cover design has already been released. Bush has said he is not writing a traditional memoir but an account of key decisions in his life. Crown says Decision Points will offer "gripping, never-before-heard detail" on such historic events as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the 2000 presidential election along with Bush's decision to quit drinking, his relationship with his family and other personal details. "Since leaving the Oval Office, President Bush has given virtually no interviews or public speeches about his presidency," Crown said in a news release. "Instead, he has spent almost every day writing Decision Points, a strikingly personal and candid account revealing how and why he made the defining decisions in his consequential presidency and personal life." A publishing industry source familiar with the book said that Bush had completed a first draft and was editing the manuscript on a computer at his office in Dallas. A former White House speech writer, Chris Michel, is helping with research. The book will have a list price of $35. One thousand signed, clothbound copies will be available for $350 each. The former president will promote Decision Points with a national tour. 8. Boutique publisher rushes to print copies of Pulitzer winner 'Tinkers' When the 2010 Pulitzer Prizes were awarded in April, the fiction winner was Tinkers by Paul Harding (Bellevue Literary Press, $14.95).
It’s the first time a book published by a small independent press has won the
Pulitzer for fiction since 1981's A Confederacy of Dunces.
No one notified Harding that he had won the prize. He was alone when he checked the Pulitzer Web site, curious to find out who had won. "I came as close to actually fainting as I think I ever have, because I literally just could not believe what I saw when it came up on the website," he said. "And I kept refreshing and it just kept coming up Tinkers, Tinkers, Tinkers." Unfortunately for Harding, his small publisher had only 15,000 copies on hand when the announcement was made, according to Publishers Weekly, so it had to scramble to complete another press run. Fortunately for Harding, publishing giant Random House, a division of Bertelsmann, quickly contracted Harding for two more novels, the first (Enon) to be set in the same New England town as Tinkers. In Tinkers, a grandfather remembers the details of his life and loved ones as he fades on his deathbed. It is rare for a Pulitzer to be awarded to a book published by a small independent press. In the case of Tinkers, the book has been gathering steam through word-of-mouth recommendations, or “buzz.” However, the merits of the book were noted early by two important reviewers. Harding's short novel is the story of a dying man, George Washington Crosby, and his relationship with his father, who suffered from epilepsy and eventually abandoned his family because of the affliction. After Harding finished writing the book, he sent it out to agents and publishers, but there were no takers. "I just put in a drawer for three years I guess, and just thought this'll be one I have in the file cabinets and I'll just start working on the next thing," Harding said. "And then it was published more or less through a series of ... wonderful, improbable accidents with the Bellevue Literary Press getting ahold of it and wanting to do it." Bellevue Literary Press is located within the department of medicine at the New York University School of Medicine, which is at Bellevue Hospital. In its starred review, Booklist wrote of the 2009 debut novel: "Writing with breathtaking lyricism and tenderness, Harding has created a rare and beautiful novel of spiritual inheritance and acute psychological and metaphysical suspense." Publishers Weekly, which named Tinkers one of its Best Books of 2009, wrote: "George Washington Crosby repairs clocks for a living and on his deathbed revisits his turbulent childhood as the oldest son of an epileptic, small-time traveling salesman… The real star is Harding's language, which dazzles… This is an especially gorgeous example of novelistic craftsmanship." The publisher initially ordered a first printing of 3,500 copies. Then a sales rep in San Francisco fell in love with the book. She got the book buyer at the independent bookstore Book Passage interested, and that book buyer brought Harding to the store for a signing event. Soon he was visiting other bookstores and started getting invited to speak at book clubs. Eventually Tinkers had gotten enough attention in literary circles that the Pulitzer committee called Goldman and asked her to submit it for the award. But neither she nor Harding ever expected it to win. Winning the Pulitzer has breathed substantial life into the sales figures for Tinkers, which hit USA Today's bestseller list at number 64 right after the award was announced. Bellevue Literary Press has reprinted 80,000 copies of the paperback, with the phrase "Winner of the Pulitzer Prize" on the cover to augment the 15,000 copies available before the award was announced. 9. News about bookstores, publishing, marketing and promotion The Canadian government will let Amazon.com open a distribution center in Canada as part of the country's recent push for open markets and freer trade. Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore said the government approved Amazon's application in return for continued steps to promote Canadian culture, including increased exposure for Canadian authors abroad and a $20 million investment, some of which will go toward cultural awards and events… Amazon has given the Lambda Literary Foundation a $25,000 grant to support their Writers' Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices this August at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. 10. Thinking of opening a bookstore? Here’s a book you should read The Letters of Sylvia Beach, edited by Keri Walsh (Columbia University Press) relates the trials and tribulations of running a bookstore. When world events get interesting, the letter-writer complains, people buy newspapers, not books. “A bookshop is mostly tiresome details all day long and you have to have a passion for it, to grub and grub in it,” she writes. “I have always loved books and their authors, and for the sake of them swallowed the rest of it, but you can't expect everyone to do the same.”
11. Books look at the “real” Marilyn Monroe, marriage to Joe DiMaggio
In the first book written by a member of the DiMaggio clan about one of the most
touching relationships of the 20th century, June DiMaggio, niece of baseball
legend Joe DiMaggio, and a close friend of Marilyn Monroe for 11 years, tells
untold stories of the two legendary and very private stars that are insightful,
fun and engaging. June DiMaggio, niece of baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, and a close friend of Marilyn Monroe for 11 years, tells untold stories of the two legendary and very private stars that are insightful, fun and engaging. First book written by a member of the DiMaggio clan about one of the most touching relationships of the 20th century. " Marilyn Joe & Me is an uncompromising and detailed examination of the 20th century's highest profile celebrity marriage: Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio. June DiMaggio is the ultimate insider here, and she sheds great light on a subject that has haunted the public for decades." - Mitchell Fink, New York Times best-selling author of The Last Days of Dead Celebrities"Much of what June has to say is startling.... She wanted to tell it all before she died: the story of the Monroe she knew and what she knows about Monroe's last moments on earth." - Lisa DePaulo, A Special Playboy Report: The Strange, Still Mysterious Death of Marilyn Monroe A singer and writer in her own right, June befriended Marilyn as well as other stars in Hollywood in the 1950s. She portrays Monroe as intelligent, warm, funny, generous, good-hearted, well read, articulate and a loving friend.
"Marilyn,
Joe
&
Me (Penmarin,
$29.95) is an uncompromising and detailed examination of the 20th century's
highest profile celebrity marriage, that of Marilyn Monroe and Joe DiMaggio.
June DiMaggio is the ultimate insider, and she sheds considerable light on a
subject that has haunted the public for decades,"
says
Mitchell Fink, New York Times best-selling author. In another title, some of the most personal correspondence that Monroe wrote is scheduled to be published for the first time in a book to be released this fall. The publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, says it will release Fragments in October, and that it will contain rare photographs of Monroe, as well as reproductions of her typewritten and handwritten letters from the late 1950s and early ’60s. Courtney Hodell, an editor at the publishing house, said Monroe’s writing covered a wide range of subjects, including notes on the roles she was working on, exhortations to herself to become a better actress and lists of resolutions on how to do so, notes from her readings about Italian Renaissance art and how to decorate her apartment, and a recipe for stuffing. There are also diary-style entries on Monroe’s relationship with Arthur Miller, as well as letters to her psychoanalysts and to Lee Strasberg, her friend and acting instructor, written when she was in the locked psychiatric ward of the Payne Whitney Clinic in New York. The letters in the book are part of the estate that Strasberg inherited after Monroe’s death in August 1962. The letters were given by his widow, Anna Strasberg, to Stanley Buchthal, a family friend and adviser, and Bernard Comment, an editor at the publisher Éditions du Seuil in Paris. "She was a great reader and someone with real writing flair," Hodell told the Associated Press. "There are fragments of poetry that are really quite beautiful, lines that stop you in your tracks." Monroe was married three times: to James Dougherty, four years her senior when she was just 16; later, to baseball great Joe DiMaggio; and then to playwright Arthur Miller. Rumors of affairs abound - particularly one spurred by her sexy birthday song for John F. Kennedy. The book will include a handful of never-before seen Monroe photographs.
12. Why New York’s book editing ranks are dominated by women Jason Pinter argued in a recent Huffington Post article that the reason men don’t read more books is that most of the editors at the major New York houses deciding on who gets published are women, with a penchant for publishing chick lit, romances and other material that appeals to other women.
Pinter’s argument, in a nutshell: "Few men work in book publishing, so there are
few supporters in the industry for books that men in particular might like,
causing fewer such books to be published or promoted and finally leading men to
think that books are not for them." Her argument: "It's worth asking, then, why there are so few men in publishing. Could it be the low pay, low status and ridiculous hours? (Remember that book editors seldom get to read manuscripts in the office--that's what weekends are for.) Apart from a handful of celebrated figures, it's the rare editor who gets paid more than a secondary school teacher in a middle-class district. The profession has come to look a lot like a skilled, pink-collar ghetto, albeit garnished with a thin dusting of reflected glamour." 13. How bad is it – and what is the book business doing to cope? In the first quarter ended March 31, net sales at Amazon rose 46 percent, to $7.13 billion, and net income rose 68 percent, to $299 million. The Kindle continues to be the company's "#1 bestselling product" and there are now 500,000 book titles, 9,000 blogs and 175 newspapers and magazines available for the e-reader – which is facing stiff competition from Apple’s recently introduced iPad. Worldwide media sales, which includes books, ebooks, music and DVDs, grew 26 percent, to $3.43 billion. Worldwide electronics and other general merchandise, which includes the Kindle, rose 72 percent, to $3.51 billion. Amazon said it expects revenue in the second quarter to be between $6.1 billion and $6.7 billion, up 31-44 percent over last year… Sales at Simon & Schuster fell six percent in their fiscal first quarter, down $10 million to $151.7 million. Parent company CBS blames "the continued soft retail market," which was "partially offset by significantly higher digital sales...such as ebooks, audio downloads and stand-alone applications." Digital sales rose $8.4 million to $12 million for the period. That's eight percent of all sales, but the figure represents all digital products - including digital audio and applications plus ebooks. The ebook versions of all of S&S’s major new hardcover releases were held back during the quarter until the switch to the agency model at the beginning of April, which would imply that digital growth will pick up in the next quarter. 14. AAP reports estimated book sales of $23.9 billion in 2009 The Association of American Publishers (AAP) has released its annual estimate of total 2009 book sales in the United States. The report, which uses data from the Bureau of the Census as well as sales data from 86 publishers inclusive of all major book publishing media market holders, estimates that U.S. publishers had net sales of $23.9 billion in 2009, down from $24.3 billion in 2008, representing a 1.8 percent decrease. In the last seven years, the industry had a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.1 percent. Trade sales of adult and juvenile books were steady at $8.1 billion in 2009, with CAGR falling to 1.8 percent. Adult hardbound books showed healthy growth of 6.9 percent, with $2.6 billion in sales in 2009. However, paperbound books for adults fell 5.2 percent to $2.2 billion. Hardbound books in the children and young adult category fell 5.0 percent to $1.7 billion while their paperbound equivalent grew 2.2 percent to $1.5 billion. Over the period covered by the estimated data, the CAGR for hardbound books was 1.3 percent for adult books and 0.6 percent for juvenile. Paperbound books grew 2.6 percent and 2.7 percent over the seven years. Mass Market paperbacks decreased 4.0 percent and brought the category CAGR to -2.2 percent. Total sales were $1.0 billion in 2009. Book clubs and mail-order fell to $588 million, a decrease of 2.0 percent. Audio book sales for 2009 totaled $192 million, down 12.9 percent from the prior year. Ebooks overtook audiobooks in 2009 with sales reaching $313 million in 2009, up 176.6 percent. Religious book sales dropped 9.0 percent to $659 million in 2009. However over the period of the estimate, it has secured steady growth with a CAGR of 2.4 percent. Educational sales in the elementary and high school (el-hi) category, those books produced for K-12 education, fell 13.8 percent to $5.2 billion in 2009, and CAGR for this category was -1.4 percent. The higher education category, which includes sales of college textbooks, reached $4.3 billion in 2009, up 12.9 percent from 2008. This brought the CAGR for college textbooks to 5.0 percent.
15. The publishing revolution: News of e-books and other new media Shipments of Barnes & Noble's nook from manufacturers in March accounted for 53 percent of all ebook readers shipped to the U.S. market, surpassing Amazon's Kindle shipments by a large margin, according to, Digitimes Research. Senior analyst Mingchi Kuo attributed this "partly to consumers' interest in new products, as Amazon's Kindle has already been on the market for some time" and to B&N having retail outlets throughout the country. Digitimes said ebook reader shipments worldwide were 1.43 million units in the January-March quarter, and will grow to 2.02 million units in the second quarter. For the year, global shipments should reach 11.4 million units, up from 3.82 million last year. 16. Google to begin selling e-books this summer
Google will begin selling ebooks by late June or July, a Google manager said at
a Book Industry Study Group panel on May 4. Google is still deciding whether it will follow the agent model where publishers set the retail price or where Google sets retail prices."
17. Can’t afford ISBN block? Google editions will have unique ISBNs
Google will use the industry-standard ISBN for products sold through Google
Editions. That’s counter to vendors like Amazon, who assign their own unique
ASINs to Kindle books. 18. Explaining the agency model for e-book pricing in layman’s language We ran two articles in the last issue of the Southern Review of Books about the new agency model for pricing ebooks, developed at blitzkrieg speed by the Book Industry Study Group (BISG). The articles produced a counterblitz of questions to the Southern Review, so let’s revisit the agency model to explain what led to it and how it works. Amazon in the months preceding the development of the model had been scaring the bejeezus out of the major publishers by buying ebooks from publishers for about $13 and then selling them for $9.99 for reading on its Kindle ebook device. Amazon was taking a loss on each book in order to gain market share and encourage sales of the Kindle. By the end of 2009, Amazon accounted for an estimated 80 percent of all ebook sales, and $9.99 seemed to be established as the most popular price for an ebook. Publishers panicked. David Young, the chairman and CEO. of Hachette Book Group USA, said, “The big concern - and it’s a massive concern - is the $9.99 pricing point. If it’s allowed to take hold in the consumer’s mind that a book is worth 10 bucks, to my mind it’s game over for this business.” As an alternative, some of the major publishers decided to push for an “agency model” for e-books. Under such a model, the publisher would be considered the seller, and an online vendor like Amazon would act as an “agent,” in exchange for a 30 percent commission. That way, the publishers would be able to set the retail price themselves, presumably at a higher level than the $9.99 favored by Amazon. Under the system that frightened the publishers, Amazon paid the publishers $13.00 for each e-book. Under the new system, publishers will receive 70 percent of the retail price of an ebook. To net $13 per book, the publishers will have to set a price of about $18.50 per ebook, well above the $9.99 norm for electronic books. That price is so far above the norm that it will probably discourage sales - even sales to Apple’s iPad device, where the pricing model is designed to be more favorable to publishers. The irony here is that, through the agency model, publishers have forced Amazon to (a) pay them less per book and (b) will sell fewer of their books. 19. Amazon cuts prices on Penguin titles waiting for agency model OK
Amazon has continued its recent practice of selling some titles at ebook price
points. The Wall Street Journal reported the online retailer is "selling
a number of new hardcover books published in April by Pearson PLC's Penguin
Group (USA) for only $9.99 amid a dispute between the two companies over
electronic books." 20. Ken Auletta: ‘Can The iPad Or The Kindle Save Book Publishers?’ In the subtitle to a recent Ken Auletta's column in the April 26 The New Yorker, he asks, "Can the iPad topple the Kindle and save the book business?" The article discusses the ongoing battle between publishing companies and Amazon over pricing of ebooks, which are projected to eventually account for as much as 40 percent of all books sold. Auletta explains that the different strategies employed by Amazon's Kindle and Apple's iPad for pricing e-books are changing the way we choose, buy and read online material. Until the iPad was released, Auletta says, Amazon sold ebooks at a loss with the hope of obtaining a bigger market share. When the iPad was released, Apple instead let publishing companies set the price of their own ebooks - the “agency model” discussed above. Though Amazon was eventually forced to go along with the new pricing policy, Auletta says it appears to be examining ways to cut the publisher entirely out of the equation. With Barnes & Noble and Sony also making waves in the electronic reader market, questions remain about the future of publishing: Auletta is the author of 11 books, including World War 3.0: Microsoft and Its Enemies and Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, which tracked the development of Google from a search engine to the provider of all things Internet. He has written the "Annals of Communications" column for The New Yorker since 1992. In an NPR interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Auletta further discussed his much-discussed New Yorker article. Some interview highlights, courtesy of NPR: On how publishers hope e-books will work "It opens up a new market, potentially to younger people. Secondly, what publishers hope to do - and they've belatedly jumped into this and I think they were much too late - but nevertheless, they're trying to create multimedia functionality out of a book. So they're offering a new kind of book in an ebook. It's not just an electronic book. It's a book that allows you to go to an archive - to access things in a multimedia dimension. And their hope is that they can actually charge more for that." On how the iPad fits into the existing market for electronic - and traditional - publishing "By the iPad coming into the market, it gives the publishers leverage over Amazon. They were afraid that Amazon - with an 80 percent market share of ebooks - would basically continue to lower prices and basically have them over a barrel. And now they feel like they've regained some leverage and regained leverage over their ability to price books. Apple has allowed them to set the price of a book and they've compelled Amazon to go along with that, much to Amazon's reluctance." "As ebooks expand exponentially - they're expected one day to reach 25 to 40 percent of all books published - what does this do to bookstores? Already, independent bookstores are already down to 10 percent of all books sold. The problem with that is that independent bookstores have a staff of people who you tend to know, they are people who really are noted for reading many books and for spotting that first-time novel or that nonfiction book by a new author. And that word of mouth, and their recommendations have helped spur sales for years. And the worry is: What replaces that?" On Amazon's old pricing system for the Kindle "Let's say a book was selling for $26 in a store. The publisher sells it to most bookstores or to Amazon for half that; let's say they sold it for $13. What Amazon would do was subsidize the difference, (and) take a loss of $3 on each of those books and sell (the ebook) for $9.99. And hope that they would make up for it by doing two things: one, by selling Kindles. They don't tell you how much profit they make or how many Kindles they sell, but the estimate is about three million Kindles are out there and they're making a nice buck on each Kindle. In addition, they're gaining market share and already they were up to 80 percent market share of electronic books. The fear that publishers had was that Amazon would continue to drop that ebook price from $9.99 to lower and lower and lower, as is the tendency in online world. It is done more cheaply and customers expect lower and lower prices. And publishers felt that that basically threatened their basic business." How e-book manufacturers could potentially cut out publishers "Amazon has actually made some deals with authors - Stephen Covey is one - and has actually approached authors and editors to try to hire editors to work for Amazon and to procure books for them. (And they're) offering authors a much larger commission than the commission they get from hardcover publishers." How Ken Auletta reads "I have a Kindle. I'm waiting to buy the iPad until the 3G model comes out in a month. When I go on vacation or overseas, I take my Kindle because it's much lighter. Instead of five books, I take my Kindle and they're there. They can download in 60 seconds. But I prefer to read a book in hardcover. I can mark it, and it's on my bookshelf and I can refer to more easily." 21. Apple says one million iPads sold in first 28 days Apple says it sold more than a million iPads in its first month, and that users have downloaded 12 million apps and 1.5 million ebooks in that period.
MarketWatch
reported that sales of the device "have already outstripped initial Wall Street
estimates and the company cannot fully meet all the demand.... Most analysts had
been expecting Apple to sell between one million and two million iPad units for
the quarter ending in June." 22. Ether Books unveils plan to sell short stories into iPhone market Ether Books launched a new offering at the London Book Fair on April 19. It is offering a catalog of short stories, essays and poetry via Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch. Authors include Alexander McCall-Smith and Louis de Bernieres. Well over one billion mobile phones are expected to be sold worldwide this year, compared with just a few million ereaders. Apple alone has already sold more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch devices, and has just launched its iPad tablet PCs. Ether Books Digital Director Maureen Scott says the company has made the decision “to go straight to distributing short works via our iPhone app to devices people already own, are familiar with and are happy to use when they have 10-15 minutes to spare." Scott previously worked for British technology group Psion, was a director of U.S. mobile Web pioneer Openwave and managed the development of the first airline consumer self-booking reservation product at British Airways.
In related news, Hachette Book Group's Orbit science fiction and fantasy imprint
will launch a digital short fiction publishing program later this year. 23. Graphic novels and comics news Comic book illustrator Frank Frazetta died on May 10. He was 82. In his obituary, the New York Times called Frazetta "an illustrator of comic books, movie posters and paperback book covers whose visions of muscle-bound men fighting with swords and axes to defend scantily dressed women helped define fantasy heroes like Conan, Tarzan and John Carter of Mars." 24. Color e-readers offer new market for comic book publishers Has the thought of reading or re-reading your favorite comic books on an e-reader occurred to you? How about reading Action Comics No. 1, in which Superman made his first appearance. A copy recently sold for over $1 million - but you could read it for next to nothing - or even for nothing as more and more works enter the public domain.
Comic books have come a long way since Action No. 1. The art has improved
immensely. You can read comic b Aside from the comics in public domain, others can be bought from the current publisher, or by subscriptions, and there are even many new comics online. A lot of the comic books currently available on the Internet are scanned in either jpg or PDF format. Used this way, it’s possible to download single pages or even whole issues, depending upon how they have been created. The downside is that some of the books are huge files. Because of this, comics are very often in a compressed format. Some of the most popular formats you will run across are: CBZ, CBR, CBT and a few others. These make downloading whole issues easy Calibre software (http://calibre-ebook.com) supports the popular formats just mentioned. For dedicated software, you might check into ComicRack (http://comicrack.cyolito.com) or Comical (http://comical.sourceforge.net/). 25. Marvel switching graphic novel distribution from Diamond to Hachette Beginning in September, Marvel Comics will switch distribution of its hardback and paperback graphic novel books from Diamond Book Distributors in Timonium, Md., to the Hachette Book Group. Hachette will distribute the graphic novel titles into both the domestic and international book trade market. Diamond Book Distributors is the book trade distribution division of Diamond Comics Distributors. ]
Marvel has also extended its contract with Diamond Comics Distributors to
distribute its titles into the domestic comic shop market, also known as the
Direct Market. The switch comes following the acquisition of Marvel by Disney last September. HarperCollins currently distributes the titles of Disney Publishing and Hyperion.
Marvel was careful to note that Diamond Comics Distribution, the dominant
distributor of traditional comic book periodicals as well as book product in the
comics shop market, will continue to distribute Marvel titles in that channel.
DBD v-p sales and marketing Kuo-Yu Liang said DBD still has over 50 clients and has just extended its contracts with Image Comics and IDW Publishing, two major independent graphic novel publishers. "We'll be fine even without Marvel," Liang said. (Source: Calvin Reid, Publishers Weekly, April 12, 2010) 26. Books in bad taste, and books that taste bad
The publisher of ex-Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s tell-all book The
Governor closed in early May.
Clients of Los Angeles-based Phoenix Books said they were informed by e-mail
just days before the company closed. "Everything pending has been cancelled, and
all rights to our books and audio revert back t 27. Sarah Palin builds personal brand - and bank account
A recent New
York
magazine article strongly hints that Sarah Palin walked away from th Here's an excerpt from the article: "Two former Palin-campaign aides - Jason Recher and Doug McMarlin - were hired to plan a book tour with all the trappings of a national political campaign. But there was a hitch: With Alaska’s strict ethics rules, Palin worried that her day job would get in the way. In March, she petitioned the Alaska attorney general’s office, which responded with a lengthy list of conditions. 'There was no way she could go on a book tour while being governor' is how one member of her Alaska staff put it." 28. News about self-publishing and vanity presses As of May 2, The Shack by Wm. Paul Young (Windblown Media) has spent 100 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list with more than 50 weeks at #1. It has also been on Publishers Weekly and USA Today bestseller lists for the same period of time. More than 12 million copies are in print (10 million copies in the United States and more than two million in foreign translations). To date, there have been 76 total printings (all formats), according to Brad Cummings, president of Windblown Media. Windblown Media originally published The Shack in 2007 with a first printing of 10,000 copies. Sales grew steadily by word-of-mouth throughout 2007. By Spring 2008, Windblown had sold over one million copies on just $200 of marketing. In May of that year, Windblown entered into an arrangement with Hachette Book Group to provide services enabling Windblown to meet the exploding demand.
29. Marketing books: what works and what doesn’t 30. Milestones: Records and news of note in book publishing Engadget reported that 1.5 million ebooks were downloaded to the iPad in the first 28 days after its introduction. But Paul Biba counters in TeleRead that Feedbooks distributed 2.6 million books during the same period… Girl detective Nancy Drew turned 80 in the last week of April. Entertainment Weekly's blog noted that " Nancy Drew books are published in 25 languages, and have sold 200 million copies worldwide"… Amazon.com has given a $25,000 grant to the Lambda Literary Foundation to support the Writers' Retreat for Emerging LGBT Voices, an annual event that will be held this year August 8-15 at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles. The Foundation called the grant "one of the most significant gifts to LLF in recent years and signals a new era of recognition for the mission and programs of Lambda Literary Foundation. The grant will permit LLF to expand its outreach and enable more talented emerging writers to participate through scholarship funds.” 31. Mystery Writers of America announces 2010 Edgar winners
The winners of the 2010 Edgar Awards were honored on April 29 at the Mystery
Writers of America banquet in New York City. 32. 'The Hole in Our Gospel' named 2010 Christian Book of the Year
The Hole in Our Gospel,
the Christian bestseller by Richard Stearns, president of World Vision U.S., has
won the 2010 Christian Book of the Year award. 33. 2010 Triangle Awards for best LGBT writing announced
The 2010 Triangle Awards for best LGBT fiction, poetry and nonfiction were
announced at the New School on April 28. The winning authors are: 34. News of chicanery, dishonesty and tort-feasing in the book business Danielle Steel's former assistant Kristy Watts was sentenced to almost three years after pleading guilty to embezzling over $760,000 from the author. Watts earned a part-time salary of $200,000. 35. Burkle increases stake, then sues Barnes & Noble over poison pill
Ron Burkle's Yucaipa American Management filed suit in Delaware Chancery Court
on May 5, alleging that Barnes & Noble and its directors "breached its fiduciary
duty by upholding a 'discriminatory' poison pill provision that would prevent
the company from being sold," Reuters reported, citing documents filed with the
Securities and Exchange Commission.
The board also said it "intends to submit the rights plan for shareholder
ratification within 12 months of adoption," Reuters noted. Orlando Figes is an award-winning historian in his own right. But he has also admitted to writing a series of anonymous attacks on books by his rivals, and he has a history of litigious academic quarrels. Figes has unmasked himself as the writer of several scathing reviews of works by contemporaries, including those of Robert Service, Rachel Polonsky and the novelist Kate Summerscale. The reviews were placed anonymously on the Amazon.com Web site. Figes originally denied authorship, and then claimed that his wife had written them. Figes, a professor of Russian history at Birkbeck, University of London, has previously been engaged in at least two legal disputes with other historians. He has been accused and cleared of plagiarism, and received hate mail while an academic at Cambridge. One colleague who did not want to be named described the most recent episode as "the tip of the iceberg.” Opinion is divided over whether Figes will be able to remain in his teaching post after what one historian described as "career suicide" from which he could "never recover.” But a one-time colleague of Figes said Birkbeck would be unlikely to want to lose one its most eminent names, and that "these days people recover from almost anything.” A number of historians recalled various incidents including the non-attribution of quotations and the inclusion of sentences in his books that seem to bear resemblance to their own work. In 1997, the American historian Richard Pipes claimed that Figes had "quoted copiously but not always generously" from his own book, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, pointing out seven examples in Figes's book A People's Tragedy that, he claimed, bore resemblance to his own. The UK’s Sunday Times reported the allegations, but ultimately had to print an apology to Figes. Figes then wrote a piece explaining the similarities, saying, "There are bound to be minor similarities of expression in two such large works on the same subject." In 2002, Cambridge historian Rachel Polonsky wrote a review of Figes's book in The Times Literary Supplement in which she accused him of inaccuracies, factual errors, misreadings, cavalier appropriation of sources and a general intellectual irresponsibility. Figes subsequently defended his record, but, according to Polonsky, misquoted his own book. When Polonsky wrote to point out that he had not quoted his own work in full, she was told the TLS would not be publishing her letter and the matter was dropped. An American academic, Priscilla Roosevelt, said she had written to complain to Figes about his apparent use of sources from her book Life on the Russian Country Estate in his award-winning A People's Tragedy, some of which were so obscure she could not believe he had come across them himself. "You can't prove these things absolutely, but the experience left me shocked and demoralized," she said. "He sent me a one-line response." Robert Service, who says he has endured "hell" over the past two weeks, said: "This is a much bigger matter than just this squalid little affair." Service, whose biography of Leon Trotsky won this year's Duff Cooper Prize, has not ruled out taking legal action against Figes for malicious falsehood, but said: "I want debate in this country to be free from interference from lawyers. I intend to help with the campaign for a change in the (UK’s) libel law." 37. Chuckles: Finding humor amid the stacks and shelves Entertainment Weekly's Shelf Life blog asked humorist Dave Barry "What book changed your life?" Barry's reply: "The Brothers Karamazov, by Dostoevsky. I was supposed to read it my freshman year in college, but it's 18 million pages long and I could never get past the first 43. Nevertheless I wrote a paper about it, and I got an OK grade, which taught me that I could write convincingly about things I did not remotely understand. This paved the way for my career in journalism." 38. Cookbook misprint costs Australian publishers $18,000 An Australian publisher has had to reprint a cookbook after one recipe listed "salt and freshly ground black people" instead of black pepper.
Penguin Group Australia had to reprint 7,000 copies of Pasta Bible, the
Sydney Morning Herald reported.
The reprint cost $18,000, but stock in bookshops will not be recalled as it is "extremely hard" to do so, Penguin said. The recipe was for spelt tagliatelle with sardines and prosciutto. "We're mortified that this has become an issue of any kind, and why anyone would be offended, we don't know," head of publishing Bob Sessions is quoted as saying by the Sydney newspaper. Penguin said almost every one of the more than 150 recipes in the book listed salt and freshly ground black pepper, but a misprint occurred on just one page. "When it comes to the proofreader, of course they should have picked it up, but proofreading a cook-book is an extremely difficult task. I find that quite forgivable," Mr. Sessions said. Penguin said it was "mortified" over the "silly" mistake in its pasta cook-book 39. BookExpo America adds Book Blogger Convention to agenda
The first annual Book Blogger Convention will take place on May 28 at the Javits
Center, the day after BookExpo America concludes. The convention was originally
going to be held at another location in New York City until Steven Rosato, BEA
event director, heard about the initiative and suggested that it take place in
connection with BEA.
The keynote speaker for the blogger event is Maureen Johnson, the author of
Scarlett Fever and other works. The convention starts with a reception on
May 27, 4–6 p.m., open to anyone attending BEA that day. 40. Volcanic ash renders London Book Fair faint shadow of prior years
The London Book Fair, held April 19-21, faced a new problem this year. In prior
years, the event has faced down disruptions from phantom transit strikes to a
disastrous one-year relocation to the outskirts of London. This year's obstacle
was volcanic ash spread from an eruption in Iceland. British air traffic
authorities banned all non-emergency flights through April 20, and flights to
many other points in Euro The Fair opened to lighter crowds and many empty booths.
A fifth of the opening day’s seminar programs were canceled. Up to 50 percent of
the tables in the International Rights Center were unoccupied. Among the no
shows due to the travel restrictions were a large contingent from South Africa
who were to join in the celebrations of the country as the fair's "market
focus." Former British prime minister Tony Blair, who was supposed to meet with
his publishers from around the world, was stuck in the Middle East. BEA show director Steve Rosato reported queries for at least a dozen IRC tables, hundreds of new registrations and multiple new booth sales on the first day of the London show alone. 41. Major upcoming trade shows, book fairs and book festivals May
May 17-20. The Museum Store Association's
Retail Conference & Expo June The American Library Association - Anaheim, CA. June 12-13. Printers Row Book Fair, http://www.chicagotribune.com/about/events/printersrow a large book fair attended by more than 100,000 book lovers in 2009. The International New Age Trade Show West - Denver, Colo. June 24-29. American Library Association's Annual Conference. Some 2,000 seminars and events as well as a huge trade show. http://www.ala.org/ala/conferencesevents/upcoming/annual/index.cfm Washington, D.C., some 2,000 seminars and events plus a huge trade show. June 27-30. CBA/The International Christian Retail Show, St. Louis, Mo.www.christianretailshow.com. Considered the best show for Christian authors. See also http://www.marketingchristianbooks.com June. The National Association of College Stores Conference. www.nacs.org August August 20-21 (tentative). The Great American Bargain Book Show (GABBS) – Boston, Hynes Convention Center. www.gabbs.net August. The New York International Gift Fair – www.nyigf.com August. New Orleans-Gulf South Booksellers Association. September
Sept. 4-5. Decatur Book Festival, Decatur (Atlanta), Ga.,
http://www.decaturbookfestival.com/Community/index.php. Held Labor Day
weekend, claims to attract over 50,000 book fans. October Oct. 6-10. Frankfurt Book Fair 2010. This is the Big Daddy of all book shows, the biggest in the world. Argentina is the Guest of Honor. Held in Frankfurt, Germany. Oct. 8-10. Southern Festival of Books: A Celebration of the Written Word, http://tn-humanities.org/festival/index.php, Nashville, Tenn., attracts more than 200 authors from throughout the U.S. October. Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival. Event was held Oct. 9-17 in 2009. We’ll post the 2010 dates when we get ‘em. Meanwhile, visit http://www.litquake.org. Louisiana Book Festival, Baton Rouge, http://lbf.state.lib.la.us. Event was held Oct. 16-17 in 2009. Oct. 30. Also visit http://www.litquake.org. November Nov. 14-21. Miami Book Fair International, http://www.miamibookfair.com draws hundreds of thousands of people. Dates uncertain – check hyperlink for Show Web site Litquake, San Francisco’s Literary Festival, http://www.litquake.org Ann Arbor Book Festival, http://www.aabookfestival.org/, Ann Arbor MI National Book Festival, http://www.loc.gov/bookfest/ sponsored by the Library of Congress on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Held on Sept. 26 in 2009. Vegas Valley Book Festival, Las Vegas, http://www.vegasvalleybookfest.org
Kentucky Book Fair,
http://www.kybookfair.com. Frankfort Convention Center, attended by up to
5,000 people including 150 authors.
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The
Southern Review is edited by Noel Griese. The author of 17 books and
numerous articles on various subjects, he has been a newspaper reporter
and editor and has taught English and journalism at the Universities of
Wisconsin and Georgia. Elected to both Phi Beta Kappa and Phi Kappa Phi,
he holds three degrees in English and journalism.
