The Prodigal Hour by Will Entrekin
Six weeks after escaping the 9/11 attacks in New York City, Chance Sowin moves back home, hoping for familiarity and security. Instead, he interrupts a burglary and his father is killed.
“Audacious, genre-bending … a thrilling head-rush of a book.” —Elizabeth Eslami
Find out more on Amazon and download a sample to your Kindle.
Table of Contents
In the EtherDome
Pearson Buys Author Solutions
Friedman, Gonzalez, Strauss, Gaughran, Dawson, Owen, Greenfield, Jones, et al
Self-Publishing: Digital Dustup / Bidinotto, Bell, Preston
Money: 2011 Trade Sales Numbers / Cader, Kafka
eBooks: ‘Through Divorce Lawyers’ / Bjarnason, Brantley
The Flouncing: La Trunk Speaks / Owen, Greenfield
Contracts by the Trunkful: Tougher Times / Gardner
Conferences: Early Bird Rates
Competition: It’s Us or Facebook / Cyzewski
Marketing: Why Ask YA? / Kephart
Finding Publication: ‘Indie’ is not always it / Martin
Books: Remember Dave Eggers? / Ryssdal
Craft: Curb Your Spam / Friedlander, Chavez, Hamilton
Craft: Author Quizzing Editor / Ferriss/Saller
Books: Reading on the Ether
Last Gas: Ferriss Wheeled Out / Bruni
In the EtherDome
Pearson Buys Author Solutions
Friedman, Gonzalez, Strauss, Gaughran, Dawson, Owen, Greenfield, Jones, et al
As the column moved, we’ve had the news of the buy by Pearson — parent of Penguin — of the self-publishing services group Author Solutions.
Author Solutions’ collateral material describes it as “located primarily in Bloomington, Indiana and Cebu City, the Philippines.”
Since this occurred past “press time” for the Ether (how discourteous can Pearson be?), I do want to recommend to you several sources of info to follow on this.
Our good colleague and host of the Ether, Jane Friedman, has written an important piece on the story: Is the Author Solutions Acquisition a Good Thing for Authors?
I’m sad to say I’ve heard publishing executives talk about the opportunity to “monetize unpublished manuscripts” and it’s why I left commercial publishing. Is this where the industry is headed? If so, I want no part of its future.
Guy LeCharles Gonzalez actually comes out of blog-suspension and lays hands to keyboard on this one, in Penguin’s Modest Self-Publishing Gamble
While ASI almost definitely has more experience with digital marketing and analytics than Penguin does, those skills could easily be internalized for much cheaper than $116m, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if a lot of that work is being done by staff in the Philippines!
Emily Suess at Suess’s Pieces has posted Calling Bullshit: A Closer Look at the Author Solutions Press Release:
Self-publishers are independent writers and artists. Say it with me: in-de-pen-dent. Sure, they pay for someone to print their book or they pay a web service to make their title available, but they don’t share their profits. They keep them. Not 20% of them, not 50% of them—all of them.
David Gaughran looks at the track record for which Author Solutions has been infamous, in Penguin’s New Business Model: Exploiting Writers
Laura Dawson is back with another go at the topic, this one headlined: Service or tool?
Our colleague Philip Jones weighs in at TheFutureBook with a couple of predictors remembered from the IfBookThen conference, in Penguin changes the conversation. Jones:
At IfBookThen earlier this year, Molly Barton, global digital director at Penguin USA who co-founded Book Country, an online community for writers, said the next stage in that site’s development would be to introduce “services” that the writers could buy, for example editorial, or design services. She also told me that Penguin was looking to take the site international, including a UK launch.
It really behooves Penguin to address the wide perception of Author Solutions as a predator. http://t.co/FoSjEp8I
July 20, 2012 8:00 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@ThadMcIlroy
Thad McIlroy
The basic details are in a Reuters-London write, Penguin owner buys self-publisher Author Solutions
Laura Dawson has contributed a quick but useful set of observations on the deal, which can supply some logical context: Penguin and Author Solutions
Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware has covered Author Solutions for a long time and has a list of questions she’d like answered: Pearson Buys Author Solutions
Laura Hazard Owen at paid Content has listened to the conference call and files Penguin buys self-publishing service Author Solutions for $116m
Sarah Weinman at Publishers Lunch has filed Penguin Acquires Self-Publishing Service Author Solutions For $116 Million
And Jeremy Greenfield at Digital Book World has Penguin Buys Self-Publishing Platform Author Solutions for $116 Million
One question that comes to mind is how this might affect the BookCountry manuscript-development community Penguin operates. Greenfield, listening to the press call, has this:
“It’s early days. We haven’t thought in detail about Book Country,” said Penguin CEO John Makinson on a press conference call.
Pearson just stepped in stinky s*** with acquisition of ASI. They earn 2/3+ of their $$ selling stuff to authors, not selling bks to readers
July 19, 2012 2:27 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@markcoker
Mark Coker
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And one more: A class action lawsuit has been announced against Harlequin, alleging that three authors, the plaintiffs, received much less in royalty payments than their agreements with the romance publisher stipulated. For this one, I recommend the early writes from:
Sarah Weinman at Publishers Lunch with Three Authors File Class Action Suit Against Harlequin On Deprivation of Digital Royalties and
Laura Hazard Owen at paid Content with Authors sue Harlequin for non-payment of ebook royalties
Michael Cader at Publishers Lunch has a very short statement from Harlequin, saying it, “wishes to make clear that this is the first it has heard of the proceedings and that a complaint has not yet been served.” This one is Harlequin Says Authors Have Been Treated Fairly
You also can see the plaintiffs’ announcement of their action here. And the hashtag #harlequinlawsuit is following an online discussion, which includes Jane Litte of Dear Author offering tweeted summaries.
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Self-Publishing: Digital Dustup / Bidinotto, Bell, Preston
For the past three years, ITW has in fact welcomed self-published authors as members. We have a number of self-published authors who are full members, including James Scott Bell (which is why his book was eligible for an award).
This is Douglas Preston writing to me. He is co-president of the International Thriller Writers (ITW). And he responded very promptly to my request for a statement on the ITW’s stance on self-publishing authors as members of the organization. Preston goes on:
Since we are an honorary organization in which membership is free and for life, self-published authors need to demonstrate a high level of accomplishment and professionalism.
Speaking of a high level of accomplishment and professionalism among the members, author and writing coach James Scott Bell let me know that his novella, One More Lie, was named the first self-published finalist in ITW’s awards at the organization’s annual ThrillerFest this week in New York.
But the news ran smack into a very different line of thinking from Robert Bidinotto, author of Hunter.
Here’s what I was getting from Bidinotto:
We continue to be belittled by many of (the traditional publishing establishment’s) denizens for choosing to publish independently. Established writers’ organizations refuse to allow us full membership privileges, regardless of our proven sales.
The “us” of that comment is self-publishing authors. And Bidinotto’s remark was one among many raised around my between-the-gases post, EXTRA ETHER: Will DIY Pay for R&D?
And that’s how the Ether got between the self-publishing camp and the Thriller Writers in a digital dustup about who is writerly enough.
I can leave it to you to get into the subject of the original piece, if you’d like (pack a lunch). The initial mull was prompted by Eugenia Williamson’s heavily criticized write, The dead end of DIY publishing at the Boston Phoenix.com, in which she looked at the self-publishing world’s apparent lack of “R&D” — meaning blockbuster books’ revenue presumably invested in new authors and work by traditional publishers.
It was heartening that in all but one instance, our comment contributors avoided the emotional one-upmanship of so many such discussions. Right from the outset, with a smartly articulated comment from author Roz Morris, the debate was sensible, respectful, and focused.
But my curiosity was piqued by Bidinotto’s comment about self-publishing authors being shut out of writers’ organizations. I asked him to supply me with an example. I’d covered his success with Hunter here on the Ether, and appreciated him getting right back to tell me, again in our comments, that the ITW’s policy for full membership precludes self-publishing authors.
And yet Preston’s answer to me in response to my request for a statement says otherwise. And, clearly, Bell was honored for a self-published work (although it should be noted that Bell publishes both traditionally and autonomously — I wondered briefly if that hybrid status was the key to his ITW membership).
blah blah blah AGENTS WILL BE OBSOLETE IN SIX MONTHS blah blah blah I AM PART OF A CORRUPT, DYING BUSINESS blah blah blah blah blah blah
July 12, 2012 11:20 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@Ginger_Clark
Ginger Clark
Well, I’ve found out there’s more to this situation with the ITW than was immediately apparent. And a mere change in the placement of some explanatory copy could do the trick.
When Bidinotto responded to me with the information I invited him to supply, he referred me, quite logically, to the How To Join page of the ITW’s site. And on that page is exactly the text he cited in his comment:
Active membership is available to thriller authors published by a commercial publishing house. This includes authors of fiction and nonfiction. By “commercial publishing house” we mean a bona fide publisher who pays an advance against royalties, edits books, creates covers, has a regular means of distribution into bookstores and other places where books are ordinarily sold, and receives no financial payments from their authors.
Where Bidinotto then supplied ellipses, we find this line, immediately following the above, emphasis mine:
There are nuances involved in all of this, which is why ITW’s board of directors is constantly aware of changing industry trends and makes every effort to accommodate writers who are not traditionally published while maintaining high professional standards for Active member status.
That’s a tad more, but oblique. And it doesn’t have to be. Because the ITW already has clearer language written.
blah blah blah NO NEED EVER AGAIN FOR CURATORS blah blah blah EDITORS DO NOTHING AND PUBLICISTS ARE OSTRICHES blah blah blah blah blah
July 12, 2012 11:23 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@Ginger_Clark
Ginger Clark
Preston’s statement to me when I asked for an explanation contains a very interesting paragraph that I couldn’t find on this “How To Join” page. That’s because it’s not there. After spending some time poking around, I discovered that you have to make an unlikely click on a link called “ITW maintains a list of recognized commercial publishers.”
And it’s there you’ll find this additional — and much more helpful — copy that Preston sent me:
With particular regard to self-published books, where there is no publisher beyond the author, any determination of the author being a qualified publisher shall be on a case-by-case basis and such factors as the work itself, the breadth of its marketing, the extent of its distribution, the editorial process, its sales, the author’s personal history, reviews in recognized publications, and any other factor relevant to the particular situation may be considered in making such determination. Self published writers are not automatically excluded from being a qualified publisher, but they bear a higher burden to demonstrate their status.
In short, because the proof of viability isn’t supplied by a standing traditional publisher, a self-published author needs to be prepared to provide information as requested by ITW to back up a request for full membership.
blah blah blah GINGER, MY SISTER HAS A BOOK ABOUT GOLDFISH I KNOW PUBLISHING IS DYING BUT COULD READ IT AND GIVE PAGES OF COMMENTS blah blah
July 12, 2012 11:25 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@Ginger_Clark
Ginger Clark
Debate the fairness of this if you must. But frankly, without examining the case each time, any organization is hard-pressed to tell who’s a going, selling author and who’s a fine but unsold hopeful.
Now here are a couple of completely unsolicited comments of my own.
To the ITW: Thanks again for supplying this information to me so we could hash out here why Bidinotto felt (I think justifiably) that full membership was out of reach for self-publishing authors. Can you consider placing this last bit of text (“With particular regard…”) on the “How To Join” page, instead of, or in addition to, the page that lists commercial publishers? Forgive me, but this would make more sense. You want the best mysteries to be found in your membership’s books, not on your site. And it would be a lot easier for self-publishers and Ether-stoned journalists to find that explanatory passage if it lived on the “How To Join” page.
James Scott Bell
To Bell: Congratulations on making a breakthrough for self-published work by having your novella nominated.
Robert Bidinotto
To Bidinotto: Go right back to the ITW and apply for full membership. Show them your excellent sale figures on Hunter, the material that’s been written about the book, the interviews with your fellow thriller authors you showed me on your site, your other work, and your Social Security card, if necessary. I’m not the ITW board (nothing so thrilling). But with Hunter’s arrival as a Wall Street Journal “Top 10″ in fiction ebooks and a No. 1 Kindle bestseller in mysteries and thrillers? — you look like a candidate to me.
And for all of us, it’s a lesson in communication. How unfortunate it is for the ITW to be subjected to complaints of shutting out self-publishers — when, indeed, they’re nominating a self-publisher for an award and simply not making their full policy findable.
If we all take a moment to think what others may need to know during this wrenching and long-running digital disruption, it can make a big difference in how things go. And it can help us hold down on the more negative noises borne primarily of exhaustion, lack of clarity, and concern about the future.
These are technical difficulties. Strange, sometimes infuriating, niggling, dumbass elements of being in basket-case transition of the industry! the industry!
Have a drink. Have another drink. There’s plenty more industry upheaval where this came from.
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blah blah blah EVERYONE I KNOW SAYS MY SISTER SHOULD SELF PUBLISH HER GOLDFISH BOOK blah blah WHAT DO YOU THINK, GINGER? blah blah blah
July 12, 2012 11:28 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@Ginger_Clark
Ginger Clark
Money: 2011 Trade Sales Numbers / Cader, Kafka
BookStats, a still-young tracking program handled by the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Book Industry Study Group (BISG), is out with a preliminary report of top-line figures for 2011, ahead of a deeper round of figures to come.
Michael Cader
Michael Cader at Publishers Marketplace’s Publishers Lunchhas a summary of what we know now, in his writeup, generously headlined 2011 Trade Sales Fell Slightly In New BookStats Figures, As eBooks Near $2 Billion and Comprise 31 Percent of Adult Fiction.
I’ll just bullet some of the highlights here.
eBooks vaulted to the largest-selling format for adult fiction, comprising 31 percent of dollar sales.
Adult fiction ebooks went from $585 million in 2010 to $1.27 billion in 2011.
eBooks accounted for almost 16 percent of all trade dollar sale.
eBook unit sales increased far more, up 210 percent, to an estimated 388 million units.
children’s and YA adult books comprised the “fastest-growing category” in 2011.
Cader goes on to discuss some issues of concern with the still-new calculations of the BookStats program. But he also includes a useful chart of the newly reported figures.
Note that the Publishers Lunch team handles general trade books and those in the religion sector differently from BookStats’ procedures, and this is why you’ll see some references at points in the chart below, such as “with Religion” — this means inclusive of those books, not necessarily with prayerful fervor.
Numbers from BookStats (AAP/BISG) per Michael Cader’s report at Publishers Lunch
A bit of perspective is helpful here, and we find it in Peter Kafka’s E-books Are Booming, and Still Sort of Small at AllThingsD. Drawing on the BookStats numbers, he writes:
Just like most media formats, the book market is still a long way from converting completely to digital: Last year, print accounted for 85 percent of the publishing industry’s general interest sales.
Peter Kafka
The report, he writes…
…finds that Amazon and other digital distributors are taking an increasing chunk of the market, and that sales of “trade” e-books — basically, everything except educational and professional texts — doubled in the last year.
This, he writes, “helped keep the publishing business more or less flat in 2011.” And that may not sound like such great news on the face of it. But:
That’s the kind of year executives in the newspaper and music business would have loved to have over the last decade. Those industries have seen their analog businesses drop off a cliff, and have spent a long time waiting for digital revenue streams to replace them. It took until 2011, for instance, for digital music sales to (barely) top CD sales in the U.S.
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blah blah blah ARE PEOPLE EVEN GOING TO BE READING BOOKS IN 10 YEARS OR WILL THEY JUST BE DOWNLOADED VIA A PORT TO OUR BRAINS blah blah blah
July 12, 2012 11:29 am via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@Ginger_Clark
Ginger Clark
eBooks: ‘Through Divorce Lawyers’ / Bjarnason, Brantley
I discovered just how bloody annoyed I am about the farce that is today’s ebook landscape. Much to my own surprise, I found that I’m more than a little bit angry about the madness that dominates ebooks.
I’ve spent enough time in Reykjavik to know that Icelanders aren’t easily brought to such agitated states as this. They have geysers to do their erupting for them.
Baldur Bjarnason
This is Baldur Bjarnason in his essay, Farce, writing here from England, I believe, where only in Bath is the soaking nearly as soothing as it is at home.
The emphasis in the following bit is mine:
First of all, the purpose of DRM is to limit what people can do with the files. By definition that is a loss of adaptability and flexibility right there. We can’t keep talking as if the readers aren’t a part of the publishing system: they are the point and purpose of publishing. Without them, books are nothing. Their needs are important.
Not that we weren’t headed in this direction in the last Ether, when Brett Sandusky told us Why DRM is fundamentally opposed to the book experience and Osprey Group’s Rebecca Smart restated her allegiance to the DRM-free ethos.
This, however, goes further. Brace yourself, you’re about to see what one Twitter correspondent has already complained is a “techie term,” ePUB. All it means is “Electronic PUBlication,” an open ebook standard. Try to keep your soul in the room:
Unfortunately, publishers are the only ones who have actually standardised on EPUB2 (for better or for worse), everybody else is in their own corner, doing their own thing, giving standardisation about as much time and respect as a hipster gives to Twilight fandom.
Now, that wasn’t so bad, was it? Good. I
n case you’re wondering, the majority of ebooks are produced in ePUB, even those going to the Kindle. Bjarnason clarifies: “Amazon provides a conversion tool called Kindlegen that creates Amazon MOBI files from EPUBs.”
Here’s a bit more context on what we’re talking about.
Bjarnason was in Milan earlier this month for the summer edition of the IfBookThen conference. There, our colleague Peter Brantley of the Internet Archive filed a report for Publishers Weekly, Milan’s If Book Then Summer Edition Conference Tracks the Digital Transformation, and included a helpful summary of where Bjarnason keeps his professional head.
As Bjarnason noted, online publishing supports authoring in a manner quite different from traditional publishing: design, layout, and authoring are intermingled in a fashion contrary to the linear nature of previous workflows. Furthermore, writing for the web means that we will never finish technical specifications and formats; as the web evolves, so too will the things we produce. Web-based production enables platform-based publishing that focuses not on journals or books, but on tools and services.
Now here’s the angry Bjarnason again:
No reading system today renders an EPUB without major problems, not unless your book sticks to plain text, a few italics, and maybe a header or two.
What does Bjarnason want?
Standardisation should mean that you could author a basic ebook using the specification as your only guide and have it render the same across all platforms…Kobo and B&N, e.g., can’t maintain a consistent rendering within their own platform, across their many devices.
The problem here is cost, as well as problems of interoperability and disregard for consumers — readers — represented by the status quo. Bjarnason:
Before disposable coffee cups became a standardised commodity, any coffee shop that wanted to sell coffee to go had to make a massive investment to set up a custom production of paper cups…After they became a standardised commodity, any coffee shop that wanted to could order a box of paper cups and offer coffee to go. The cups cost less. The coffee shops can offer better service for less. The makers of disposable cups earn more. Everybody makes more money and consumers have more buying power.
I’ll leave you to peruse Bjarnason’s write at your own pace. Particularly for those of us who aren’t up to our keyboards in code every day, the post is important for understanding that as ebooks become ever more central to publishing (see the sales report above), factioning within the field will continue to dog us.
As he gets to the advent of ePUB3, the newly arriving version which Adobe’s DRM system doesn’t support (and won’t for some time, Bjarnason fumes), he gets off this lovely passage about what’s going on in the backshop of digital publishing:
Theory and practice in the ebook world are not just separated, they’re setting each other’s stuff on fire, throwing clothes out onto the lawn, taking sledgehammers to the Porsche, and communicating only through divorce lawyers and thinly veiled death threats.
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I've noticed that it's 104 degrees at 6:25 in Chicago. Something ain't right.
July 17, 2012 7:27 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite
@DonLinn
Don Linn
The Flouncing: La Trunk Speaks / Owen, Greenfield
“I see that it would be surprising that someone would rip their publisher to shreds,” Penelope Trunk said, but the argument for self-publishing seems obvious to her. Of course, she noted, “not a lot of authors are in the position that I’m in” — with a very large online following.
You’ve just read a rare thing, too rare: original reporting.
It’s in Penelope Trunk: Publishers’ revenue model ‘assumes authors are going to flake.’
Laura Hazard Owen
Laura Hazard Owen at paidContent got in touch with Penelope Trunk and interviewed her about her widely discussed post, How I got a big advance from a big publisher and got self-published anyway. I was glad to see The Atlantic Wire pick up the piece from paidContent, it deserves the extra play.
So vociferous an attack on an unspecified traditional publisher was Trunk’s commentary that even the more militant members of the self-publishing community seemed inclined to sit this one out. In fact, Owen gets at that in a part of her story that might surprise some — Trunk isn’t part of the self-publishing community, such as it is, they don’t know her:
I told her about the community of outspoken self-publishing advocates like J.A. Konrath, who blogs almost exclusively about self-publishing and often riles up the publishing community with his opinionated posts. Trunk hadn’t read those posts and doesn’t see herself as part of that community. “I don’t want to be one of those self-publishing gurus,” she said.
<img class="size-thumbnail wp-image-9441" title="penelope-trunk from paidContent" src="http://janefriedman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/penelope-t