Bitchin' Blog Posts
: Publishing
October 10, 2011 | Monday | 17 Comments
Don’t worry - I do let the editor locked in my basement come outside for fresh air and a nap and some wine and whatnot. She’s a freerange editor when she’s not answering reader questions here! J9 asked: How has the explosion of the e-reader and e-book market changed publishing, especially acquisition, marketing and sales expectations? And related, has the e-book market caused editors’ job duties to change? Ask the Editor In a nice way, it’s given us other avenues in which to find readers. And in another it makes it insanely easier for us to bring books home to…
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September 12, 2011 | Monday | 26 Comments
She’s still in my basement (which is dry, thank heaven) and I’ve still got a lot of wine for bribery purposes, so Editor X is happy to answer more questions. Here we go with installment two of “Ask the Editor.” Anony Miss asked: My question: why aren’t there more scratch-n-sniff contemporary novels? I think it’s a whole niche market being totally ignored. Ask the Editor Speaking as a person who had to research the embedding of a music box thingie in a book cover, I can say that it’s too expensive. We’d print in China/Singapore, which means it’ll take me…
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September 08, 2011 | Thursday | 43 Comments
Remember that editor I have tied up in my basement? She’s been fed and I shared my wine supply because I’m not TOTALLY evil, and she’s consented to answer some of your questions from our original entry. I’ve got quite a few answers - she’s really freaking wordy, my GOD - so I’ll break them up in to several posts. Kim in Hawaii asked Do you read bloggers’ reviews and readers’ comments? If yes, does their feedback influence how you acquire and edit future books? I think readers do grow frustrated that they take the time to express their displeasure…
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May 25, 2011 | Wednesday | 14 Comments
One of the meetings I had yesterday at BEA was with Courtney Miller, Sr. Acquisitions Editor for Amazon Publishing. She is currently working on the Montlake Romance line, though she tells me that the editorial staff is still being built as they hire more people to develop the team. Miller comes from “the Kindle side” of the company, and has worked at Amazon for about three years now. The goals of Amazon Publishing as she described them were to offer a unique experience for authors, while getting both digital and print books in as many places as possible. For example,…
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May 12, 2011 | Thursday | 19 Comments
Per Shelf Awareness today, Audible has launched ACX, which enables authors to create audiobooks of their work, either by narrating them or by hiring voice actors from the registered database of talent. Here, have a video about it, featuring two actors who really irritated me with their pseudo-bashful self-congratulatory demeanor: The upshot is that so many excellent books are not made into audio books, and with the increasing success of self-publishing ventures in digital and print-on-demand, audiobooks are a natural extension of that success. The ACX program is available to authors at a flat rate or at a 50/50 share…
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May 11, 2011 | Wednesday | 63 Comments
First up: the link that sent listservs on fire and had everyone pulling that old manuscript out from under the bed. Bella Andre, kicking ass and taking names. I wish the headline were a little less “Anyone can do this!” because I don’t necessarily believe that anyone can make a $100,000-go at digital self publishing. I think Bella Andre was a perfect example of Seneca’s definition of luck: when preparation meets opportunity. It’s not as if it’s as simple as tossing your self published work up on the wall and having spaghetti and hundred dollar bills rain down on you…
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April 23, 2011 | Saturday | 27 Comments
Please note: there is not a single royal wedding-type link in here. Fear not. Author Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes that she found major discrepancies in the ebook sales reported in her royalty statements and is calling for writers to check their royalty statement ebook sales figures against any self-published works or against Bookscan, and to alert writers organizations to demand audits of publishing houses whose royalty statements are inconsistent. ...traditional publishers are not indulging in a criminal act. They’re doing the best they can out of necessity. They see no reason to spend precious dollars revamping their accounting systems to…
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February 18, 2011 | Friday | 30 Comments
The highlights of the first day of ToC included Margaret Atwood, Indie booksellers speaking confidently and knowledgeably about building community, and two days of hot lunch. I love hot lunches like you have no idea. The opening keynotes of ToC were rather awesome, mostly. First was Theodore Gray, who discussed the creation of his periodic table table, and the book and then the iPad app that were inspired by his strange collection. The ipad app is jaw dropping - then comes the Outer Space one, and I about leapt off my chair to go home and get my iPad so…
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February 13, 2011 | Sunday | 111 Comments
Starting Monday I’ll be at Tools of Change in Publishing, a conference that’s a sort of brainiac party at the intersection of publishing and digital innovation. Last year I called TOC a very full-brain conference because “both left and right brain perspectives are represented and explored.” This year, Jane Litte and I were invited to present a panel on digital reading devices from the user’s perspective. If you’re attending ToC, it’s Wednesday at 2:30 pm. We’ll be talking about all the different digital reading devices and platforms, and the reader’s reaction. As it says in the description, we’ll be discussing…
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January 26, 2011 | Wednesday | 34 Comments
Day one of the Digital Book World conference was a mix of panels that were so great with the amazing awesome brilliance of the panelists the top of my head nearly blew off, and panels that were so infuriating the top of my head nearly blew off. Let’s start with the CEO panel, since that was in the morning. Brian Napack, President of Macmillan, Jane Friedman, CEO of Open Road Integrated Media, David Steinberger, CEO of Perseus, and Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson, were joined by David Nussbam, CEO of F+W Media, to talk around and about digital book…
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January 15, 2011 | Saturday | 74 Comments
Via Colleen Lindsay, a big ol’ heads up with impending ORLY? surrounding FirstOne Digital Publishing. FirstOne is a new digital press (Wait, why do I hear popcorn popping? Stop that!) that opened its doors this week with a contest that raised a few eyebrows. Aside from what Laura Anne Gilman noted in her entry as the standard hyperbole of a newly launching digital press, there’s a contest with a rather high entrance fee of $149 and a clause that has an Absolute Write thread discussing the entire concept in detail. The clause reads, on the FirstOne website: All submissions become…
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October 01, 2010 | Friday | 40 Comments
Another reason to fear the ease of self-publishing? If you’re an author with a bit of a temper and an assistant in your basement, and you fire said assistant, said assistant might just up and write not one but possibly TWO books. And self publish them. It’s like the literary equivalent of telling the passengers off, pulling the inflatable slide and making your escape and resignation. First, there’s Faulty Gratification: An Ineeda Halfbaked Vampire Humper Almost Story, which reviews on Amazon state is a not-terribly-well-written parody of Guilty Pleasures. Then, there’s the memoir, The Diva Ate Her, by Anne Onymous,…
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September 14, 2010 | Tuesday | 41 Comments
What light through yonder window breaks? It's an iFrame, and it contains survey results! Clearly, I need to get over my crush on the Wufoo surveys very very soon. But not today!
var host = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://" : "http://");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + host + "sbtb.wufoo.com/scripts/widget/embed.js?w=GiwuslashElFzxOuwwuslashzzWWz6490XO66NL6PIRAn7RmJ658cPk=' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
var host = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://" : "http://");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + host + "sbtb.wufoo.com/scripts/widget/embed.js?w=wuslashZfHYuOtGyL2kcZ3OrwuBeBD5VywuslashTDy0RaUbxFKKXopHjI=' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
var host = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://" : "http://");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + host + "sbtb.wufoo.com/scripts/widget/embed.js?w=GqQON50ideSlPDheU7wuslashjW21WoFHb9nurCyzB6qfS3wuslashE=' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
var host = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://" : "http://");document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + host + "sbtb.wufoo.com/scripts/widget/embed.js?w=wI9I23UZ8btu5McKubWz1s9EFskTtyMrmEZkzoewuslashil0=' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
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August 07, 2010 | Saturday | 77 Comments
At the romance panel at WORD Brooklyn a few weeks ago, one of the audience members asked why romance takes so much crap from everyone. Hope Tarr said she thinks it boils down, every time, to the fact that romance is written by women, edited and published by women, and read by women. As we said in the Bosoms, look in your pants. That’s why. So grab your nearest alcoholic beverage, and play along as we look at the state of romance after an appearance in Bloomberg Business Week. In an article that mentions bodice ripping not once but Twice,…
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August 06, 2010 | Friday | 71 Comments
Sitting on my countertop right now are a number of printed bound galleys for books coming out in November. Publishing as a rule works so far in advance, editors are now plotting out winter 2011, or even spring 2012, and thinking little about what’s going on in a month or two. That’s marketing and publicity’s department. And, of course, the author’s concern as well. But if you’re a Dorchester author with a mass market release scheduled for this fall, you are thinking a lot about right now - and from my understanding, thinking you are totally lost, up a creek,…
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