The iBookstore team wrote in an email to iTunes Connect users: “ We strongly recommend that you do not schedule pricing changes through the interval pricing system in iTunes Connect that would take effect from December 22 through December 29. Pricing changes scheduled to take effect during this date range will not be reflected in the iBookstore and the book will become unavailable for purchase. We also recommend that you do not schedule any books to go live during the shutdown. Releases scheduled with a sales start date between these dates will not go live until after the shutdown.”

I imagine Apple employees need their Christmas time off, too.

Journalist Marc Herman’s Kindle Single on the aftermath of the Libyan revolution sold enough copies at $1.99 each to begin to recoup costs for the trip to Libya in the first place. He suggests that this might be a possible model for investigative journalists to go freelance as newspapers’ decline reduces funding for their kind of work.

Ingram notes that Amazon isn’t the only short-book/long-article market, either. A number of other publishing ventures are offering help to journalists who want to publish their own longer works.

As I’ve pointed out a number of times before, the term “book” has become so fluid that it can now mean almost anything a writer wants it to. What that does to traditional publishing is a question mark (it’s probably not good) but what it does for writers is almost unquestionably good.

Of course, Singles are far from the only new opportunity Amazon has produced; much better-known is the enabling effect it has had on self-publishing. It just goes to show that it’s an ill wind that blows no good.

Not only does this mean S&S is splitting print and digital rights—something publishers have been so reluctant to do in the past that they sued when RosettaBooks wanted to do it for backlist titles—but given the pricing Locke puts on its e-books it would seem like a rather risky move for the publisher.

For S&S, it is surely a gamble. One of the major reasons Locke’s books sell is because he prices them cheap at $0.99 (49p); S&S must be thinking hard about the size of the print runs and the right price point. US mass-market paperbacks are generally priced around $8.99, which may be a bit too steep for Locke’s fan base.

For 99-cent books, the royalty Amazon offers is only 35%, not the 70% much-beloved of self-publishing authors—but even so, 35% is still a greater percentage than the 25% publishers have balked at offering.

Will more publishers follow suit and allow authors to self-publish their own e-books while they concentrate on print? It seems unlikely, but in today’s turbulent world of e-publishing, who can say?

As Tim Carmody put it on Wired:

So instead of an independent born-digital press, publishing next-generation multimedia novels (or magazines or textbooks or children’s books or cookbooks), Facebook will probably get marginally better iOS apps.

Carmody suggests that this is a bad thing and will reduce the amount of innovation available in interactive e-book publishing. And I can see that. But on the other hand, it’s not as if Push Pop was the only fish in the sea. There are plenty of innovative digital publishing platforms out there, and the removal of one from the market doesn’t mean the others won’t continue to innovate.

And who knows, if there aren’t any more Push Pop interactive e-books, perhaps Facebook will take on some more interactive e-book-like qualities itself. Regardless, this isn’t going to end all of e-bookdom, and hopefully the talent behind Push Pop will make its creativity felt in other ways.

Creating a D2C website, Sayce explains, is a three-step process, requiring building first the website itself, then a strong relationship with readers, and finally brand awareness. She goes into more detail about the process, and notes that Firsty Group is currently helping many publishers go through it.

Going D2C certainly seems to have worked well for Baen, which has gone through all three of those steps and boasts a thriving community and a high level of brand awareness among those folks on the ‘net who read the SF and fantasy books Baen publishes. But Baen did have a ten-year head start on everybody else. It remains to be seen how well it will work for today’s publishers, and whether it will end up leading to unwanted market fragmentation as some fear.

(For an overview of the various editorial roles, see Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor.)

This was brought to mind the other day when I was contacted by a client to copyedit a new medical book. The client’s inquiry included these points:

has recommended you for a new title, which requires copyediting, and we need someone who is a subject matter expert in physiology with a strong science background to copy edit this book, as some sections may need to be rewritten.

…

Language edit required: Yes (Many of contributors are not English speaker so will need copy edited pretty closely for language, especially for the chapters written by a non English speaker)

(Emphasis supplied.) The project was approximately 600 pages and needed to be completed within three weeks. The client estimated that the editing could be completed in 92 hours. The fee? The standard copyediting fee.

I declined the project for several reasons. Here is my written response:

I appreciate you and thinking of us for this project, but I don’t think we fit your needs for three reasons. First, none of us are subject-matter experts in physiology. We are very experienced medical copyeditors, but that is not the same as having expertise in a particular subject area.

Second, you mention rewriting sections. That is the job of a developmental editor, not a copyeditor. Although we can do developmental editing, our fee is significantly higher for doing so, especially if English is not the native language of the original authors. Copyeditors work under the guise that the project has already been developmental edited and although they may change a sentence or two for tense or ease of reading, copyeditors do not rewrite paragraphs and sections.

Finally, if a project needs developmental work (again, especially if English is not the original authors’ native language), I think the schedule you propose is too tight for normal working hours. I’m not clear on how you came up with your estimate of 92 hours being needed to do the job, but that equates to approximately 6 pages an hour (using your stated number of pages as 549; we always reserve the right to verify the page count based on our agreement with ), which, in my experience over 27 years of medical editing, is much too high if rewriting is required (again, especially if English is not the original authors’ native language). Rewriting work under such circumstances more often than not works out to an editing rate of 2 to 3 pages an hour.

I didn’t bother emphasizing that the fee was inadequate for a developmental edit, which clearly was the level of editing expected. And it also needs to be remembered that in addition to doing the editorial work — grammar, spelling, syntax, etc. — the copyeditor also needs to code every element of the manuscript for typesetting, often by applying a template and tags.

This request is typical of the inquiries I am receiving (and have been receiving for quite some time). It is not enough for editors to be proficient in the tools of editing; editors are expected to rewrite and to have subject-matter expertise.

I have edited thousands of books over the course of my 27 years as an editor, but I don’t believe that turns me into a subject-matter expert. True I have greater familiarity on a broad level with the subject matter, but expertise is gotten by a combination of specialized training and practical experience, not just reading: Simply because I have edited hundreds of medical books does not qualify me to be a doctor.

The demand for greater expertise and for higher-level service is a result of bean counting. When I began my career, publishers had a budget line for developmental editing and a separate budget line for copyediting. It was expected by everyone in the publishing loop that a project would go to copyediting only after it had been developmentally edited. But in the press to reduce costs and increase profits, the segregation of the tasks has slowly disappeared and now everything that can be called editing is bunched together under the name copyediting. (Worth noting is that copyediting is a less costly budget line than developmental editing, thus the merger of developmental editing into copyediting rather than vice versa.)

This merger by publishers is also reflected in dissatisfaction expressed by authors over the editing that is done. Authors see the edited manuscript either as proof pages or as marked up copy (usually using Word’s track changes). The real problem is when authors first see the edited version in proof pages, without the benefit of seeing all the work that the editor did clearly defined. Authors tend to see every error that remains as a major error and vocally complain. They forget that the purpose of proof is to catch the errors that slipped past during copyediting or that may have been introduced during the copyediting and typesetting processes.

The balance is off-kilter. The expectations of authors and publishers soar as the various editorial roles are blended, yet the output of the editors cannot keep up with those expectations for numerous reasons, not least of which are insufficient time allocated by the client to do the tasks and inadequate compensation.

It isn’t clear to me what an editor can do in the face of these changes. Today, editors are caught between the increased demands of clients and the increased competition among editors for work. The one thing there is no shortage of is the number of people who call themselves editors; the number of “editors” rises daily, and as that number increases, there is a downward pressure applied to compensation and an upward pressure applied to the number of tasks expected to be performed by the editor – too many editors are competing for that shrinking pot of available work.

Little by little the face of editing is changing. Whether it is really for the better for anyone — author, publisher, or editor — is questionable. Editing is a hands-on task that requires sufficient time and expertise to do competently, let alone well, yet all parties are losing sight of this, as the growing requirements with reduced time allocations attest.

Via An American Editor.

(Photo: sidewalk flying)

Simply put, publishers continue to remain reluctant to convert their books into digital formats due to cost, as well as their own ongoing fears about digitization.

Why are publishers so suspicious when it comes to e-books? First, they believe e-books will eventually cannibalize their print book business. Second, they suspect the book market will continue to decline and, ultimately, become less lucrative. Third, they think international e-book businesses, especially Amazon’s Kindle e-bookstore, will destroy the Japanese distribution system dominated by two companies, Tohan and Nippan, whose shareholders include a dozen of Japan’s major publishers.

This may sound like an irresponsible and self-destructive approach to outside market forces, but the Japanese publishing industry, argues Kamata, operates “more like a society to which the privileged members have belonged for generations.” He notes that last year, “a major business magazine had to cancel its cover story about distribution in the publishing industry” because it was too critical about what publishers consider sensitive private topics.

To fight off the Amazon menace, the publishers are working with those two distribution companies mentioned above to sell ebooks directly to consumers, but because they’re keeping ebook prices at 70-80% of print price, consumers are ignoring them—and the ebook market remains stunted.

Read the full article at Publishing Perspectives.

(Photo: TAKA@P.P.R.S.)

There’s not much information about the device on the RomantiCon page, other than that it comes preloaded with 60 short stories and will be sold on the convention floor starting September 30th. Based on the rendering provided, it looks like the device is a sibling to a couple of models from Russian companies Digma and Prology, but tellingly the EC model ships with a Chinese dictionary.

I contacted Susan Edwards, the COO of Ellora’s Cave, and conducted a short interview by email with her to find out more about why the publisher is striking out on its own.

What was the inspiration for this?

Susan Edwards: Although our books are or will shortly be available through all the major ebook vendors, we do still have a lot of loyal customers who buy almost solely from our website. We wanted to provide them with a non-proprietary reader that they could use for all their ebooks, but that would also make it easy to continue to buy directly from us, where they still get the best price and can take advantage of all of our sales and purchase incentives.

Plus, we do a lot of conventions, trade shows, contests, p.r. and giveaways. We had been purchasing proprietary e-readers for those purposes and thought, why not have our own e-reader? It’s great advertising and it, again, makes it easy for people to come to our site and buy directly from us.

This model, which we’re calling ECave C71, is a very limited edition test run that we are rolling out at our RomantiCon convention. We will give many of them away as prizes, and so will be able to work closely with a limited population of users to make sure the device does everything they want it to before deciding on future models and functions.

Can you provide some details on the device? It looks like the Prology Latitute T-701.

SE: It’s very similar to that one. It wasn’t manufactured by them, but has very similar specs and does use the same operating system.

This first model does not come with a cover, though it fits the sleeves available for the Nook and the Kindle 3. Right now, we’re testing the water with the device to gauge interest. If we decide to go larger scale, we will probably have a selection of our own covers to choose from.

You mentioned a “vibrating key” functionality. What!?

SE: It’s a tactile feedback function, like the clicking sound you get when you tap keys. We chose the vibration rather than the usual click mostly just for fun. We are, after all, primarily an erotic romance publisher, and we like to have fun with that, so we often inject a note of fun around the sexuality of our content.

Have you set a price?

SE: We are still working on determining an exact price point. We would definitely like to sell it for less than other e-readers, with some built-in purchasing incentives: something like a combination of free e-books preloaded on the device and a discount on the purchase of additional e-books. We are looking at different models in a range of prices for the future.

How does EC plan on handling warranty and service issues?

SE: We have a great customer service department, so most of the support issues will be handled via that existing department. Any problems we can’t solve through that avenue, we will work directly with the manufacturer on and we will replace any faulty devices. That’s part of the reason we are starting out small, to make sure we are getting dependable devices from reliable manufacturers who stand behind their products.

The similar Prology and Digma models seems to offer a lot of extra functionality, like a radio, photo viewer, voice recorder app, calculator, and so on. Will those things be in the EC model, or is it going to be customized to work solely as an ebook reader?

SE: The ECave C71 features photo, music and video functionality. It truly is a multi-media device at a fraction of the cost of most tablet PCs. It does not feature wireless connectivity but can be accessed via the usb cable provided or by loading various media onto a separate MicroSD card.

Do you see this as a way to exert some control over your market segment when it comes to ebooks, which is currently dominated by huge companies like Amazon, Apple and B&N?

SE: Many of our customers have been buying, downloading and reading our books on their computers and other digital devices for years. We have always worked to keep up with their preferences by providing our books in whatever format they prefer so that we can retain them as customers. This is really just an extension of that practice, and it very definitely does help us to retain direct access to our market segment.

Edwards also answered a lot of detailed questions about capability:

• Connects to your PC via USB; drag-and-drop ebook files onto the device.
• It will accept protected ebooks that have been unlocked by Adobe Digital Editions. (EC doesn’t use DRM on its own books.)
• No notes or highlights.
• The built-in dictionary is in Chinese. Edwards adds, “Since we do have very frank colloquial language in our books, I can’t imagine what some of those translations might be.”
• Notes, highlights and dictionary may be updated in the future, depending on customer response.

Here are some specs provided by Edwards’ team, which match closely to the specs listed on the Digma product page:

• 7-inch high clear TFT digital screen 720p (Resolution: 800 x 480 pixels)
• CPU: Rockchip2729
• OS: Unix-based
• 4GB Storage Capacity, Supports Micro SD cards up to 32GB
• Ebook formats: TXT, PDF, EPUB, CHM, HTML, PDB, UMD
• Photo formats: JPG, BMP, PNG
• Audio formats: MP3,WMA,FLAC,WAV,APE
• Video formats: AVI, RM, RMVB, WMV, MP4, PMP, MPEG, FLV,VOB, 3GP etc.
• Battery: Li-ION 1800mAh
• Playing time(with earphone): 6 hours movie, 10 hours music

Based on the tech specs on the Digma product page, the ECave C71 dimensions look to be approximately 190 x 120 x 11 mm—roughly the same size as the Kindle 3, but about 50% thicker.

A few interesting things that came out of this discussion include the contention that, even though e-book readers and tablets have taken off in the last few years, the amount of time spent on screen-based reading is actually decreasing.

Some ascribed this to device convergence and the greater choice available to today’s consumers. Though the rise of the smartphone and tablet has made it easier for readers to continue their reading in the bus queue or the doctor’s waiting room, it has also offered them a range of other media to compete for their time, from games and the web to films and television programmes; even the Kindle offers magazines and syndicated blogs as an alternative to ebooks.

It was also suggested that readers might be finding less time for reading lengthy works, which suggests that e-publishing programs concentrating on shorter works (such as Amazon’s Kindle Singles program) might be the way to go.

Another topic participants raised is that the prevalence of electronic reading should make it easier than ever for publishers to get a handle on readers’ habits and find out exactly what they want so they can meet customers’ needs better. However, companies like Amazon, Apple, and Google have proven unwilling to share that sort of information with publishers.

And there were also echoes of a point that has been raised time and again: the suggestion that publishers are being held back in a digital world by processes that evolved to deal with print, and need to develop new skills to work in the world of the web and social networking. Publishers need to be willing to experiment with new formats, though this can be a costly process.

I suppose that with so many conferences trying to help publishers find their way into the digital future, sooner or later they’ll have to, right?

The pros of this program are immediately apparent: the interface is rather DIY friendly, the icon design seemed crisp and best of all the creation of the TOS (Table of Contents) couldn’t be simpler. One merely highlights the chapter heading as an h1 or h2 (or any ‘h’, really) for each chapter, then hit a button and “voila!” the beautifully-linked chapters appear in a list on the right hand side, glowing in their success and all ready to be tested. This contrasts to the more involved, coded approach that users of Calibre have struggled with, sometimes abandoning their TOS altogether.

I was also pleased to see that Sigil forms all the files necessary for an ePub file (the epub, the cover image and the metadata file) into one easy-to-upload unit, which consumers likewise can download in a less-confusing fashion than juggling three separate files.

The cons of using Sigil were not as clear as the pros, and unfortunately have proven–thus far–to be insurmountable. The program does not ‘like’ imports of text formatted in html and its ePub “validation” process creates a long list of errors to “repair” with very little information on how to find or fix said errors. After combing through various ePub-makin’ forums I managed to glean a few answers and apply them, but as of yet the ePubs I’ve made with Sigil still won’t work on either of the two devices I’ve uploaded them to. It could merely be my own inexperience with the newer program, but I noted that I had viable, readable ePubs using Calibre in less than half the time it took Sigil to generate its list of errors. I was saddened by all this, mostly for the loss of the svelte TOS for whose sake I embarked on a two-day quest for forum help. Hopefully, I can find all the errors and deliver another piece detailing what ‘worked’ but, for now–in my opinion-Calibre remains the top self-publisher’s open-source ePub creator.

Via Greene Ink

Specifically, Kowalczyk is testing an app called Phoster, which provides 70 templates that let you combine your own artwork with pre-designed typefaces and layouts. With the right photo and some thoughtful adjustments, the resulting images can pass for clean, modern book covers that look better than 80% of the self-pubbed ebook covers out there.

I’ve used Phoster myself and agree that the end results are impressive, but I’ve never taken it to this next step for a couple of reasons. The first is that I’m not sure how high a resolution you can produce (judging by some of the Flickr pool submissions, it’s dependent upon the source photo up to a point). The other is that I’m not sure the developer has given permission to use the templates for commercial purposes. I’ve asked him to respond to this via Twitter.

But in the bigger picture, it’s a perfect example of cheap* new digital tools that can help improve the self-publishing workflow.

* Not counting the cost of the iPad, obviously.

Okay, maybe I need to say a bit more about this.  As in: Why did I do it?

The short answer is, I did it because my book sales have been in a slump for the past few months.  I could, of course, speculate on all sorts of arcane market forces, bad breaks, genre popularity slips and pirate conspiracies to account for that, but I’m pretty sure the primary reason is that no one knows about my books, and no one who’s bought my books is telling anyone else about them.  That’s a shame, because my original marketing strategy was supposed to take advantage of word-of-mouth to get my books going in the market.  Unfortunately, it looks like the initial push I got from word-of-mouth did not generate enough inertia to get them very far, and now the books are stranded in stagnant waters.

That means I must ramp up my marketing efforts to keep the books going.  I’m still looking into many other strategies I can apply, but one of the quickest and easiest was to drop my prices; so I decided to do that now, while the other strategies are in-process.

Why 99¢?  That was a tough one for me, for two reasons.  First, my books were previously on sale for $2.99US.  Compared to most of the ebooks out there, at $8 and up, I thought that was a great deal, and I didn’t think my books would need to be priced any lower to make them stand out in the market.  The second reason is that there is still a stigma against the 99¢ ebook; it is often perceived that it must be cheap in content because it is cheap in price, and probably not worth buying except as a curiosity, an impulse buy, a throw-away purchase.  It’s a tough stigma to break, especially as so many 99¢ ebooks really are garbage…

However, at $2.99 sales of my books were about as dry as our East Coast summer.  Also, there is also a lot of evidence that 99¢ ebooks can do well in the market, providing the jump-start for many books and series.  And apparently a lot of ebook consumers are committed to the idea that ebooks in general cost far too much—being, like, just electrons and all—and fight against paying more than a few bucks for any but the most best-selling authors.  Many ebook consumers base their ebook searches on price, making 99¢ ebooks prominent on their search lists.

The 99¢ ebook hasn’t done magically well for all authors, of course; however, there are enough authors who have reported notable success with the 99¢ ebook, and recommend it to other authors (including me), that I have finally overcome my reluctance and decided to take the plunge.

So, that’s it.  Nothing philosophical or personal or Machiavellian about the decision… just a practical marketing ploy by a practical ebook writer.  Obviously, I’m not expecting Hocking numbers (if I wanted that, I’d be writing about sparkly vampires), but hopefully sales will get a noticeable bump from the price change, and I might earn enough to take my wife out to dinner.  Once.

Still, if you’ve ever felt that a publisher wasn’t taking the ebook edition seriously, perhaps it will please you to know that typos are increasing in print editions as well. Heffernan noted two stinkers, “Buckminster Füller” and “habberdasher”, in recent first edition hardcovers.

Read “What Typos Mean to Book Publishing” at the NYT’s Opinionator blog.

(Photo: kvanhorn)

Delabarre put its first title up for sale in August 2010, and over the past eleven months has sold over 7,000 copies, most of them at the $2.99 price point.

In the interview, Rutherford talks about why he chose to lead with joke books, and why he thinks publishers should take book titles and SEO more seriously. There’s also some talk about the financial side of things, including that he offers advances and “nearly equal” royalty agreements (he won’t say what the split is exactly) with authors who enter into an ongoing partnership with him.

“Working with a self-publishing publisher” (mp3 file) [Taleist]

From Johnson’s report:

One of the roadblocks to developing Japan’s e-book market lies in the usability of e-book stores and devices, according to Fujio Noguchi, Senior General Manager of Sony’s Digital Reading Business Division. Noguchi said currently, customers are confused about where to buy e-books and how to get that content on their devices. For this reason, Sony has formed a partnership with Kinokuniya (the largest bookstore chain in Japan) and Panasonic in order to create a seamless customer experience when buying and reading e-books on a variety of devices. In this way, Noguchi said, “we hope we can cultivate the market further.”

You can read the full post at Publishing Perspectives.

(Photo: Rollofunk)