I know I'm coming a bit late to this party, but I was out of town while everyone was discussing James Patterson's ad. And I'm kind of glad I was. It gave me time to digest what other people were saying and form my own opinions. I wasn't in favor of the government bailout of the automobile and banking industry, for exactly this reason. We set a precedent. Now people can say, "Well you bailed them out; what about us?" Which is exactly what Patterson alluded to in his ad. That genie's out of the bottle. We're going to see lots more...

It was the first day of my first college English class, and the teacher of our freshman seminar opened the discussion by announcing that, in this class, we were going to read only books written by women authors. My first thought was that that seemed to be a rather arbitrary and meaningless distinction. Then she asked us to stop and think over the books we had read in our recent high school English classes. I mentally ran through the list. I was stunned. They were all male. And I hadn’t even noticed! This moment many years ago marked the beginning of...

David Gaughran published a scathing article yesterday on Argo Navis Author Services and the agents who are promoting it to their clients. I wasn't surprised that yet another barely dressed up distribution service was attempting to convince authors to give up a ridiculous percentage for services which are little better (and arguably worse) than those offered by Smashwords. I've gotten used to the sudden proliferation of ways to separate authors from their royalties. I was disappointed, but hardly surprised. According to their page, Argo Navis is "specifically for authors who control e-rights or reverted print rights, and have been published by a...

When I read the DBW article yesterday entitled "7 Must-Consider Strategies for Ebook Pricing," I ended up scratching my head. What happened to "listen to the consumer and what they consistently tell you they want?" That sounds like a good idea when considering pricing e-books. Apparently not. It started with strategy #1. "Charge extra for convenience." Here's the quote: Though ebooks cost less to print, ship, and stock than paper books, they’re much more convenient for readers. So why not charge extra for that convenience? With this strategy, the price of an ebook would be higher than its equivalent in paper—isn’t immediate...

It's easy to always talk about publishers who get it wrong, and yes, lots of them do. Bookish, anyone? (Where you can get recommendations, but it's all a one way street, and many, if not most, of their articles are aimed at books or authors published by the houses behind the site.) Tor, an imprint of Macmillan, gets it right. About once a week, they send out a newsletter packed full of information about movies, TV shows and books. Because they are a sci-fi/fantasy imprint, most of the news is about those genres, but that's OK. Most of their readers are likely...

I'm a bit behind on reading Rusch's blog on the business of being a writer, but one of her recent articles on binge reading (which also touched on Hydra) was excellent food for thought. Note that her article didn't cover Hydra's recent changes in its royalty and payment structure, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth reading, both as readers and as writers. Rusch discusses reader habits, and how there's no such things as "too many books" for a popular author. She also talks about why traditional publishers limit the number of books an author can release in a year. (Hint, it's...

Many publishing insiders and authors have been discussing Random House over the past week. The company might wish it had stayed out of the news as criticisms came down over its digital imprints, especially Hydra, which handles science fiction. In case you missed the news, here’s the basic version: Contract specifications for Hydra were made public, and many realized the terms were not ideal for authors. The digital imprints offered a publishing package with no advance, and with net proceeds that would be split 50/50. In addition, the author would have to pay a one-time fee for set-up costs such as...

TeleRead has earlier covered two stories about some bad publishing experiments: The first was about the scammy contracts Random House was offering authors who signed with their digital-only imprint. The second was about a Canadian newspaper, the National Post, which was trying to extract 'licensing' payments from readers who were trying to quote from their stories in a legal way under fair use rules. In both these stories, I pointed out that neither business was being illegal, per se—but that they were being fishy, and would learn their lesson if people raised a loud enough hue and cry. Well, it's happened! I...

It sounds suspiciously like a story from The Onion: 'Fifty Shades' author to publish writing guide. But nope—it's actually a real-life AP wire story that appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer's website this morning. Scheduled to be published on May 1 by Random House's Vintage imprint, Fifty Shades of Grey: Inner Goddess (A Journal) will be a combination of author E.L. James' professional writing advice and—get this—blank journal pages for readers to fill with their own words. Wow. You definitely don't need an English lit degree to see this book for what it is: A fairly easy way to make a pile of money by cashing in...

Independent comic book creators will get a new outlet for their creations. Earlier today, ComiXology announced the launch of ComiXology Submit, where comic book and graphic novel creators can upload their files for free. ComiXology will then transform the files to be read on its platform, which itself can be accessed across a variety of apps. “While we continue to push ourselves to innovate the digital comic experience, ComiXology Submit provides an incredible opportunity for creators to sell their work to a highly targeted and global audience of comic book and graphic novel fans,” said ComiXology co-founder and CEO David Steinberger, in a release. “The next generation...

Science-fiction, adult-themed novels and other types of genre fiction have made an impression on the digital world. Little, Brown UK’s Clare Smith thinks literary fiction is obviously the next step in the e-book world. The company has created Blackfriars, a digital imprint to be launched in June. “I think the thing for me, with doing a strategic review of fiction, one of the things that seems really clear is we’ve reached the tipping point of genre fiction,” says Smith, Blackfriars’ publishing director and associate publisher. “It’s just not obvious to me why you wouldn’t do digital-only literature.” Blackfriars will kick off with three...

I've always been a sucker for stories about the history of American pop culture. So when TeleRead founder David Rothman sent me an email last weekend with a subject line that read, "This Was the First Word Processor Ever Used By a Novelist. It Weighed 200 Pounds and Had to Be Brought in Though the Window," I bit. Truth be told, I don't know the first thing about the history of typewriters or word processors—or pencils or papyrus or stone tablets, for that matter. Matthew Kirschenbaum, however—an author and associate professor of English at the University of Maryland—has spent years researching the literary...