The emergence of search engine optimization (SEO) significantly changed the way that web content is created. Will the digitization of e-books, and the offering of free sample chapters, change the way that books are plotted and written? This is the question asked by Alan Jacobs in an article on The Atlantic. And he finds that in some ways it already is. Jacobs points out that a number of authors are trying to plot their books so that a major cliffhanger occurs at the end of the 10% that Amazon provides in its sample chapters. He also notes that the...

On the blog The Bliss Quest, a blogger who goes by Athena writes a lengthy, thoughtful post looking setting a price for her self-published book. After her last publisher offered her a contract that would only pay her 5% of the book’s cover price (and her editor actually told her “Writers don’t write to make money, they write because they must”), she started looking longingly at the 70% revenue that self-publishing would offer her, and trying to figure out just how many copies she would need to sell at what price in order to make back minimum wage for the...

You may have heard the T.S. Eliot quote that says mediocre writers borrow, but good writers steal. Sometimes this can be astonishingly literal: PaidContent reports on a New York Times bestselling erotic novel that started out as alternate-universe Twilight fanfic, originally posted in its entirety to (though later deleted from) fanfiction hosting site FF.net. The novel, Fifty Shades of Grey by British author E.L. James, reimagined Twilight set in contemporary Seattle, apparently without the supernatural elements found in the original vampire novels: instead of a werewolf, Edward is a “masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections.” Presumably the published...

Matthew Ingram at GigaOm takes a look at a Seth Godin interview (which is actually interesting in its own right for all the stuff Godin said that Ingram didn’t cover) to cherry-pick a comment from Godin that authors should be willing to give their books away for free as e-books and focus on building a fan base rather than trying to make money right away. Godin said: Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled...

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley’s personal blog, Above the Crowd, has a post pointing out why Dropbox is a “major disruption” (that is, a disruptive innovation—”an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology” per Wikipedia) in the industry. Prompted by a new feature Dropbox added, to allow Android devices to synch photos automatically, Gurley points out that it’s easy to underestimate the importance of what Dropbox has done. He explains that Dropbox was the first...

Author Cat Valente has a guest post over on Charles Stross’s blog. She’s been writing a series of posts on writing and publishing, and this one looks at the current “us vs. them” mentality when it comes to self- or traditional publishing. Valente points out that there’s no self-publishing magic wand that will make your books an instant success—but that while all the self-publishing boosters pay lip service to the idea that it’s going to take a lot of hard work to make it in self-publishing, there’s always this subtext that there really is some sort of magical...

Remember last April, when I covered an article suggesting that publishers could use no-compete clauses to keep writers from publishing backlist e-books? At the time, I hadn’t thought it was the sort of thing a publisher would actually do, but the latest blog post by author Kristine Kathryn Rusch tells another tale. Rusch warns her readers against several sneaky tactics publishers use to slip no-compete clauses into their contracts. These clauses often say that the author will not publish any “competing” works, or any other works for a specific period of time, without written permission from the publisher. ...

Should we learn to stop worrying and love the Amazon? That’s the position espoused by writer/publisher Bob Mayer in a post to his blog “Write It Forward”. Mayer co-founded independent publishing house Who Dares Wins Publishing in January 2011, and “went from selling a few hundred eBooks that month to earning seven figures.” He doesn’t see a threat in Amazon, but instead sees opportunity. Mayer has some books in the Kindle Select program, but he is also providing exclusives to Barnes & Noble and doing business with Kobo and others as well. I’m not...

Technology writer and blogger Robert X. Cringely (the one behind the 1996 TV miniseries Triumph of the Nerds, not the InfoWorld columnists) has announced he is going to be rebooting his written-in-1989, updated-in-1996 history of Silicon Valley, Accidental Empires for the modern Internet age: he is going to blog it. Over the next few months, Cringely will be reposting the entire book to a blog, and inviting reader participation to help him update it for the final e-book form. Like most blogs, this new one will allow reader comments. And it’s those comments I’ll use...

We’ve mentioned the e-writing app Scrivener (available for Windows or OS X) a time or two, and some of our commenters have expressed fondness for it. Indeed, even my brother loves it and has been pestering me to try it; he seems to think that lack of Scrivener is all that’s keeping me from writing the next Great American Novel. I have to admit, with the things I’m seeing about it I’m definitely starting to get tempted to try it out. On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that...

Fair’s fair. If we get upset over something Apple’s done, we should also mention when they fix it. So, remember the kerfuffle over Apple apparently claiming rights in the user agreement over commercial sale of any e-book created in iBooks Author? Well, Ars Technica reports that Apple has just released a patch to the app, and iBooks Author v1.01 includes a clarification in the EULA: it specifically covers only e-books generated in the interactive .ibooks format. (Emphasis mine.) If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated...

A post by Robert McCrum on the Guardian books blog on “the power of paper in the digital era” didn’t turn out the way I thought it was going to from the headline. I expected it to be another one of those “paper books rule, e-books drool” stories we’ve been seeing with increasing frequency lately, but instead it took quite a different approach. McCrum discusses the dichotomy of paper archives and digitization. Thanks to digital copies of records, author Sarah Thornhill was able to do much of the research for a historical novel based on her ancestors without ever...