Publishing Perspectives has an interesting story about a book assembled to raise money for Haiti in the wake of the devastating earthquake. The idea behind 100 Stories for Haiti was to assemble 100 stories from all over the Internet, and then publish them as a book and e-book.
Author Greg McQueen says that the book would not have been possible five years ago, before the dawn of social networking:
As it happened, I posted [to social networks] an appeal for stories on the morning of Tuesday, January, 19. Just one week after the earthquake that left over 200,000 dead. The final deadline for submissions was Wednesday, Jan, 27 and the manuscript actually went off to the printers on Feb 14. So, in three weeks, we went from an appeal to a finished manuscript.
It is being published as a print book by UK publisher Bridge House Publishing and an e-book via Smashwords on March 4th. Pricing for the print book will range from £2.30 for the UK to £10 (about $15.41 at current rates) for the rest of the world; the e-book will have pay-what-you-like pricing starting at £1.
In a separate editorial, Edward Nawotka uses this book as an example to wonder why traditional print publishers cannot come to market faster. As some comments to his post point out, in part it depends on the kind of book. An 80,000-word collection of assorted stories is naturally going to be faster to edit than a 120,000-word novel that has to go back and forth between publisher and author several times.
Still, it is interesting to note that at least some print publishers can work faster if they really want to. Just consider all the books on O.J. Simpson that suddenly blossomed on bookstore shelves like dandelions in the sidewalk when his trial was going on.
In fact, any time there is any big newsworthy event, there is a veritable explosion of sudden books about it. This is definitely food for thought.
Related: the DriveThruRPG digital RPG fundraising drive for Haiti; Paul Biba’s previous article on 100 Stories for Haiti
Perhaps because publishers have a vested interest in controlling content and market placement and which books are on the shelves at any given time? Despite what people may think of their apparently ham-handed handling of ebooks, they aren’t dummies…
Scott Nicholson
I understand the need for non-fiction books to be current but do we really care that a novel takes a while to publish? In my case, as with many publishers, I’m working on a queue. It doesn’t take long to publish any particular book (and I will say my queue is much shorter than many of the big publishers who’ve already filled their 2011 and even 2012 slots (I’m still working on 2010)), but still, I’ve got books in my submissions list, books I’ve contracted and waiting for the legals, books I’m actively editing, books I’m waiting for response from authors on my edits, books I’m integrating author responses.
If I just wanted to push through one particular book, I could do so in a couple of weeks. But that would just mean pushing back the other books in the queue which doesn’t seem quite fair.
Rob Preece
Publisher