Do I really have to say anything else?  I have dropped my ebook prices, across the board, to 99¢ ($0.99US). Well, except for the free books.  They're still free. 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...

In the wake of the Amazon/Macmillan e-book pricing affair and the reader comments it stirred up, Charlie Stross has decided to tackle some common misconceptions about the publishing industry on his blog. He has made two posts so far. The first misconception Stross covers is simply that “the publishing industry makes sense.” He notes that a lot of discussions about “the publishing industry” treat it as a more or less uniform entity where every part works about the same as every other part. He goes on to explain that this is not quite true. For the rest...

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a post on O’Reilly’s Tools of Change website that I wanted to cover, but it was so long that I never actually got around to looking at it in the detail I needed, until now. Fortunately, the article is still no less timely. This piece is an interview with Richard Nash, a theater-director-turned-publisher who has now launched a “social publishing” start-up called Cursor. Nash talks about Cursor and its goals, then goes on to discuss some of the broader implications of publishing meeting the kind of “Web 2.0” interactivity that is...

Self-publishing has gotten easier and easier lately, with the arrival of print-on-demand services such as Lulu and on-line stores such as Amazon offering their own packages. But until now, the potential self-publishing author has been handicapped by one critical factor: he actually has to write the book (or arrange a ghost-writer) himself. But now VentureBeat reports on a self-publishing site called FastPencil that is offering a “Thought Leadership” program. FastPencil will provide business leaders and CEOs with a ghost-writing team that can translate their ideas into a book which they will then distribute as print and e-books through...

Switzerland is looking at reinstating its fixed book price law. This law, like those in France, Germany and Italy, restricts the sale of books below the publisher's recommended price. The rationale is to support independent booksellers, small publishers and chains that have to compete with Amazon. There is currently some dispute as to whether the new law should apply to online book retailers. More info here....

The New York Times has an article covering the implications of the impending agency pricing model for book sales. It mentions the one-star ratings that have shown up when e-book editions have been delayed or perceived as too expensive, and warns that publishers may be in for more than they bargain for with the increase in price. Many of the arguments that we have covered in detail over the last couple of weeks make their appearance here: the cost of printing and shipping a paper book versus price of e-book, the sense of “entitlement” displayed by consumers, and the...

Rupert Murdoch has been in the news lately for his strong stance against content aggregators such as Google News. Interestingly, it seems his daughter Elisabeth does not share his views on content “theft”. In a speech to the NATPE national TV conference, Elisabeth Murdoch recently stated that some piracy may be inevitable. "Fans remain the best salesmen of our content, even if that behavior is on the borderline of piracy. Danger of the new world is that we must concede that we'll lose some control." Murdoch said that social networking might be...

I don’t know how I could have missed this. Cyberbooks by Ben Bova, one of the seminal fictional depictions of e-books, finally became available as an e-book itself last year—and best of all, it’s a Baen e-book which means no DRM and a wide variety of formats. Cyberbooks was published as part of the Ben Bova anthology Laugh Lines, available in the November 2009 Webscriptions month for $15, or by itself for $6. The book is a brilliant, scathing satire of the publishing industry (in fact, I’m a bit surprised that the original publisher had enough of...

We had a great show today on The Biblio File, marred only by a minor technical malfunction in the middle. I was joined by Paula Berinstein of The Writing Show (as well as a number of listeners in the text chat) and we talked for over an hour about Ficbot’s and my posts, the Amazon/Macmillan situation in general, and related matters. The 30-megabyte mp3 file can be downloaded here (right-click and choose “save as”), or streamed from the show’s homepage. At some point it will be available in the  iTunes podcast section as well. Items we...

I’ve been looking for good articles on Amazon/Macmillan from the authors’/publishers’ perspective I could link here that were thoughtful and analytical beyond the “here’s what’s happening” posts (and subsequent snark) Scalzi and Stross have been posting—and thanks to this post at Making Light, I finally found one. In this piece at the Huffington Post, music-exec-turned-author Susan Piver compares Amazon’s sales of e-books at loss-leader pricing to the big box chain stores’ sales of compact discs at loss-leader pricing in the 1990s and the subsequent death of music stores and homogenization of the national music scene. I grew up...

Earlier I complained of the botch that Amazon had made of the listings for The Solomon Scandals---news of interest to others with small press books in E or P. Just how helpful is it when the most conspicuous listing in the Amazon catalog says your novel isn’t available in the United States? Well, I’m delighted to report that Amazon not only has zapped the DRMed version of Scandals at my request, but also has deleted the listing for this phantom edition. Big thanks to Sarah B and her team. She reports that the delay in the removal of...

In November we reported that Book View Cafe had gone live. Now, Book View Café, a digital publishing cooperative for professional authors, has announced it has partnered with Smashwords to distribute Book View’s growing ebook catalog, including titles by from such well known authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Vonda N. McIntyre, Sarah Smith, Seanan McGuire and Laura Anne Gilman. The authors of Book View Café are all veterans of the publishing world, having worked with some of the largest print publishers including Penguin Books, St. Martin’s Press, Tor Books, and Simon & Schuster. Book View Café is one of a growing...