Simon & Schuster has entered a deal to start publishing books by self-publishing star author John Locke. There’s not so much that’s new about that in and of itself—after all, just a few months ago several publishers bid on works by self-publishing star Amanda Hocking. But something that is new, the Bookseller points out, is the terms of the publishing agreement: Simon & Schuster is just taking the print books and creating a new imprint to do it, and Locke will continue self-publishing his own e-books. Not only does this mean S&S is splitting print and digital rights—something publishers...

Today Push Pop Press, the e-publishing firm who produced an interactive version of an Al Gore climatology book, announced today that it has been acquired by Facebook. Facebook has no interest in publishing interactive e-books, and Push Pop has announced it will no longer be publishing anything. Instead, Facebook will be incorporating Push Pop’s technology into its own platform. 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. ...

Futurebook has an article looking at a recent discussion in Soho held as part of a “Future of Publishing” conference series. As the piece points out, it seems like you can’t turn around without running into another conference or other event trying to determine how to deal with the “future of publishing”, but this series differs in that it tends to offer some hands-on exercises aimed at finding practical solutions. 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...

In May, I mentioned a writer’s thoughts on what the rise of the e-book would mean for book covers. Today I found an article considering what badly-designed covers mean for particular e-books. We reported in March on agent Sonia Land’s deal to publish Catherine Cookson’s backlist digitally through Amazon, bypassing Cookson’s print publishers altogether. On Futurebook a few days ago, Simon Appleby posted a column poking fun at the e-books’ frankly hideous covers. Essentially, all the book covers look more or less like the one posted at left; the only differences are the title and the background...

Carrying on the electronic self-publishing theme of my posts tonight, Michael Stackpole (whose self-publishing efforts we’ve covered before) has a blog post talking about the reasons some authors fear self-e-publishing. He discusses the perceived illegitimacy of self-published books (a holdover from the pre-Internet days when self-publishing meant “vanity press”), pointing out that the traditional publishers don’t exactly have clean hands in that regard anymore either. Traditional publishing surrendered it’s claim to being gatekeepers every time they let a crap novel get printed. Am I to believe that Snooki is ever going to be short-listed for...

I suppose it was inevitable. As self-e-publishing has drawn more and more attention, with relatively major-name authors deciding to forego pro-publishing and go it alone, and over 1/4 of the Amazon Top 100 list being made up of such books, now signs of an anti-pro-publishing “backlash” have popped up. Blogger switch11 at iReaderReview points out the “mistake” one popular self-publishing author made when he decided to sign up with Macmillan. There’s no other way to put it – Signing a book deal was a huge mistake. John Rector could have been a Top 100 Kindle...

Salon Magazine’s Laura Miller has an article looking at the recent moves by Barry Eisler away from and Amanda Hocking toward traditional publishing, and how the current author-marketed nature of the publishing industry means that even traditionally-published authors have to be their own publicist to a greater or lesser extent. This is, of course, a problem that has been apparent at least ever since the Internet expanded beyond the ivory towers of government and academia, and publishers started standing back and letting authors do more of their own marketing while they did less. It didn’t spring fully-formed from the...

In response to John Scalzi’s e-publishing bingo card, Flickr user Shmuel 510 put together a “Traditional Publishing Bingo Card” containing the arguments he’s tired of hearing in favor of traditional publishing. Like Scalzi’s card, it’s still missing some (in particular, the “smell of books” question again goes unmentioned) but also like that card, it’s particularly dead on in what it does have. It was rather hard picking just four squares to excerpt for this posting. (Found via BoingBoing.)...

John Scalzi has created a hilarious “Electronic Publishing Bingo” card, of which I’ve excerpted the first four squares at left. Go to the site to see the whole thing. Scalzi notes that he is not himself hostile to e-publishing (given that he owes his discovery and subsequent career to a couple of self-e-published novels), but he does get tired of hearing the same arguments (from all sides) over and over again. Of course, there are still plenty of those talking points that there wasn’t room for on the card. As one commenter on BoingBoing points out, it’s missing the...

The Bookseller reports that a Nielsen Book study shows that the number of new books being published every year is steadily rising, due largely to the influence of digital and print-on-demand publishing. Of course, this figure comes from the ISBNs that Nielsen issues; if the number of books published without ISBNs (offered for sale directly via websites, local stores, or other means) has also increased, that might make it even greater. This puts me in mind of the old argument about how the Internet has “killed” the music industry, and the oft-heard retort that, no, it’s just hurting the...

Publishing analyst Mike Shatzkin, back from Digital Book World, has an interesting piece on his blog looking at the effect that non-publishers getting into the publishing business could have other publishers. He talks about a discussion he had with a distinctly non-tech-savvy publisher of renown who was now running his own smaller operation. This publisher felt that the advances in reducing the cost of small-scale publishing should make it that much easier for him to publish books. He wasn’t concerned by all the self-published stuff he would be competing with, since 99% of it would be dreck, but as...

Joe Konrath has posted again about his successes with self-publishing through Amazon. (We’ve covered a number of such posts from him already.) This time he couches it in the form of a “bedtime story,” which is a bit cutesy but it gets the point across. Soon, Joe was making over $1000 a month on Kindle. Joe was shocked by this. He thought the only way to make a living as a writer was with the Gatekeeper. The Gatekeeper offered advances. The Gatekeeper did the editing and the cover art. And most importantly, the...