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...

Are agents still necessary in the new e-publishing world? I’m running across a number of people who don’t seem to think so. For example, self-publishing writer Stephen Leather opined in a recent interview with The Bookseller Magazine: I think agents will be the hardest hit by the eBook revolution. There is almost no negotiation with Amazon over royalty rates so if you are dealing with them it’s pointless to pay an agent fifteen per cent. It used to be agents who acted as the gatekeepers – more trendy jargon – and they pretty much decided who...

The quality issue is often brought up as one of the biggest drawbacks to the rise of independent/self-publishing. “There’s so much slush, how do you find the fraction of percent of books that are actually worth reading?” However, in her latest blog post, Kristine Kathryn Rusch points out that this may be the wrong question. Rusch points out that a lot of commercially-published books aren’t so hot either, but in terms of finding books you want to read, it’s really beside the point. Hundreds of thousands of books are published by traditional publishers every year, and even if we...

Kristine Kathryn Rusch has posted an essay to her blog about abundance-based versus scarcity-based thinking, and how ingrained scarcity-based habits are making it harder for the publishing industry to adapt to the new abundance-based world of the Internet and e-books. The publishing industry used to be strictly scarcity-based. Shelf space on bookstores was a valuable and limited resource, and books could only stay there for a limited amount of time before being shipped back to the publisher for destruction or discount resale. But Amazon came along and changed all that—by having effectively unlimited shelf space, Amazon can sell you...

Paul forwarded to me an email from Michael O’Neil from the National Coalition Against Censorship, with a press release noting that the NCAC and the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) are mobilizing to put pressure on PayPal to reverse its requirement that online bookshops stop carrying certain kinds of erotica. Scribd carries a copy of the open letter the organizations sent to PayPal. The press release says: The ABFFE and NCAC letter notes that PayPal’s policy has the potential to suppress important literary works.  “Incest, rape and bestiality have been depicted in world...

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. ...

Found via a post on the E-Book Mailing List today, a fantastic blog post by writer Sarah A. Hoyt, that links to an equally fantastic blog post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (which is of related but not identical subject matter to the blog post by Rusch we covered back in March). Rusch’s post, made back in May, is intended to be an eye-opener, a clarion call to the publisher-bound writers that Michael Stackpole analogizes to Roman “house slaves”. Traditional book publishing, Rusch warns, is traveling down the same road that rock music has. She points to examples from music-industry...