Here’s an intriguing experiment in e-publishing promotion. Scribner is going to release the new Stephen King short story “Mile 81” free to select members of the online-social-influence-ranking site Klout, a week before it goes on sale as an e-book single for $2.99. Apparently the idea builds on the marketing notion of identifying important trendsetters and influencers and pitching your product to them, enticing them to then pitch it to everybody else. It’s just that Klout seems to think it can measure exactly who those people are. Is this going to be a clever new way for authors to promote...

According to the Wall Street Journal, King made $80K for his novella "UR" written exclusively for Amazon. King says: I didn't do "Ur" for money. I did it because it was interesting. I'm fairly prolific. It took three days, and I've made about $80,000. You can't get that for short fiction from Playboy or anybody else. It's ridiculous. ...

Galleycat has a tidbit from a forthcoming Mediabistro feature on marketing guru Seth Godin: Godin has pledged never again to publish books via traditional publishers. Godin said, in part: I like the people, but I can't abide the long wait, the filters, the big push at launch, the nudging to get people to go to a store they don't usually visit to buy something they don't usually buy, to get them to pay for an idea in a form that's hard to spread Godin is no stranger to direct-to-consumer e-publishing. In 2001, he...

Every week it seems something new is happening in eBookland to set the ebook cause back a decade or two. Always at the forefront of the reversal of fortune is greed. This week’s menace to eBookland is literary agent Andrew Wylie and his new publishing venture Odyssey. Wylie could have summed up his actions in simple terms: to disserve both his clients and the ebook-buying public. What, you ask, did he do? He agreed to give Amazon exclusive rights for 2 years to his authors’ backlist titles; Wylie will publish the books and exclusively sell them through Amazon. The backlist includes...

For an author to “build a community” with his readers has become a popular catch phrase in recent times. In particular, Richard Nash has talked at length about how community-based publishing is the main purpose of his new venture, Cursor. When you have a close relationship with your readers, the thinking goes, they are much more likely to buy your stuff. However, community-building can have a darker side as well, as this March editorial by Guy Gavriel Kay, one of my favorite authors, reveals. Kay talks about how some authors, such as George R.R. Martin and Patrick...