After a decade of flat income from printed books and hemorrhagic siphoning of e-book revenues  by pirates, Random House got the green light from parent organization Bertelsmann to alter its corporate charter and become a nonprofit organization. Though the company tried to put a good face on it, the move is a tacit admission that the book business is unprofitable.

To implement the changeover and compete with filesharing pirates, the firm will slash list prices to $0.00. The logic behind the strategy was laid out by a Random spokeswoman: “It’s good will. We believe that customers seeking free books will prefer to patronize a branded company like Random House rather than some no-name buccaneer.”

The company cafeteria will be converted to a soup kitchen for indigent authors, according to one employee who spoke anonymously.

Random’s move was acclaimed by the literary agent community, which itself went non-profit several years ago. “Most of our members now do volunteer work, like reading to children at libraries,” said a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives. “It’s so much more satisfying than dealing with authors.”

Only a few years ago, a 50% reduction in the first printing of a bestselling author would mean she had entered the dreaded Death Spiral from which there is no recovery.

For those of you who have not been trapped in the cockpit of a plummeting career, the Death Spiral works like this.  If the printing of your first novel was 100,000 but net sales were only 35,000, your publisher will print only 35,000 of your second book.  And if that one nets only 15,000 your publisher will print only 15,000 of your third book – if your publisher is loyal enough to offer you a contract on a third book.  In all too many cases, as printings and sales spin to earth in a sickening downdraft of failure, publishers will not sign you up for new books.

Blockbuster author Jean Auel – 45 million copies of her Earth’s Children prehistoricals  in print worldwide – has just taken a big hit with the printing of the sixth book in the series, Land of the Painted Caves. Her publisher, Crown, issued 465,000 copies, a big drop over prior printings.  Yet neither she nor her publisher seem overly concerned.  Why?

“There has been a sea change in publishing since Ms. Auel’s last book, ” says New York Times book beat reporter Julie Bosman.  “In the last year, many anticipated novels have sold as many e-books as print books in the first week of publication.” Auel says ““I don’t care if they read it in e-book or in hardcover….If they enjoy it, I don’t have any objection.”

For authors threatened with a nosedive, e-books may be the wind beneath their wings.

Read Promoting Jean Auel’s ‘Land of Painted Caves’ as an E-Book.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Enhanced e-books.  Here today, gone tomorrow?

In a recent interview with Michael Healy, Director of Google’s Book Rights Registry, Simon & Schuster President and CEO Carolyn Reidy offered many cogent observations about the e-book business including the fact that e-books represent as much as 60% of the initial sales of a newly released book.  You can read it all on Teleread. However, many who read the dialogue may have missed this significant comment by Reidy (obviously condensed by the transcriber):

“Enhanced ebook market is not very strong and some of the biggest sellers have still been less than 2,000 copies. Still experimenting doesn’t appear that public is enthused by the concept. Don’t do any apps any more because are very expensive to make and get lost in the App Store, don’t know how to get them recognized in the mass of stuff in the store. Can’t put apps into the bookstore which makes it harder for them to be found.”

“Enhanced” has been the hot byword in publishing for the last year or two and has even been the cause of friction between publishers and film companies. Movie people feel that if a publisher makes a book that looks like a movie and sounds like a movie, it’s a movie and the publisher is infringing on the moviemaker’s territory.  If other publishers come to the same conclusion as Reidy – that it’s just too expensive, time-consuming and unprofitable – the enhanced e-book may die aborning and we will all wonder one day what the fuss was about.  Then you’ll remember that you heard it here first. (See One-Word Explanation of Why Enhanced E-Books Won’t Work.)

Richard Curtis

A deliciously entertaining but instructive controversy has arisen over the review of The Greek Seaman, a self-published novel by an English writer named Jacqueline Howett.  A reviewer writing under the handle “BigAl” posted a critique describing the story as “compelling and interesting.” But he also slammed it for being rife with spelling and grammatical errors.  He gave the book two stars and complained “Reading shouldn’t be that hard.”

Whereupon the author lost it. First she blamed the proofing problems on the fact that BigAl had reviewed a flawed copy of the book. “You obviously didn’t read the second clean copy I requested you download that was also reformatted, so this is a very unfair review.” Then she marshaled positive Amazon reviews to prove her book deserved more stars than BigAl had awarded it. Then she got out the knives and took after BigAl personally, calling him names, insisting he withdraw his review and demanding that he come out and fight like a man and answer private emails she sent him.

A host of commenters rushed to BigAl’s support, accusing the author of unprofessionalism. Finally BigAl defended himself in a comment of his own, citing such solecisms as:

“She carried her stocky build carefully back down the stairs.”

and

“Don and Katy watched hypnotically Gino place more coffees out at another table with supreme balance.”

We have not read the book and cannot judge its literary or grammatical merits. We can however draw some inferences from the author’s rabid attacks on her tormenters:

• “Al was given the option of a free copy from smashwords the following day to download in any format he preffered…”
• “…you could choose any format you wanted to read it in and if their were any spelling mistakes they were corrected.”
• “This is not only discusting and unprofessional on your part, but you really don’t fool me AL”
• “Your the target not me!”
• “Just look at your ball all of you”
• “Why read the wrong copy? that don’t make sense.”
• “Also in the new copy you did not have to click at all to get to the next page on Kindle, so thats how I now he never downloaded the clean copy.”
• “You are a big rat and a snake with poisenous venom.”

It’s hard not to concur with the anonymous commenter who said “The best part is that even your comments, Jacqueline, are full of misspellings, awkward phrasing, grammatical errors, and typos. So I’m certain those creep into your writing. And if you didn’t have a good editor (or even an editor at all), then it’s not hard to believe what the reviewer is saying.”

Ms. Howett’s response?

“Fuck off!”

You can read it all here.

Richard Curtis

Thanks to SRB.

Authors – time to lawyer up?

The United States Supreme Court has refused to hear an appeal of a lower court’s ruling that digital music royalties should be treated as a license.  Given the similarities between music and book contracts, the implications for authors are significant. Below is our original article on the subject published in October 2010.

Don’t just stand there. Look at the royalty language in your book contract.

RC

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Is there a reason why publishers are not wailing, gnashing their teeth and rending their garments over the Eminem decision?

Maybe they haven’t heard about it. Maybe they don’t understand it. Maybe they don’t think it applies to them. Maybe they just don’t want to think about it at all.

They really must think about it and so must you. The case heard by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals was ostensibly about music but you can bet it won’t be long before it’s about e-books, and it could throw the publishing industry’s royalty structure into chaos.

Ethan Smith of the Wall Street Journal explains the issues (the italics are ours): “Under most recording contracts, artists are entitled to 50% of revenue from licensed uses of their music. That usually means soundtracks for movies, TV shows and ads. Sales, on the other hand generate royalties for the artist at a much lower rate—generally in the low teens, and rarely more than 20%.”

For “recording contracts” read “publishing contracts”. Under current book industry standards publishers pay authors a 25% royalty for e-book sales. Their contracts also call for a 50% share of e-book licenses made with third parties. But publishers do not consider e-book revenue to be license revenue. If they did they’d have to pay authors 50% of what they receive rather than half of that amount.

In the case in question, Eminem’s producers F.B.T. Productions brought a lawsuit against Aftermath Records claiming that what Aftermath defined as sales were really license revenues and Aftermath therefore owed them the difference between the low royalty they were being paid and the much higher share of license money. The three judge panel of the San Francisco Federal court agreed:

Pursuant to its agreements with Apple and other third parties…, Aftermath did not “sell” anything to the download distributors. The download distributors did not obtain title to the digital files. The ownership of those files remained with Aftermath, Aftermath reserved the right to regain possession of the files at any time, and Aftermath obtained recurring benefits in the form of payments based on the volume of downloads . . . Under our case law interpreting and applying the Copyright Act, too, it is well settled that where a copyright owner transfers a copy of copyrighted material, retains title, limits the uses to which the material may be put, and is compensated periodically based on the transferee’s exploitation of the material, the transaction is a license.

For a cogent analysis of the case and its implications for the book industry, read Copyright Alert: 9th Circuit Holds Digital Downloads are Licenses Not Sales by copyright authority Lloyd J. Jassin, to whom we’re indebted for bringing the case to our attention.

It will not surprise us to find a flurry of amendment letters from publishers in the next few months saying “Wherever we refer to ‘royalty’ we mean ‘license’ but we’re still going to pay you 25% of what we receive.”

Richard Curtis

The following story was submitted to us anonymously, but so far we have been unable to verify it.

A team of researchers has unlocked the secret of successful self-publication and is ready to guarantee that anybody applying the formula can duplicate the 100,000+ Kindle sales reported by Indie superstars.

Studying the techniques of pioneer indie writers like Joe Konrath, Amanda Hocking, John Locke and Selena Blake, the grad school geeks focused on multiple price-changes in concentrated periods of time. “What unlocked it for us was the realization that e-books are an ever-fluctuating commodity like soybeans and sorghum,” said  the mellifluously named Trini Rongbuk, leader of the research team.  “By changing the price hundreds of times within the hour, we are able to rival the bestselling independent authors and get any book, no matter how bad, on Amazon’s top 100 list.”

To prove that the formula works, Rongbuk, who had never even published a letter to the editor, uploaded a 50,000 word stream-of-consciousness screed she titled Garbage and began manipulating the list price between $.99 and $9.99 thousands of times over a 24 hour period. Sales soared and by the end of the test period she smashed the one-day Kindle sales record to smithereens.  At the end of the experiment she collapsed and was taken to the hospital for dehydration and severe carpal tunnel syndrome.

“This proves that anyone can sell hundreds of thousands of e-books as long as you keep the list price constantly in motion,” said one of her partners.

The experiment has attracted the attention of a group of asset managers  interested in packaging the program and developing e-books as a speculative commodity.

Agent and E-Reads publisher Richard Curtis was interviewed by Gatekeepers Post publisher Jeff Rivera. The two industry leaders explored the emergence of a corps of gatekeepers that is very far from the establishment elite that we grew up with.

You can listen to the podcast here.

You can also read Richard Curtis’s posting about Gatekeepers here . ************************************

The Gatekeepers Post is the leading social media book publishing community on the web Richard Curtis is probably one of the most respected people in the book publishing industry. He’s incredibly smart, wise and a true visionary who foresaw the eBook revolution years before the masses. In today’s audio interview with the veteran literary agent and Publisher of E-eads, he discusses with us the true pros and cons authors need to keep in mind when they are deciding between publishing directly or publishing with an e-book publisher such as his company. If you’re about to load your book on Kindle yourself, you might give serious thought to listening to this interview first.

Suleiman the Magnificent, Grand Sultan of the Ottoman Turkish Empire and the most powerful ruler in the world, was determined to conquer Europe. Only one thing stood in his way: a dot of an island in the Mediterranean called Malta occupied by the Knights of St. John, the cream of the warriors of the Holy Roman Empire. A clash of civilizations was shaping up the likes of which had not been seen since Persia invaded Greece.

Determined to capture Malta and use its port to launch operations against Europe, Suleiman sent an armada and an overwhelming army in 1565. A few thousand defenders in Fort St. Elmo fought to the last man, enduring unimaginably cruel hardships. When they captured the fort the Turks took no prisoners and mutilated the defenders’ bodies. Seventy year old Grand Master Jean Parisot de la Valette of the Knights reciprocated by decapitating his Turkish prisoners and using their heads to cannonade the enemy. Then the battle for Malta began in earnest: no quarter asked; none given.

The Siege of Malta was not merely a gripping tale of brutality, courage, and tenacity, but the saga of two mighty civilizations struggling for domination of the known world. In the ebb and flow of the battle on this scrap of land the destiny of Europe teetered in the balance. Though the conflict took place some 450 years ago, it resonates to this very day.

Some years ago, after visiting Malta I came across The Great Siege, Ernle Bradford’s account of this pivotal event, and it left me stunned. I had never read a more gripping work of military history. When I began inquiring about its status I discovered that it was out of print. A visit to Amazon.com revealed almost universally five-star reviews and numerous pleas for someone to bring it back into print. Now that I was a publisher I asked – why not me? I made some inquiries and located the owners of the rights.

The happy upshot is that E-Reads is thrilled to bring back The Great Siege. Click here for the Kindle Buy Link. Below are excerpts from some of the 21 five-star reviews on Amazon.com, and here is the first chapter.

I know that when you read The Great Siege you’ll share the high opinion of one reader who said “This is truly a great book.”

Richard Curtis

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Stunning read, brilliant story, absolutely compelling!
I just don’t know how this story has escaped the clutches of Hollywood. The Great Siege of Malta has to be one of the most amazing conflicts of military history.
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Probably the best book of all time related to the Knights of Saint John and the Ottomans.
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…a cliffhanger up to the last pages
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The siege of Malta is one of those great episodes of history where almost super-human courage and bravery triumph against overwhelming odds.

If you like adventure read this book: besides reading like a fascinating adventure story it happens to describe real-life actual facts. Beats any Hollywood epic, IMHO.
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For anyone who claims history is ‘boring’ this book is the remedy – an absolute page-turning account of a desperate battle. The account, though historically informative, reads like a novel. It is concisely written, expressive, and utterly captivating; I could not put it down.

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This is a truly great book. Mr Bradford is so passionate about his subject, so vivid in his detail, that it’s all you can do not to book a plane ticket to go and see for yourself. The detail is staggering – he recreates the past with the love and care of an artist. It is a book about the Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem and their struggle against the Turks of the Ottoman empire – and it’s a ripping good read.

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An amazingly heroic defense of the knights and the Maltese against an amazing siege of the navy of the Magnificent and his generals. When I read in my middle school history class, this siege just was an unsuccessful one-sentence event in the hundreds of pages of the Ottoman Empire, but, while reading this book, I felt like I watched and lived the siege minute by minute. And I felt like this was the most important siege of all times (it truly might be!).

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What an epic film this would make as some of the events ring true to this day.
A must read for anyone interested in the advent of gunpowder, heroic and defiant stands, massive battles and some incredible characters like the leader of the knights, La Valette who was seventy years old while leading the defense himself! Most enjoyable book of this nature that I have ever read. Powerful stuff.

Harlan Ellison is not profligate with compliments. So, in his lips, “Damn him, he’s good” is a benediction. And he pronounced it over George Alec Effinger’s Heroics.

Like everyone in the future, Irene struggles with boredom. Food, clothing, and all the necessities of human life have been taken care of. But, what does that leave of life itself? At eighty-two, Irene sets out on a pilgrimage across America hoping to find the answer. Along the way, she becomes transformed, both physically and by her interactions with other civilians all trying to cope with this new world.

Filled with wry humor and fantastic symbolism, Heroics mixes adventure and philosophy in a way both engrossing and entertaining. Here’s that complete Harlan Ellison quote: “It is the best Effinger yet…and for those of us who have been watching with amazement that is about as rich a compliment as you can expect from other envious authors. Damn him, he’s good!”

George Alec Effinger was a true master of satirical Science Fiction. Before his death in 2002, Effinger was a prolific novelist and short story writer, earning acclaim from his fans and peers, including a Nebula Award nomination for his first book What Entropy Means to Me. In Heroics, he revisits some of the themes and characters of that first book for startling, funny and poignant results.

Daniel would be glad to phone for a taxi for Kelly, this ravishing and mysterious creature who seems to have appeared out of nowhere – but phones and taxis have not been invented yet. But we get ahead of ourselves (that’s what happens when you talk about time travel fiction!).

Kelly Brennan, a beautiful young widow, arrives at the door wearing a horrible lime green silk and organza bridesmaid’s dress. She seems confused and talks about strange devices like “telephones” and “cabs”–things that don’t yet exist in this post-Civil War New Orleans.

You see, Kelly has traveled backward through time to an era of gentile southern manners and a calm pace of life she had only dreamed of in her modern, hectic world. Adding to Kelly’s confusion is the uncanny resemblance of her charming gentleman host, Daniel Gilmore, to her late husband Michael.

Is this all a dream? Are Daniel and his precocious daughter Lizzie real? As Kelly begins to adjust to life in the past, she faces an even greater challenge–opening her heart to a man who himself has known great loss and sadness. Can Kelly and Daniel find love not in the past nor in the future, but in this jumbled present?

In Time After Time, Constance O’Day-Flannery, the original “Queen of Time Travel Romance,” proves that true love can never be lost. It simply waits to be found in another time, at the perfect time.

If you find romance in other eras besides the one you live in, try some other Constance O’Day-Flannery time travel romances.