No no no! We meant the Espresso printer!

Don Quixote’s demented crusade could not be more – er, quixotic – than our advocacy of print on demand kiosks.  We’ve promoted their installation not merely in bookstores and libraries – the logical place for them – but in such counterintuitive locations as drug stores, truck stops and bagel shops.

With the advent of print on demand technology there is no longer any reason for books to be sold only in bookstores, though certainly bookstores would be a good place to start. We  particularly urge the management of Borders to use its space (what remains of it) as a showroom for a million-book library that can be downloaded or manufactured on the spot.

If you want to see how our promotion of e-book and POD kiosks has nearly deranged us, click on this menu of coocoo articles dedicated to the subject.

Several factors have limited the adoption of POD on a mass commercial basis. One is the ungainly size of the printers (though that has not discouraged the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass.).  Another is the lack of an organized, gung-ho sales force.   These barriers however, may soon come down according to Publisher’s Weekly‘s Judith Rosen.

Rosen reports that “a new partnership with the American Booksellers Association to help get frontlist and midlist titles from mainstream houses (something that has eluded On Demand Books to date), an agreement with HarperCollins for some backlist titles with the promise of new releases at some point in the future, and more involvement from Xerox, the Espresso Book Machine could be poised to become a bookstore staple. The marketing arrangement with Xerox last March gives the On Demand Books a sales force of 4,000, and more financially attractive leasing options for the Espresso Book Machine.”

Which is why, despite our having been knocked off our horse so many times, we are ready to remount and charge the kiosk windmill yet again.

Details in Book Machines Near the Tipping Point?

Richard Curtis

Not long ago, in connection with a patent lawsuit over the touchscreen page-turning function of certain e-books, we wrote: “Patent attorneys are the ticks of the Digital Age. After quietly applying for a patent they set up their nest on a tree branch and patiently wait – sometimes for years – until a fat cat walks underneath their perch. Then they drop on their victim’s neck and drain its blood.” (See Can You Be Sued for Turning a Page?)

The ticks are back at work, falling this time on the neck of a colossus, Apple. It seems that J.T. Colby and Co., the firm that purchased the assets of bankrupt publisher Byron Preiss, is aggrieved that Preiss long ago cornered the term “iBooks” and Apple’s use of it “is likely to overwhelm the good will of plaintiffs’ ‘ibooks’ and ‘ipicturebooks’ marks and render them virtually worthless.”

Preiss did in fact publish e-books under those monikers and, according to Steven Musil reporting on cnetnews.com, took out a patent “for science fiction books.” However, a search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office indicates that the patent is “listed as abandoned as of 2003.,” writes Musil.

“Another USPTO search,” he goes on to say, “reveals an Apple filing for iBook in 2010 that describes ‘software for reading electronic publications on digital electronic devices.’”

So it looks like the ticks have their work cut out for them. Often these things end up in quiet settlements, so we may never know the upshot, but if we hear of anything arising out of Apple sued over its use of ‘iBook’ we’ll get back to you.

Richard Curtis

E-Reads is giving away Kobo Reader gift cards worth $25.00 to two lucky winners. To enter, all you have to do is sign up for the E-Reads newsletter.  The offer ends July 4th.  Winners will be selected at random.

Kobo is a global e-book retailer offering over 2.3 million e-books to readers in over two hundred countries. The company supports ePub and enables readers to read its e-books on their smartphone, Sony Reader, laptop, or any other device they choose. About Kobo’s recently released eReader Touch Huffington Post raved, “…Makes massive ultra-modern leaps…”

Click here to participate.

Years ago the late Evan Hunter lamented to me that his pseudonym was more famous than he was. Under his own name* he had written some pretty famous novels several of which, like The Blackboard Jungle and Strangers When We Meet, had been made into movies. But The 87th Precinct, the detective series he created under the name Ed McBain, was a huge hit. The irony that his nom de plume eclipsed his vrai nom drove Hunter to distraction. It reached a point where the normally clean-shaven author had to grow a beard for the author photo of “Ed McBain” for which fans clamored.

This is just one of countless stories I could tell you about pseudonyms. They came flooding back to mind when I read about a recently published book, Nom de Plume: A (Secret) History of Pseudonyms by Carmela Ciuraru.

In an excerpt published in Salon she touched on the psychological stress that might have tormented Hunter. “The merging of an author and an alter ego is an unpredictable thing. It can become a marriage, like a faithful and sturdy partnership, or it can prove a swift, intoxicating affair. A clandestine literary self can be tried on temporarily, to produce a single work, then dropped like a robe; or the guise might exist as something to be guarded at all costs. The attraction is obvious and undeniable. Entering another body (figuratively, ecstatically) is almost an erotic impulse.”

In Hunter’s case it became a kind of addiction that his fans would not let him break. But I have also known authors who loved their alter identity so much more than their own that they had their names officially changed. I have known authors whose careers were rescued by writing under a false name, and others whose careers were ruined by it.

For prolific authors pseudonyms are a must. Too-frequent publication cheapens the product, so publishers are loath to schedule books less than six months apart, and for significant authors it’s twelve. Writers capable of writing two or three books a year will fall further and further behind waiting for their publisher’s green light. Thus a pen name liberates them to write for other publishers or even to double-up for their own publisher. Both Nora Roberts and her pen name J. D. Robb are published by Putnam, for instance.

But there are other reasons besides fecundity for employing a pseudonym. Frequently authors whose sales are weak will be asked by their publishers to write under a pen name to get out from under the onus of poor numbers. The problem with this ploy is that the newly christened author is unknown, and stores will therefore order modestly.  What’s worse, the author cannot easily promote the book under his or her pen name.

Roberts is an obvious exception. So is Stephen King, whose prolificness spawned a successful new identity, Richard Bachman. But King eventually gave the name up. “The author,” writes Ciuraru, “subsequently issued a press release announcing Bachman’s death from ‘cancer of the pseudonym.’ King dedicated his 1989 novel The Dark Half (about a pen name that assumes a sinister life of its own) to ‘the late Richard Bachman.’”

Before becoming a literary agent your faithful correspondent wrote dozens of books. The most successful was the novelization of the John Carpenter movie Halloween. It garnered rave reviews, which you can read on Amazon. But don’t look it up under the name Richard Curtis.  I wrote it as “Curtis Richards”.

Read all about pennames in The decline of the pseudonym.

Richard Curtis (a.k.a. Curtis Richards)

*Actually Hunter’s birth name was Salvatore Lombino but he had it legally changed.

In connection with comments about literary agents who also operate publishing ventures, digital book industry authority Mike Shatzkin said this about E-Reads:

It is worth noting here that there’s one dog that hasn’t barked. Richard Curtis was the first ebook publishing agent. He set up his E-Reads business over a decade ago. He also pays 50% royalties. Richard did not create E-Reads to compete with publishers on royalties but because when he did publishers just wouldn’t do the ebooks. He has built his enterprise since that time to nearly a $1 million annual business (meaning that he’s delivering half-a-million a year to authors for properties that, at least until very recently and perhaps still, would never have been put into ebooks by a publisher.) But his name is noticeably absent from the chorus using higher ebook royalties as a public prod to bedevil publishers.

For the complete article click here.

Responding to input both from readers and authors, E-Reads has cut list prices for a wide range of selected e-book titles.  Many novels previously priced at $9.99 have been slashed as low as $2.99.  All nonfiction, previously priced at $12.99, will now list at $9.99 or lower.

“After surveying readers and authors and studying creative pricing strategies developed by independent authors, we felt that a drop in price per unit would be balanced by a rise in volume,” said E-Reads CEO Richard Curtis. “The move seems to have worked, as our volume has already risen 10% in the month since the changes took hold. We will continue reviewing and adjusting prices as the market demands.”

E-Reads, founded in 2000, is a leading independent reprinter of previously published books. Its e-books are sold worldwide in the English language at the Kindle, Nook, Sony, Apple, Diesel, Kobo and other retail and library websites, and trade paperbacks at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

“Are you going to rape me?”

That’s not the kind of opening line calculated to make a reader shut a novel and put it back on the shelf. Nor is the rest of the exchange:

“Are you going to rape me?” Sarah asked in English, trying hard to keep her fear from showing in her voice.

Kalid Shah devoured her with the intense dark eyes she remembered from their previous meeting. The eunuchs on either side of her, their oiled black skins gleaming, held her in place with grips of iron.

“If I chose to do so, there would be no one here to stop me,” Kalid replied flatly in the same language, with a British accent. He made a slight dismissive gesture and the eunuchs released her, stepping back. He said another short word abruptly and they left the room, bowing their way out.

That’s how Doreen Owens Malek starts her gripping and deeply romantic historical novel The Panther and the Pearl.  Sarah Woolcott, spirited and independent, always yearned to escape the Victorian mores and monotony of 19th century Boston. Now, she finds herself trapped in the harem of a Turkish prince, unable to escape back to America or even the relative safety of Constantinople.

Pampered and tightly controlled, Sarah knows she will never submit willingly to this world of courtesans and servants. Yet, Kalid Shah, the startlingly handsome man who has purchased her, carries an indescribable assuredness about him. He longs to possess this blue-eyed American woman–not simply her body but her heart as well.

As fate pulls these two together, violence and the traditions of this foreign land threaten to tear them apart. Will passions overrun them? Can they overcome the divide between their worlds? Will Sarah and Kalid’s mutual longings be able to set each other free?

E-Reads is putting Doreen Owens Malek books back in print as fast as we can, so keep your eye peeled on her author page.

With The Other Hand Clapping E-Reads adds yet another great work of erotic fiction by Marco Vassi, possibly the greatest erotic writer of his generation. His first publisher at Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, compared his prose to Henry Miller’s.

In The Other Hand Clapping, Larry and Eleanor had been married for four years when Larry first began studying Zen seriously. Now, two years later, Larry stands facing a mirror. He has entered into “the great doubt,” a psychological impasse in his studies that threatens to rip his marriage apart.

Soon, Larry’s mind is overtaken by suspicion of infidelity on the part of Eleanor. Is the evidence real? Is it a hallucination brought about by his meditation? Or is this all some sort of metatheater acted out by a wife feeling her husband slip away? Whatever the case, passion inevitably transforms into suspense, and all-encompassing distrust pushes the couple toward a possibly violent climax.

Although Marco Vassi’s life was cut short, his memory lives on here with the release of The Vassi Collection.

To learn more about this amazing writer, read An Intrepid Voyager to a World of Searing Erotic Fantasies.

It started as Book-of-the-Month Club. After merging with a number of rivals it became Bookspan, then Booksonline, with a club to suit every reading taste from war to crafts to spirituality to mysteries to African American to gay and lesbian and even, yes, to literature. But time, technology and demographics have taken their toll, and now the clubs have all but succumbed as Bertelsmann, the publishing colossus that owned most of them, announced it was closing the division that operated them.

Almost 85 years ago a marketing genius created the brilliant – some say diabolical – principle on which the Book of the Month Club was founded. It was called the negative option. By signing up, subscribers would receive (and be required to pay for) a book every month unless he or she actively requested that no book be sent. The founders counted on sloth, one of the seven deadly sins, to insure that subscribers would neglect to inform the club that they didn’t want a book this month (or any other month). Only very recently was the negative option abandoned as clubs sought to reinvent themselves.

They sought in vain. As populations shifted to cities from the rural demographics that fed book clubs, as book shops and chain superstores popped up in suburban malls, as deeply discounted hardcovers and cheap paperbacks and ultimately e-books took their hacks at the flesh of these beached whales, book clubs lost their audience, their profitability, and, at last, their reason for being.

The wickedness of the negative option aside, book clubs brought literacy, joy and culture to millions of households, and their passing should be noted with bared head.

For more about book clubs, click here.

Richard Curtis

Book clubs are such solid fixtures in the lives of authors, agents, and publishers that we take them for granted, like enormous monuments that we no longer notice on our way to work every day. How impoverished our literary environment would be without book clubs can easily be grasped when you realize that millions of Americans subscribe to them. And because changes in pricing, reader tastes, distribution, marketing, and other trends have drawn new attention to the functions of book clubs, this is a particularly good time to examine this phenomenon.

Book clubs (and I’m referring to commercial clubs, not the informal discussion groups that have sprung up in living rooms over the last decade) were an outgrowth of attempts to reach a larger segment of the reading population than was then being served by bookstores. Experiments like department store book clubs (there were Macy’s, Gimbel’s, and Bloomingdale’s clubs among others) and tie-ins of cheap editions of books with the sale of products (a tobacco company included miniature volumes of Shakespeare plays in its cigarette packs) inspired an enterprising merchandiser named Harry Scherman to found the Book-of-the-Month Club in 1926. He perceived that an enormous potential audience, particularly in rural areas, had inadequate access to bookstores in towns and cities. Mail order, which worked so successfully for many other products purveyed to rural people, ought to work with books, too, Scherman reasoned. And he was right.

Scherman, however, put a twist on this concept that made it a dramatic departure from the Sears, Roebuck approach. It’s called the “negative option,” meaning that unless members expressly indicate that they do not want the latest selection, the club will assume they don’t it and will send it to them. Scherman’s insight into human nature was almost diabolically shrewd. Perhaps he didn’t trust that members would buy books simply because they were good, and he counted on such human foibles as laziness, guilt, and confusion to make members default on their obligation to return their cards in time to prevent clubs from shipping selections to them.

Whatever the motives of Scherman and subsequent book club entrepreneurs, the clubs caught on fast and hard, sweeping the country and, in the process, revealing some serious flaws in the way that books in this country were (and still are!) distributed and promoted. One publisher observed that “the clubs advertised books extensively and nationally, sold them regularly to people who had previously been only occasional book buyers and, most importantly, fostered the habit of regular reading,” according to John Tebbel in his excellent book about American publishing, Between Covers. Tebbel cites book clubs aimed at business people, engineers and other professionals as particularly effective in reaching audiences that conventional bookstore marketing simply could not touch.

Not unexpectedly, the creation of the clubs provoked a great outcry among retail bookstore owners, who felt gravely threatened by them, particularly when a competitive club, the Literary Guild, added the wrinkle of offering books for prices below retail. Many retailers accused publishers who dealt with clubs of collaborating with the enemy. Harder to comprehend was the opposition by publishers, who after all did stand to profit from licenses to clubs. Their contention, however, was that the clubs represented an element of crass mercantilism and cynical exploitation of the hallowed spirit of literature (publishers believed the oddest things in those days!). The Bookman asserted that book club members were “too feeble-minded, too lazy, or too busy to make their own choices.” But book clubs were an idea whose time had come, and after consolidating their gains during the Great Depression of the 1930s (reading being one of the few affordable pleasures of that grim era), they became the institution we revere today.

With few exceptions, the basic idea concocted by Scherman has not changed. A lot of other things have, however, forcing clubs to take measures to keep up with changing times, tastes, and conditions.

One of these is the shrinking of rural America, making bookstores accessible to people in all but the remotest reaches of the nation. Fortunately for the clubs, accessibility of bookstores is not by any means the most important factor for potential book buyers. Indeed, urban members constitute a large portion of the clubs’ memberships. A far more important element is price. Book clubs offer discounts on the list prices of books, starting at around 10 percent, and additionally offer free bonus books plus sign-up inducements such as free sets of books.

As long as a wide gap existed between bookstore and book club prices for books, clubs could hope to continue doing a healthy business. The critical test came when the paperback revolution took hold, making paperback originals and reprints available for prices far below those offered by clubs to their members. But the clubs came through the test unbowed, revealing how solidly the convenience factor figured in the thinking of book buyers.

Most recently, the clubs found themselves under intensive fire from their old enemies the bookstores following the explosive expansion of such chains as Barnes & Noble, especially into suburban and rural areas, strip malls and the like. Not only did these chains reach deeply into territories that had been big profit targets for book clubs, but they started discounting books at or below the prices offered by the clubs. And when you added postage and handling charges to the prices members paid for book club selections, the allure of the stores became very compelling. Fortunately for the clubs, the stores could not sustain the narrow profit margins generated by “deep discounting,” and although discounts are still offered on certain books by chain stores, the threat to the clubs from that source seems to have been averted.

It would appear that no matter what weapons the enemies of book clubs throw at them, the clubs survive because they possess one advantage the stores cannot overcome: selectivity. For readers too busy or uncertain to sort out the welter of new books, clubs proffer the recommendations of a panel of experts who have screened the candidates and distilled the very best. Furthermore, many book clubs cater to specialized tastes. Book buyers interested in subjects ranging from dance to warfare, mysteries to science fiction, nostalgia to travel, sailing to nursing, business to computers can satisfy their predilections by joining clubs aimed at those specific interests.

Most book clubs make their selections in pretty much the same way. Publishers submit books at an early stage, in manuscript or proofs, accompanied by promotional material and any other information about book and author that the publisher may feel will make the book more attractive to club members. (On occasion, a book will be chosen by a club after publication.) The submission is assigned by the club’s editorial board to a reader, hopefully one who will give it an informed and sympathetic reading. Recommended works are then circulated to the rest of the editorial committee and are discussed, rated, and voted on. The club then negotiates deals with publishers on the books they wish to acquire. The club either guarantees to purchase a quantity of copies of the publisher’s edition or, if the club has its own printing facility, licenses the right to publish its own edition. In either case, most clubs pay an advance against a royalty, though some smaller clubs pay a flat fee for a fixed, one-time printing. After the deal is struck, the clubs solicit orders from their membership. Except for the clubs that do their own printing, most clubs earn their profit from the difference between the cost of copies purchased from publishers and the price received from subscribers.

Book clubs are a major source of book sales, the largest clubs reaching hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

For the biggest literary stars the advances paid by book clubs can be mind-boggling, such as the $1.75 million reportedly paid by the Literary Guild for James Michener’s The Covenant after a bidding war with the Book-of-the-Month Club (the two clubs merged, so it’s not likely you will see future bidding wars on such a grand scale.). Most of the time, like any other business enterprise book clubs will offer as little as they can get away with, in many cases below $10,000. Often, however, publishers can sell the same book to more than one club. Royalties usually range from 5 to 10 percent of the book club’s price.

The money paid to publishers by book clubs is, with almost no exceptions, split equally between publisher and author, and in a great many cases the club income makes the difference between profit and loss for a publisher on a given book. Indeed, a former head of Book-of-the-Month Club told a gathering of literary agents that she considers book clubs the saviors of midlist books. It can certainly be argued that in an era of increasing attention to frontlist books, book clubs keep a great many books in print far longer than publishers themselves are able to do.

Although the key interface with book clubs is the book publisher, agents often cultivate book club executives in order to give them early notice of publication deals on books that might be hot prospects for the clubs. Some time ago, my agency performed the equivalent of passing a camel through the eye of a needle when we submitted an unsold manuscript directly to the Reader’s Digest Book Club and secured a commitment from the Club to buy the book if we could find a publisher for it. We had failed up to then to sell this lovely family-type story that seemed to be too tame for the editors who had read it. But it was right up the RDBC’s alley, and armed with a five-figure book club offer, we easily attracted a publisher for the book. But this was a rare event and we just happened to have the right book in the right place at the right time.

It’s hard to imagine authors failing to be delighted by book club sales, but there have been a few. Willa Cather’s arm had to be twisted to accept book club selection of Shadows on the Rock because she considered it crass exploitation of her work (authors had the oddest ideas in those days, too!). More recently, a number of authors, notably Stephen King, have objected to book club acquisition of their books on the grounds that club sales cut into sales of hardcover and even of paperback editions of the same book, losing them both readers and money.

Their reasoning is by no means without merit. Take a big-name author such as King whose book is published by a hardcover-paperback company that pays him, we can assume, a full royalty on both editions of his book. Suppose the hardcover edition sells for $25 and the paperback for $7. One thousand copies of the hardcover edition might bring in about $3,000 in royalties. One thousand copies of the paperback edition might bring in about $700. Now, suppose one thousand copies of the book club edition are sold at a 20 percent discount to subscribers, or $20. The royalty on those thousand copies will be about $1,300. But that money must be split fifty-fifty with the author’s publisher, netting the author $650. Thus the book club’s revenues are about 25 percent of what the author will get for the same number of copies sold in hardcover, and even a little lower than the royalties for the same number of paperback copies sold. Although it can be argued that the same thousand people who might buy the book through a book club wouldn’t necessarily buy it in stores if it weren’t carried by the club, you can nevertheless see how authors like King might view sales of their works to book clubs as losing propositions. The war between bookstores and book clubs still smolders, sixty years after the opening volley.

Willa Cather and Stephen King notwithstanding, a phone call from your agent or editor informing you that your book has been selected by a club is cause for celebration, and of course it looks great on your resumé!

- Richard Curtis