I haven’t seen the word “Facevook” used, so if I’m coining an original term I hereby bequeath it to Mark Zuckerberg in the hope he will give me a modest gratuity.

It seems that Zuckerberg’s Facebook has acquired an outfit called Push Pop Press, we learn from New York Times‘s Nick Bilton. Bilton refers to it as an e-book publisher but from his description it sounds more like a vook developer: “a digital book maker that specializes in interactive books for the Apple iPad and iPhone. The e-books built by the publisher feel like movies; interactive graphics with words sprinkled about cross the page.”

We’re not sure Facebook wants to get into the e-book business but vooks reflect the social networking behmoth’s commitment to delivering entertainment. Says Bilton: “Facebook’s move into other forms of entertainment, like gaming and movies, demonstrates that the company is looking at other forms of revenue beyond standard advertising. Of course, it doesn’t need to own a book company to distribute books. It doesn’t own a movie studio or a game maker.

Why Did Facebook Buy an E-Book Publisher?

And for more about vooks, read If They Asked Me I Could Write a…Vook?

Richard Curtis

In a recent Publishers Weekly article about Amazon’s foray into trade book publishing, every agent PW interviewed spoke “under condition of anonymity.” Why?

Apparently, writes PW’s Rachel Deahl, “their chief concern is selling a book to an untested entity. One agent said he would be particularly leery about taking a big author to Amazon. ‘As a matter of rule, I don’t like to test the waters with big authors. I’d rather deal with a firm that is well established.’”

We find this statement astounding. It seems to equate Amazon Publishing with all those one-horse self-publication presses with interchangeable names started up by penniless ex-editors. What makes these agents imagine that Amazon, boasting enough assets to acquire all Big Six publishers without raising a sweat, would fail at book publishing any more than it has failed at any other goal it has set for itself?

The anonymous agent’s remark is even more puzzling when you look at the deals reported daily in Publishers Lunch and note how many famous agents are making “nice” deals for books by big name clients with those selfsame small presses after the Big Six turned them down. “Nice” is defined (by Lunch‘s founder Michael Cader) as advances of $1 to $49,000, sums that no self-respecting superagent would be caught dead admitting just a few years ago.

Agents have legitimate reasons to be concerned about Amazon. As Deahl points out, Amazon has gone into competition with the very publishers who feed Amazon’s vast retail business. But that is not the first threat that agents have had to adjust to over the past few decades. Think of the frenzy of postwar mergers and acquisitions that shrank a thousand viable trade publisher to a handful.  Think of Barnes & Noble’s remorseless drive to hegemony over independent booksellers.  Think of the advent of e-books that, despite decades of warning, caught most agents completely flatfooted.  In each instance agents adjusted.  They will adjust this time, too, and if they’re smart they’ll see Amazon Publishing as an opportunity to enrich themselves and their clients.

Amazon offers competitive advances, royalties and subsidiary rights participation, has hired first-rate editorial, production, sales and marketing personnel, has formed partnerships with established distributors and retailers and is even discussing a retail relationship with its own rival Barnes & Noble.

The only thing Amazon Publishing lacks is experience. So what? Have Big Six publishers, with their centuries of experience, performed so flawlessly that an author would have to be crazy to abandon them for this upstart?

When it comes to Amazon Publishing, this agency has no reason to hide behind anonymity.  We welcome Amazon Publishing to the family of trade book publishers and look forward to making lots of “nice” deals, “very nice” deals ($50,000 – $99,000), “good” deals ($100,000 – $250,000), “significant” deals ($251,000 – $499,000) and “major” deals ($500,000 and up).

Richard Curtis

You say you’re a fan of detective novels but you haven’t discovered Richard Prather’s Shell Scott?  Hmmm, I don’t know about you…

But you can atone for your sin by picking up just about any of the nearly forty novels and story collections penned by the late great Prather and joining his humorous private eye on another whacked-out caper, inevitably populated by plug-ugly goons and scantily clad ladies in jeopardy. Shell is an endearing, self-satirizing hero who is as likely to nail the bad guys by bumbling as by brilliant detection and bravado.

I was one of millions who feasted on Shell Scotts like popcorn and now I’m happy to introduce them to you.  For light summer reading there just is nothing better.

The books aren’t in any particular sequence, so you can start anywhere, but what the heck, start with A, Always Leave ‘Em Dying, and work your way down to W, Way of a Wanton.

Richard Curtis

His life all but ruined because of a bad rap he took for murdering two guys to prevent a rape, Reid Bennett relocates in a quaint backwater town in Canada. Then the corpses show up. German shepherd Sam by his side, Bennett does what he has to do, and none of it is in the police officer’s manual.

Dead in the Water launched Ted Wood’s mystery career and the fictional adventures of Reid Bennett. But what brings readers back for book after book is Sam, Reid’s German shepherd. Publisher’s Weekly described Sam thus: “…a multitalented utility infielder who can ‘keep,’ ‘track,’ ‘seek,’ “fight,’ ‘guard,’ sniff out cocaine and corpses, save lives and generally pinch-hit for a dozen patrolmen.” Fans plead, “Whatever happens to Reid Bennett, don’t touch a hair of that dog’s head!”

E-Reads is in the process of releasing all 10 titles in the Reid Bennett detective series. You’ll have to read them all to find out if anyone touched a hair of Sam’s head.

– Richard Curtis

The proof of the pudding is in the tasting, and the proof of the e-book reader is in the reading.  Nick Bilton of the New York Times sampled numerous readers including that tried and true gadget called the paperback, and in  Deciding on a Book, and How to Read It presents his conclusions.

Reading one chapter on each device, he reached the following conclusions:

Kindle: “A joy in many respects…It is a dedicated e-reader, so you can’t hop off to the Web to look up facts…Kindle software works on almost every device with a screen and an Internet connection… [The keyboard] seems like a waste of space.”

Mobile phones: “Simple and satisfactory.”

Apple apps: “Big downside for many is that you can read them only on Apple devices…iBooks looks beautiful, with a design that feels more like a traditional book, with sepia-toned paper and stylistic typography, again, it is available only on Apple devices.”

Google eBookstore “Wasn’t quite as satisfactory as I’d had with the Kindle…its design felt a little too rigid and even clunky.”

iPad 1: “Too heavy and feels more like a dumbbell than an e-reader.”

iPad 2: “Lighter and feels snug in your hands… Both iPads offer an immersive reading experience. I found myself jumping back and forth between my book and the Web, looking up old facts and pictures… I also found myself being sucked into the wormhole of the Internet and a few games of Angry Birds rather than reading my book.” [Make up your mind, Bilton. Is iPad immersive or distractive?]

Barnes & Noble Color Nook: “Unlike Amazon’s device it allows you to surf the Web. It is a little slow, though, and that sometimes frustrated me…Like the Kindle software, the Barnes & Noble reading application is downloadable to several devices. It also offers some neat features that separates it from its competitors.”

Print paperback: “It took barely a paragraph for me to feel frustrated. I kept looking up things on my iPhone, and forgetting to earmark my page.” Obviously Bilton wasn’t familiar with the Floppatronic Fleeber, reviewed in these pages a while ago, but it’s my personal favorite way to read.

Notable in its omission from Bilton’s article is the Sony eReader, which may in itself be a statement of where that device stands – or falls – in the pantheon of choices.

Richard Curtis

Harlequin has issued a new letter to authors and agents updating its June memo. Though the royalty rate for single titles remains 25% of net, the series royalty has been sweetened with an escalation to 20%. Executives Donna Hayes and Loriana Sacilotto remind writers and agents that the series royalty reflects the brand-building that Harlequin brings to the table.

Here’s the memo. Attachments are not included.
Richard Curtis

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Dear Agent:

Re: Proposed Amendments to Digital Royalty Rates

As you know, on June 24th Harlequin sent an e-mail about our intention to amend digital royalty rates. A technical problem with our e-mail security software resulted in most authors not receiving the originally e-mailed letters. Agents however, did receive the letters for their clients and the letters have also been posted online. As a result many of you have by now seen the original letters. Since that time, however, we have had many discussions with authors and agents and have made changes to the terms and amendment process proposed in that initial letter. We would now like to share those with you.

Rates

Harlequin is offering to amend royalty rates for English language sales of digital editions in the US and Canada as follows:

Series: 15% of net digital receipts to $50,000; 17.5% of net digital receipts from $50,001 to $100,000; 20% of net digital receipts thereafter

Single Title Authors: 25% of net digital receipts

If you agree to these amended rates they will be applied to the sales of your front list and backlist titles. The effective date of the new rates will depend on the date by which Harlequin has received your executed amending agreement (see Process below).

The reason for the difference between series and single title rates is the strength and value of the Harlequin brand name in generating demand and sales of series books. Of course, without the talent of our series authors and their Harlequin editors, we would not have a series business. However, it is also true that without the Harlequin brand strength behind series books, the series authors wouldn’t enjoy the level of the sales they do today for both print and e-book formats.

Over many years, Harlequin has invested millions and millions of dollars and continues to invest to make the Harlequin brand name the reason why readers buy our series books, globally. In a combined print and digital world, the Harlequin brand will be even more important as physical displays at retail and search and discovery in digital become the key ways readers find their series books in increasingly diverse, noisy and cluttered environments. The Harlequin brand on print and digital series books immediately communicates great romance stories, the benefits of which the reader understands and can rely on.

Definition of Net Digital Receipts (NDR)

Net Digital Receipts are the actual revenues received by Harlequin North America when it makes the sale of an English language electronic edition, in the United States and Canada, net of trade discounts, commissions and any applicable taxes and duties. The royalty will be calculated on the basis of these receipts.

Territories

The new digital royalty rates will apply to English language books sold in the US and Canada only. At this time, we are not making any changes to the digital royalty rate terms in territories outside the US and Canada.

We will continue to consider the option of world English rates, however the reality is that our other English language companies, UK and Australia, operate independently, with different series names, different covers and varied investments in market-specific promotional plans. At this time, these fundamental differences don’t support a world English digital royalty rate.

Authors Receiving the Revised Digital Royalty Rates

All Harlequin authors are being offered the amended rates. There will be no distinction between “active” and “inactive” authors. Authors will be required to return an executed amending agreement to receive the new digital royalty rates.

Process

We require authors to execute amending agreements in order to receive our new digital royalty rates. As you can appreciate, the number of contracts this amendment is covering is enormous. The modifications to our royalty system in order to make these digital royalty rate amendments possible and to pay our authors accurately are significant and time-consuming. We expect to have the amending agreements issued to authors (and their agents) by mid-October 2011. If executed amending agreements are returned to us by December 31, 2011, the effective date of the new digital royalty rates will be July 1, 2012. The effective date will be later where executed amending agreements are received after December 31, 2011.

Attached is a Q&A where you will find Harlequin’s responses to many questions we have received so far on this issue.

Sincerely,

Donna Hayes, Publisher and CEO

Loriana Sacilotto, Executive Vice President, Global Editorial

The Brits may be behind us in e-book technology but when it comes to righteousness they’re light years ahead of us Yanks.  We reported on legislation they passed to curb file-sharing deadbeats (See Want to Sue a Pirate? Move to England). But now they’ve actually gone and put the clamps on a pirate website.

“A High Court judge has ruled that [British Internet Service Provider] BT must block access to a website which provides links to pirated movies,” reports BBC News. “Newzbin 2 is a members-only site which aggregates a large amount of the illegally copied material found on Usenet discussion forums. The landmark case is the first time that an ISP has been ordered to block access to such a site.” (Details here.)

Unlike American lawmakers who are cowed by the might of Google and other ISPs (Read Game Over. Google Insists on Linking to Pirate Sites), British legislators recognize that if antipiracy measures are going to be effective, ISP links to pirate sites must be choked off. Listen to the stern words of the judge’s statement:

“This court action was never an attack on ISPs but we do need their co-operation to deal with the Newzbin site which continually tries to evade the law and judicial sanction. Newzbin is a notorious pirate website which makes hundreds of thousands of copyrighted products available without permission and with no regard for the law.”

Can you imagine a comment like that coming out of the mouth of an American judge?

Richard Curtis

For a complete archive of E-Reads postings about piracy, visit Pirate Central.

The wise saying “Art is never finished, it is only abandoned” is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and if you’d like to see it applied with a vengeance you can pay a visit to MyUnfinishedNovels.com and see a veritable graveyard of abandoned manuscripts.

Having failed six times to finish a book, novelist – or more aptly would-be novelist – Steve Wilson sought company to share his misery, and has found plenty of it on his halfway house website for failed writers.  Or is it a house for halfway failed writers. Only halfway because they have, after all, halfway succeeded.

“Each unpublished novel,” we are told on the MobyLives blog, ‘is accompanied by a ‘reason abandoned’.” We didn’t see any dog-ate-my-final-chapter excuses but you can find plenty of entertaining ones. But don’t be too smug; if you have an unfinished novel in your trunk, Wilson will have the last laugh.

Where Novels Go to Die

Richard Curtis

Twentieth century publication practices are receding so quickly into ancient history that cosmologists have actually detected a distinctive red shift on their spectroscopes.

The latest hurtling into the past is mass market paperback reprints of hardcover books. Back in the post-World War II era, when dinosaurs walked the earth, the protocol went like this: the hardcover came out first, followed one year later by the mass market paperback.

In those distant days the e-book reprint was just a gleam in Jeff Bezos’s eye. When paperback reprinters were trampling each other to bid for reprint rights to hot bestsellers, and hardcover publishers were scooping up paperback outfits, Bezos was still a youngster.  Reading about the Mort Jankow, the superstar lawyer-agent who bestrode the late 20th century book world like a colossus and engineered the biggest paperback reprint deal in publishing history, is like reading about the Colossus of Rhodes.

Julie Bosman, who covers the book beat for the New York Times, reminds us how far we have come from that primitive epoch. The current sequence is hardcover and e-book simultaneously. The paperback? “In an industry that has been upended by the growth of e-books, publishers are moving against convention by pushing paperbacks into publication earlier than usual, sometimes less than six months after they appeared in hardcover,” she writes. “Hardcovers have less time to prove themselves in bookstores, since retailers tend to move them off the shelves more quickly than they used to.”

Stressed about the increased pace of modern life?  You’ll get no comfort from Paperback Publishers Quicken Their Pace.

Richard Curtis

Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana are a combustible mix – but if they combust they could ruin their professional careers. Passionately attracted to each other, they are equally passionate defenders of their clients even when their interests are completely adversarial.

Set all this tension against the sultry background of a Miami riddled with crime and corruption, drowning in drugs, illegal immigrants and shady deals, and simmering with a melting-pot clash of cultures and you have a recipe for a hotly explosive series of legal thrillers by Barbara Parker. You can find them on Barbara’s author page.

In the debut novel, Suspicion of Innocence, Gail Connor is a fast-rising attorney in a major law firm, about to make partner—until her life is derailed by the discovery of her sister’s murdered body and the possibility that Gail is the prime suspect. Gail must fight for her life as she gets a first-hand look at the dark underside of the legal system she is pledged to uphold.

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Barbara Parker was a dear friend, a dedicated professional writer and a beloved and esteemed client whose untimely passing was and remains a source of anguish to all who knew her. Trained as a lawyer, she worked as a prosecutor with the state attorney’s office in Dade County, Florida before moving into a private practice specializing in real estate and family law. Suspicion of Innocence, published in 1994, was her first legal thriller. It was followed by seven more titles featuring her two lawyer protagonists and sometime lovers, Gail Connor and Anthony Quintana. Suspicion of Innocence was a finalist for a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and two other Gail and Anthony novels, Suspicion of Deceit and Suspicion of Betrayal, were New York Times bestsellers. She died in March 2009, at age 62. Too young. Far, far too young.

RC