Last May, in connection with the launch of its romance line, Amazon exec Jeff Belle said “We also know our customers enjoy genre fiction of all kinds, so we are busy building publishing businesses that will focus on additional genres as well.” We all knew that meant a science fiction line was coming. We just didn’t know when or what it would be named.

Today we know.

Amazon’s science fiction, fantasy, and horror imprint is now up and running. It’s called 47North.

Among the featured titles in the launch of the line are Against the Light, an original fantasy novel by Dave Duncan, and the first work in The Mongoliad by Neal Stephenson and Greg Bear. Duncan and Bear are represented by Richard Curtis Associates.

If you were wondering about the meaning of the name, go to your googlemap and see what Pacific Northwest city is located at 47 degrees of latitude. Hint: Amazon is headquartered there. Here’s another: it’s the home of the Space Needle.

Here’s the full article.

Richard Curtis

As our government girds for debate over President Obama’s jobs bill, we thought the following article, published here in December 2008, might be relevant.

Richard Curtis

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December 2008

Among the few special interest groups not petitioning the government for a bailout these days are writers. Paul Greenberg, in the New York Sunday Times Book Review, speculates on what such a rescue package would look like. The bulge of his tongue in cheek is apparent, but underlying his geniality is an important reminder that although the official (according to National Endowment for the Arts) ranks of professional writers are modest at 185,000, their combined voice represents a significant influence on American culture and needs to be heard.

Unlike the crybabies in the financial sectors of our economy pleading with Congress to compensate them for their own greed and stupidity, writers are a proud and independent lot, and though they’re not above pocketing the occasional windfall – an unexpected movie option or foreign sale – I don’t know of many who would go hat in hand to their legislature to lobby for a bailout just because their agent can’t find a publisher for their latest novel.

No, writers don’t want a bailout. What writers want is work, and Greenberg reminds us that in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, President Franklin D. Roosevelt acknowledged the value of their profession by creating the Federal Writers’ Project. Over 6,500 writers were put to work writing guidebooks, local and regional histories, photographic essays, oral memoirs and the like. (A film about this era, Soul of a People, is currently in development.) “The most well-known of these publications,” Wikipedia tells us, “were the 48 state guides to America (plus Alaska Territory, Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C.) known as the American Guide Series.”

President Elect Obama has established, at the heart of his economic recovery program, a plan to rebuild our nation’s long-neglected infrastructure of rutted roads, crumbling dams, rusting bridges and leaking sewers. A student of American history and in particular of President Roosevelt’s New Deal, Obama sees parallels between Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration and Obama’s own determination to put Americans back to work on meaningful projects that will restore pride to its wounded citizens.

I’m relatively certain that the crumbling infrastructure of the publishing business will not be found on the list of federal projects requiring urgent attention. But as our community of writers, journalists and poets surveys the landscape, we see newspaper, magazine and book publishers on a precipitously downward slope. Some of their decline is self-inflicted, through failure to envision, understand, and take advantage of the revolutionary power of digital delivery of information. And some of it is their unavoidable blindsiding by market and technological forces. But whether writers are witting or unwitting victims of upheaval, we find our profession upheaved, and we lift our eyes to our leader for help.

Luckily for us, our leader is a writer (and a damned good one, too). He’s one of us. So, perhaps, as he and his cultured and literate brain-trust set out to repair America’s physical plant, they will recognize that there’s a lot of writing to be done to support and celebrate our nation’s reconstruction and to give it a voice and intellectual underpinning. We’ll need artists, too, and musicians, just as we did when President Roosevelt launched his program to haul his country’s citizens up by their own bootstraps.

President Obama, when you open up those envelopes from your publishers and shake out the handsome royalty checks rewarding you for your inspiring words, remember your fellow writers. They are a priceless resource. Put them to work. They will cost a fraction of what the government is paying to bail out banks and insurance companies and automobile manufacturers (the secret is out – writers will do it for love), and they will reward you and the American people a thousandfold.

Richard Curtis

Doomsday stories are among humankind’s oldest, and for those of us who toss at night contemplating war, famine, plague, terrorism and a host of worst case scenarios, there is a body of apocalyptic literature guaranteed to extend insomnia far into the bright glare of daytime. You don’t have to be a Freudian psychologist to grasp that there is a pleasure principle underlying the terror we get reading books designed to scare us witless. Is it the joy of knowing the horror is not happening to us? I don’t think so. If the book is good, the horror is happening to us!

The last five or six decades have refined apocalyptic literature to a form of high art. After reading On the Beach, Nevil Shute’s prediction of a devastated post-nuclear planet, I was traumatized for months. (Of course, given the state of nuclear rearmament and proliferation now, things are actually worse today than ever.) We have seen nuclear holocaust novels, environmental disaster novels, religious apocalypse novels, dystopian novels, and every other kind of novel informing us that the end of life as we know it is but moments away.

William Johnstone’s Ashes novels are among the most realistic and disturbing of them, and because the series extends to some thirty volumes, you need not concern yourself about running out of stimuli to rob you of a good night’s sleep. Does that give you pleasure, as Dr. Freud says it will? That’s for you to say. But it does give E-Reads great pleasure to offer the complete series to you. This link will take you to the first volume and clicking on the author’s name will take you to a listing of all the Johnstone books available on E-Reads.

- Richard Curtis

Though World War II ended over sixty years ago, to all who served or simply followed it from the Allied viewpoint, books sympathetic to the Axis viewpoint make us uneasy to say the least. Such a book is Grey Wolf, Grey Sea by E. B. Gasaway, which chronicles one of the war’s most successful U-Boats and its captain in savage confrontations on and beneath the sea. The U-124 was both predator and prey, and much as we hate to admire Kapitanleutnant Jochen Mohr, his courage and determination are impossible to deny.

The following piece was written last August, less than two months before the death of Steve Jobs.

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Steve Jobs Looks Mortality in the Eye

He is Steve Jobs. Look upon his works, ye Mighty, and despair.

Early in 2009, when Jobs’ was forced to temporarily give up leadership of Apple in order to combat pancreatic cancer, we reminded our readers of Charles De Gaulle’s grim remark: “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

“Every business captain,” we said, “needs to post that quotation on the wall in front of his or her desk as a reminder that great leaders must be great delegators. Jobs is as indispensable as corporate heads can possibly be, but adverse health has forced him, as it did De Gaulle, to look at his mortality and relinquish to others tasks that threaten to sap the energy he needs to restore his health.” (See My Irreplaceable You.) Jobs’s medical leave in ’09 was enough to depress the value of Apple’s shares by 2% in the domestic stock market and as much as 7.9% overseas.

And now the day of reckoning has arrived for Steve Jobs and the company he has fashioned like a masterpiece wrought by a modern-day Cellini: today he resigned as CEO, admitting he was no longer able to effectively run it. The reins will be picked up by Chief Operating Office Tim Cook. In his poignant statement Jobs said “I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.”

What will become of Apple? In the Wall Street Journal Yukari Iwatani Kane writes that “People familiar with the situation have said that Mr. Jobs continues to be active at Apple and is closely involved in the company’s product strategy. Apple watchers don’t expect that to change even after Mr. Cook takes over.”

The first test of that statement came today when the stock market opened. The last trade before the announcement on Wednesday August 24th, was $376.18. Overnight, before the market opened today, shares dropped over $12.00 a share. However, it closed at 373.72, an unremarkable drop of $2.46, less than -0.65%‎. This would seem to suggest that sensible investors see that Jobs’s signature on his company is deeply embedded in the quality of its products and service. It doesn’t hurt that in the last quarter Apple reported blowout earnings of over 7.3 billion dollars.

The company is scarcely vulnerable. Its presiding visionary, however, is all too mortal. We wish him godspeed on his journey.

Richard Curtis

Attention Slushers. Here’s your chance not just to review slush but to fund it.

That may sound like the first line of a satirical story in The Onion but in fact it’s the pitch for a startup venture called Pubslush, which describes itself as “a revolutionary publisher that utilizes the power of community support and social networking to select books to be published by connecting writers directly with their readers.

“Through a collaborative method,” the venture’s press release explains, “Slushers (registered users) review, share, and fund their favorite submissions. Upon reaching the required support level, Pubslush will facilitate the complete publishing process , including editing, design, marketing, distribution, etc. Also, Pubslush simultaneously acts as an agent, allowing editors at major publishers to easily browse the top submissions and extend deals to authors if they wish.”

The scheme is reminiscent of AOL Time Warner’s ill-fated iPublish program launched at the dawn of the Digital Revolution.  “The centerpiece of iPublish.com is iWrite, a community area that offers writers a direct way to get their work in front of other writers and iPublish.com editors. Writers must review at least three short excerpts from works by other authors before they can post an excerpt of their work for consideration. If an excerpt receives high ratings, an iPublish.com editor will read the full manuscript and decide if the work should be published as an e-book and, if it meets certain requirements, as a print-on-demand book. ”

iPublish lost an estimated $13 million.  But maybe Pubslush founder Jesse Potash knows something that AOL Time Warner didn’t?

Read details in Publishing Startup Offers Aspiring Authors New Opportunities

Richard Curtis

At Rhode Island College, a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.

Oops! Let’s take that again:

“At Rhode Island College,” reports Trip Gabriel in the New York Times, “a freshman copied and pasted from a Web site’s frequently asked questions page about homelessness — and did not think he needed to credit a source in his assignment because the page did not include author information.”

The second iteration of the above paragraphs represents another author’s words, properly attributed and indicated by quotation marks. The first version dropped the attribution and quotation marks. In my haste to prepare this post I might well have dropped them inadvertently. It happens all the time when well-meaning and essentially honest authors confuse their research notes with their own original texts.

But the deliberate lifting of other people’s texts without credit or quotation marks is a spreading plague, and the worst of it is that its young perpetrators have so completely lost their moral compasses that many haven’t a clue that there is anything wrong with it. As a result we are spawning a generation of cheaters.

Gabriel cites a survey by a research institute that found that “about 40 percent of 14,000 undergraduates admitted to copying a few sentences in written assignments.”

“Perhaps more significant,” the reporter ads, “the number who believed that copying from the Web constitutes ‘serious cheating’ is declining — to 29 percent on average in recent surveys from 34 percent earlier in the decade.”

Finally, Gabriel cites anthropologist Susan D. Blum, who attributes weakened undergraduates’ consciences to uncertainty about their own personas, reinforced by social networking in the Digital Age. “If you are not so worried about presenting yourself as absolutely unique, then it’s O.K. if you say other people’s words, it’s O.K. if you say things you don’t believe, it’s O.K. if you write papers you couldn’t care less about because they accomplish the task, which is turning something in and getting a grade. And it’s O.K. if you put words out there without getting any credit.”

All this may be completely true but it doesn’t account for the root causes of young people’s diminished sense of right and wrong.  Here we have to look to their parents.  What is happening in the home that the simplest of moral distinctions is all but extinguished?

Details in Plagiarism Lines Blur for Students in Digital Age

Richard Curtis

Is the pen mightier than Perseus's sword?

Perseus Book Group, a leading publisher and distributor for small presses, has announced a service to distribute and market self-published books, particularly out of print titles whose rights have been reverted to authors.  It will pay a 70% share of net revenues to content providers, as opposed to the 25% share paid by major publishers and 50% by some independent e-book publishers including E-Reads.

“The service,” writes the New York Times‘ Julie Bosman, “arrives as authors are increasingly looking for ways to circumvent the traditional publishing model, take advantage of the infinite shelf space of the e-book world and release their own work. That’s especially the case for reviving out-of-print books whose rights have reverted back to the author.”

The service is not offered to the general public but is open only to authors represented by literary agents. And though it offers distribution (to such retailers as Kindle, Nook, iPad, Kobo and Sony) it does not produce the books themselves, meaning that the authors have to create (presumably through scanning) text files, proofread them, format them (such as putting them into ePub), design covers, and undertake other editorial functions now performed by full e-book publishers such as Open Road, Rosetta, and E-Reads (full disclosure: Richard Curtis is CEO of E-Reads).

Perseus CEO David Steinberger made it clear that while the new company, called Argo Navis, “provided distribution and marketing services, the author remained the publisher,” writes Bosman. “While authors get a much higher share of the revenue under this arrangement, they’ll receive fewer of the services, and financial support, provided by publishers under more conventional contracts.”

Authors and agents interested in Perseus’s offering will undoubtedly factor in the time and labor involved in producing books themselves, but this service nevertheless opens the door for literary agents to find a comfortable place in digital publishing on behalf of their clients.  By helping their clients to produce books, they can justify the higher commissions or management fees that many agents now seek to balance softening revenue flow resulting from a struggling book industry.  It is also a way for agents to strengthen bonds with their clients whose eyes may be roving in the direction of independence and self-publication.

New Service for Authors Seeking to Self-Publish E-Books

Richard Curtis

“If I were a betting man,” writes John Biggs in techcrunch.com, “I’d wager quite a bit” that books “are not going to make it past this decade.”

Good thing you’re not a betting man, Mr. Biggs, because I have $1000 on the table that says you’re wrong. Game on?

Biggs’ confidence is based on current hot trends in e-book sales, and we can’t blame him for projecting the doom of paper, publishers and bookstores based on those soaring charts.  Here’s his reasoning:

As we well know, ebook sales are now outpacing hardback sales and publishers are now crowing ebook numbers alongside their traditional in-store sales numbers. Soon those in-store sales numbers will dwindle and disappear simply because there will be no stores – heavy readers, the folks who buy genre fiction by the basket-full will be happy to head over to Nooks and Kindles, especially when they drop below $99 (as they will this year).

As a literary agent and e-book publisher I foresee a different picture, one that points to a continuing attachment to paper books, the publishers that produce them and the shops that sell them. Some of the evidence is statistical, some anecdotal and some gut instinct, but more than sufficient to challenge Biggs’ timeline that has independent bookstores gone by 2015 and major publishers by 2019.

“I will miss ,” says Biggs, “the creak of the Village Bookshop’s old church floor, the calm of Crescent City books, and the crankiness of the Provincetown Bookshop.”

He’ll also miss $1000.00.  Make your check payable to Doctors Without Borders, Mr. Biggs.

See if you agree with Biggs’ timetable: The Future Of Books: A Dystopian Timeline

Richard Curtis