After complying with the draconian reporting requirements imposed by the Department of Justice, the three publishers that have settled to avoid prosecution may wish they’d fought the charges. The conditions are just a little less stringent than house arrest. We will not be surprised to hear that executives at Simon & Schuster, Harper or Hachette have been fitted with ankle monitors.

Richard Curtis

Here is a summary of the compliance requisites for the parties that settled (from Publishers Weekly):

Compliance:
This is the most onerous part of the settlement, and helps explain why Macmillan and and Penguin have decided to fight. Under the Settlement, each publisher will have to engage in a number of compliance measures including:

The appointment of an “Anti-Trust Compliance Officer,” reporting directly to the company’s general counsel.

In addition, the publishers must provide at least “four hours of training” for relevant staff delivered by an attorney and conduct “an annual compliance audit.”

The Settling Publishers must also furnish to the DoJ “on a quarterly basis” electronic copies of any non-privileged communications containing allegations of noncompliance and must “maintain and furnish to the Department of Justice on a quarterly basis, a log of all oral and written communications, excluding privileged or public communications,” between the publishers “officers, directors, or employees” involved in the development of the Settling Defendant’s plans or strategies relating to e-books.

Under the Settlement, the DoJ can also inspect the publishers’ offices, and “require Settling Defendants to provide to the United States hard copy or electronic copies of all books, ledgers, accounts, records, data, and documents in the possession, custody, or control of Settling Defendants, relating to any matters contained in this Final Judgment.”

DoJ officials can also interview “either informally or on the record” the Settling Defendants’ “officers, employees, or agents.” But, if you’re tabbed, you do get to bring your an attorney.

And, upon request, the Settling publishers must submit “written reports or respond to written interrogatories, under oath if requested,” relating to any of the matters contained in the settlement.

The below announcement from the Authors Guild reports that Barnes & Noble has acceded to pleas from the Guild not to make authors collateral damage in the war with Amazon over the latter’s business practices including exclusive content agreements.

Here’s the Guild’s announcement in full:

Richard Curtis

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Here’s some welcome news: Barnes & Noble has agreed to our request to bring Marshall Cavendish children’s books back to their stores’ shelves. By our count, more than 250 authors and 150 illustrators have been affected.

How these books got pulled in the first place is a lesson in how exclusive content agreements have begun balkanizing the book marketplace.

In December, Amazon Publishing purchased Marshall Cavendish’s children’s book list, more than 450 children’s and young adult titles. The next month, Barnes & Noble announced that it would not be stocking any Amazon published titles in its stores. B&N released a statement from Jaime Carey, its chief merchandising officer, saying that it would not stock books published by Amazon, “based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent.”

With this announcement, B&N pulled Marshall Cavendish children’s books from its shelves. For Debby Dahl Edwardson, the timing could not have been worse or more devastating. Her most recent book, “My Name is Not Easy,” had been selected as a 2011 National Book Award Finalist. This sort of recognition can transform an author’s career, and authors typically visit countless bookstores to make the most of such opportunities. Ms. Edwardson, however, found her opportunity drastically curtailed. Barnes & Noble removed her book from its shelves (including from the shelves of its store in Fairbanks, Alaska, the one nearest the author’s North Slope home) about two months after the National Book Awards ceremony.

As we’ve made clear over the last several years, we’re very concerned with Amazon’s rapidly growing dominance of bookselling. Exclusive content is a big part of that story. With $9 billion in cash, Amazon can afford to cut more deals as it did with DC Comics to acquire exclusive e-book rights to titles, as it tries to gain the upper hand in the e-reader and tablet market.

So we’re sympathetic to the position of brick-and-mortar booksellers, even the largest of them: this isn’t a fair fight, by any stretch. Still, it’s essential that authors and readers not become collateral damage. The authors and illustrators who signed contracts with Marshall Cavendish had no way of anticipating that the publisher would assign their contracts to Amazon. For these authors to lose their vital showroom presence in Barnes & Noble stores was clearly unfair and harmful. Children’s books, especially picture books, need to be seen to be appreciated by readers.

We fear that more and bigger battles in bookselling and book publishing loom in the months ahead. For the sake of authors and readers, we hope those fighting it out will avoid using access to vital literary marketplaces as a weapon.

Unfortunately, this seems unlikely. Amazon is seizing an ever-growing share of the bookselling market, but it’s after far bigger game. Deploying some of its cash to buy publishers with deep backlists is an inexpensive way for Amazon to ensure that its Kindle Fire is an essential device to many readers, who then can be sold movies, TV shows, and music through the platform. Amazon’s history suggests it won’t be shy in these efforts.
Meanwhile, Barnes & Noble isn’t backing down. Its executives made clear to us that it is making this exception because it announced the policy after Amazon announced its purchase of the Marshall Cavendish titles. For any new Amazon acquisitions, Barnes & Noble’s policy is to ban the books from their shelves.

For now, however, some good news for Marshall Cavendish authors and illustrators.
We’ll keep you posted on any developments.

Gutenberg's POD: prohibitively expensive

LightningSource Inc., a subsidiary of Ingram, has been E-Reads’ POD printer of choice since our founding in 2000. And because – through no fault of LSI’s – the high cost of on-demand printing has prevented the process from achieving its full commercial potential, our hearts beat a little faster when LSI announced in Publishers Weekly a number of initiatives suggesting POD prices could come down.

From the outset of the Digital Era, we have made our titles available in print on demand and steadfastly predicted that POD will become the principal means by which most books will be distributed (See A World Without Inventory, Part 1 and Part 2).

However, this progress has been compromised by the high cost of on-demand printing is a one-copy-at-a-time process, as opposed to traditional press runs. As with any form of individualized manufacture, the price per unit is very high. Where a 5,000 copy print run of a typical novel might cost $.50 or $1.00 per copy, a POD of the same book might cost upwards of $5.00. The result is 300 page trade paperbacks that cost $20.00 compared to $12.00 or $15.00 for that book produced as part of a long print-run.

In essence, Ingram has licensed print technology developed by the German company EPAC, and acquired two EPAC printing plants. “Incorporating the use of EPAC technology is expected to increase the number of copies Lightning can print cost effectively,” PW reports. Ingram Content Group chairman called the EPAC print technology “groundbreaking. With our years of print experience, Ingram will take the promise of print-on-demand to the next level.”

We look forward to standing beside LSI when it happens.

Details in Ingram Acquires Two EPAC Plants, Licenses POD Technology.

Richard Curtis
Note to readers: Digital Book World has invited me to post my blogs initially on its website before releasing them on E-Reads, and this content is re-published with DBW’s permission. Click here to view the original posting.

The Worm Book has sat atop the Vermicomposting Betseller List for 13 years

The flight of serious book reviewers from newspapers to blogs has left such a vacuum in the reviewing establishment that the hallowed Sunday New York Times Book Review has decided to drop reviews altogether in order to concentrate on an all bestseller-list format. The publication will also trim the Review‘s dimensions to 5″ by 3″ as a cost-saving measure. The changes will be instituted in next Sunday’s issue.

Though the announcement caught many observers by surprise, knowledgeable Times-watchers had recently noted that the number of reviews appearing in the publication had dwindled to a handful, and most of those were devoted to vampire novels, diet and makeover advice, and self-serving autobiographies by former members of the Bush administration. “These books are review-proof anyway, so why bother any more?” said a high-ranking Times Corporation executive speaking anonymously. “It’s time to drop the pretense that there’s anything of value to review.”

The space liberated by elimination of reviews enables the paper to focus on niche and even micro bestseller lists. For instance, books about worm composting, a subject of perennial interest to gardeners, will now have their own bestseller list, as will zombie historical romances in the voice of Charlotte Bronte. There will be a list dedicated to as-told-to dog memoirs and another called “Books with S**t, F**k and A**hole in the Titles.”

The online edition of the NYTBR will have some interactive features. Subscribers will be able to mix and match bestseller lists (e.g. books about worm composting with F**k in the title). There will be a Bestseller List Trifecta (pick 3 pays 45-1), and a Four-List Combo (choice of Russian, French, Blue Cheese or Thousand Island).

Richard Curtis

The war on women seems to be invading their fiction. For the second time in a few weeks chick lit has come under attack.

A few weeks ago we picked up on a piece in The Awl  suggesting that romance is the lowest form of literature. Now, in Salon, we’re told that chick lit may be dead altogether. Coincidentally or otherwise, both charges were leveled by women.

“Less than a decade after commentators clucked at bookstore shelves lined with cartoon high-heels and pink cocktail glasses,” writes Laura Miller in this latest sally, “the only debate that the once-flourishing genre inspires now is over when to run its obituary.”

To Miller’s credit, she realizes it might be a good idea to define her terms. She seems to be referring to the spate of shopping-and-screwing novels published at the end of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st. This variant reflected an overheated economy whose excesses were exemplified by glam fashionistas and their Masters of the Universe lovers. ”As the first species of popular fiction to treat its heroines’ professional aspirations as seriously as their romantic prospects, chick lit flourished at a time when ambitious young women poured into a robust job market, seeking both love and success, often with a heaping serving of pricey commodities on the side.”

This trend, says Miller, “smells decidedly off in the face of 8.3 percent unemployment.” That may be true to a degree, but the mutual attractions and sexual tensions between gorgeous, ambitious women and alpha males are not ever going to give way to commonplace characters, shabby settings and humdrum sex.

No matter how you define them, the themes and formulas that have sustained popular women’s fiction for centuries have varied only slightly and will not vary in the foreseeable future. Romance continues to thrive as a genre and sustains the trade book publishing industry to the tune of 25% of its sales.  Survey the lists of such romance powerhouses as Harlequin or Kensington and you’ll see that chick lit is alive and well, thank you very much.

Perhaps Laura Miller is looking for love stories in all the wrong places?

Richard Curtis
Note to readers: Digital Book World has invited me to post my blogs initially on its website before releasing them on E-Reads, and this content is re-published with DBW’s permission. Click here to view the original posting.

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 how agent Esther Newberg urged her author Patricia O’Brien to use a pen name on the manuscript of her latest novel because publishers, citing poor sales of her previous book, were turning the new one down on grounds that had nothing to do with merits of the work. O’Brien took her agent’s advice. Newberg sold it to Doubleday in three days. With 35,000 copies of her new book in print, the author (now “Kate Alcott”) has a new lease on life complete with a new biography and author photo.  Author and agent became anxious when the ploy was revealed, but the editor was cool with it. (For the full story read Book Is Judged by the Name on Its Cover) By Julie Bosman)

If you can relate to Hunter’s and O’Brien’s stories, you’ll want to read 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 these authors. “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. As in the case of O’Brien, authors whose sales are weak will write under a pen name to get out from under the onus of poor numbers. The problem with this ruse is that the newly christened author is unknown, and stores may 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.

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

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

Note to readers: Digital Book World has invited me to post my blogs initially on its website before releasing them on E-Reads, and this content is re-published with DBW’s permission. Click here to view the original posting.

Arguably the first instant book in modern history was First American Into Space by Robert Silverberg. It was published in 1961, when “instant” was measured in months and not moments. They were called “crash” books then, but they were glacial compared to today’s headspinners.

The story of its creation is an entertaining one. After plans were set to send the first American astronaut into space, Charles Heckelmann, editor of a paperback publisher called Monarch Books, devised a plan to publish a book to celebrate the event. He hired Robert Silverberg, a reliable paperback novelist who has long since gone on to fame, fortune and honor, to write it. Filling – some would say padding – his manuscript with the history of rocketry, astronaut training, biographies of the astronaut candidates for the flight, etc. etc. Silverberg delivered everything but the last chapter. The book was set into type and while Alan Shepard rode a capsule for fifteen minutes before parachuting back to Earth, Silverberg typed the final chapter, taking it right off the television set in real time. He rushed the chapter to Heckelmann who in turn rushed it to the printer. “The flight was on a Friday,” Silverberg reminisces, “and I seem to recall they had the book on sale by the following Monday or Tuesday.”

Three or four days to produce and release a book? That now seems like an eternity, especially after reading Jeremy Greenfield’s posting on DBW, Jeremy Lin Hits E-Bookshelves With Quick Turnaround Book, Linsanity. For those of you who have been living in a coal mine for the past month, Jeremy Lin is the New York Knicks point guard who went from just-hatched to giant-killer in two weeks, taking New York and the media by storm – and engendering several instant books that were truly instantaneous.

Greenfield is right that the Lin instant books signal “new realities in the book business.”  It’s hard to believe that a headline-driven book that comes out four or six months after an event will find much traction or make a lot of money when the e-book and vook producers can get their editions out in a matter of hours. Indeed, an editor told me today that he’s been flooded by proposals for Jeremy Lin books and he’s told the authors and agents to forget about it; the window closed a week ago!

While Jeremy Lin was electrifying fans on the basketball court, agents for Amanda Knox, cleared, after a sensational trial, of murdering her housemate, signed a book deal for $4 million. It will take months for Knox and her collaborator to write the book and months more to edit and publish it.  By the time it’s released, what newsworthy information will be left?  Before you answer that question, click on this page of Amazon listings for books about Amanda Knox.

We think the Linsanity story has a lot more legs than Knoxsanity. But the truly big story is that digital media have in all likelihood closed the window on the instant book of yesteryear.

See our piece about the “instant” book created after the ditching of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River, Not a Quickie, Exactly, More Like a Slowie.

Richard Curtis

Note to readers: Digital Book World has invited me to post my blogs initially on its website before releasing them on E-Reads, and this content is re-published with DBW’s permission. Click here to view the original posting.

S&S Royalty Statements - Before

S&S Royalty Statements - After

In September of last year we took Simon & Schuster to task for its overweight and excessively detailed royalty statements. “Bloated” was the term we used. “The weight of the package has been known to induce hernias in even the stoutest of mail room clerks,” we observed, urging the publisher to reform its profligate ways. (See Simon & Schuster’s War on Trees)

What a difference one semi-annual royalty period makes. Our criticisms, reinforced by those of authors and literary agents including a committee of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, inspired Simon & Schuster to review its reporting practices and overhaul them from top to bottom. In the first week of March the publisher has opened its “Author Portal,” a dedicated, password-activated website containing PDFs of all statements and offering download and printing options. Furthermore, the statements have been “substantially redesigned” and streamlined.

One author’s statement shrank from 41 pages to 8, and an agent praised the new format as “concise, comprehensive, uncluttered, and easy to understand.” Our agency’s own statements slimmed down from 977 pages – two reams of paper – to 323. But we now have the option to print out any given page or produce a compact digital file to archive and/or email to authors. And because so many of those statements have had zero activity for years, the savings on our resources – and the environment – are tremendous.

Credit should be given where credit is due, and we take our hats off to Simon & Schuster for responding so thoroughly and swiftly to our challenge.

Richard Curtis

Note to readers: Digital Book World has invited me to post my blogs initially on its website before releasing them on E-Reads, and this content is re-published with DBW’s permission. Click here to view the original posting.

Book by book, author by author, venue by venue and investor by investor, the Espresso print on demand machine is picking up momentum as the paper book publishing mode of the future.

Just how close is that future? The machine needs to get smaller, faster and cheaper, the investors more open-handed and the installations more abundant. Above all, the concept needs to sink into the mentality of a publishing industry that lives in denial that the distribution system that prospered in the 20th century is going to survive in the 21st. With the erosion of traditional bookselling through store chains and independent shops, the handwriting is on the wall for a system built around trucks – trucks that not only deliver books from printers to distribution depots to stores, but carry the unsold books back to their doom in a pulping vat. The number of copies returned can exceed 50% of the number distributed.

With the alternative distribution system of e-books in place, the idea of returnable books, or at least books returnable in stomach-turning numbers (e-books are actually returnable, but the percentage of return is miniscule), has become a preposterous anachronism. The “handwriting on the wall” is actually eInk.

Print on demand on demand is another form of digital publishing, except that the end product is tangible. That publishers do not yet embrace this simple truth is part of the tunnel vision endemic on the part of book industry leaders.  It’s easy to understand why it is so obdurate: distributing books into stores via fossil-fueled vehicles generates most of the cash that flows through the publishing industry. But the unprofitability of that system, compared to one in which printed books are manufactured at the point of purchase, is appalling.

The paradigmatic shift of the book business from the current distribution model to a POD-based one is inevitable. What is delaying it is a lack of imagination on the part of industry leaders. Though they have dipped a toe in the water by issuing backlist books in POD, none has yet dared to abandon the long print run and the returnable distribution model.

All this is preface to an article by John Tozzi in bloomberg.com about progress in the installation of Espresso print on demand machines, On Demand Books Bets on Self-Publishing, which we urge you to read. It describes the efforts of On Demand chairman Jason Epstein and his investment partners to gain acceptance for the Espresso throughout the land.

At the dawn of the digital book industry, a trade publication named Jason Epstein one of three “Grumpy Old Visionaries”.  Over a decade later his original vision seems a lot fresher than that of many book industry executives half his age (he summed it up compellingly in an article published in 2010).  We wish him the gift of time to see his vision achieved and profit handsomely from it.

(And if you’re curious to know who the other grumpy old visionaries were, you may click here).

Richard Curtis