Sourcebooks’s Vice President and Editorial Director Todd Stocke issued a bulletin to colleagues in the publishing industry reporting record-breaking sales and exciting initiatives in the traditional and digital space.  Coming just before Book Expo America convenes, it will certainly burnish the company’s reputation as an industry leader.

The text is below, but not hotlinked.

Richard Curtis

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Dear Friends -

Two weeks ago I watched our accounting department process the largest (by far) batch of royalty checks in our history, and I wanted to take the opportunity to say thanks to all of you. This year Sourcebooks celebrates 25 years since its one-book founding out of publisher Dominique Raccah’s home. Today we publish 300+ new titles a year across a breadth of categories we never imagined. We have more than 2,000 titles in print from 1,700 remarkable authors. We’ve celebrated 27 New York Times bestsellers and more than 50 national bestsellers. And that only happens with the support and partnership of people like you.

As many of you know, making publishing more transparent and less mysterious for authors, readers, and partners is part of our mission. To wit, some notes from our results in Q1 of 2012:

· Our sales continue to grow, up 17% in Q1 despite fewer retail storefronts. This is all coming off a standout 2011 that was once again the best in our history.

· Although industry news is reporting a marked flattening of ebook sales (up 9.9% in February), ours are up 73% over prior year. Our marketing strength is a real asset in an ever-cluttered space for consumer discovery.

· Our print sales are up 3%. Yes, print, even in a Borders-less world.

· Our top 5 areas of sales are, in order: romance fiction; adult nonfiction; adult fiction; children’s books; young adult. It’s worth noting that we weren’t even in romance, children’s, and YA just 5 years ago.

As 2012 evolves, we continue to experiment on behalf of our authors.

· We recently launched an “online readers club” in the romance space called Discover a New Love that is generating some interesting news and data on what our readers are looking for, specifically experimenting in the areas of reader discovery and DRM (or the absence thereof) .

· “To free or not to free?” We’ve experimented and published some results on the impact of “free” promotions, and we’re seeing the results in this area change almost monthly.

· We’re testing an “agile publishing model” in adult nonfiction with Digital Book World headliner David Houle.

· As we have for 14 years, we’re continuing to deliver remarkable enhanced book experiences for readers – now entirely digital – and in the areas of poetry, adult nonfiction, and children’s books.

For those of you attending BEA this year, we’ll have several editors there and we’re looking for great new projects. Drop us a line, we’d love to see you! I’ll be there, as will Deb Werksman, Leah Hultenschmidt, Shana Drehs, Aubrey Poole, and Steve Geck. Who says publishers don’t bring editors to BEA anymore!

· You can find our catalogs online at www.sourcebooks.com/catalogs.html

· We recently overhauled our page for agents showing our acquiring editors and their interests. We hope you’ll find it to be much more thorough (plus photos!): http://www.sourcebooks.com/resources/editorial-contacts-for-agents.html

It’s been a remarkable 25 years for us. We’ve been able to do a lot of things we were told independent publishers couldn’t do. And we’re looking to continue to take leadership and drive innovation for authors in the next 25. We couldn’t have done it without all of you. We hope to hear from you soon!

Best Wishes,

Todd Stocke

Vice President, Editorial Director

Congratulations to recent New York Times bestselling authors Jill Mansell, Kristi Yamaguchi, Tim Bowers, Harlan Cohen, Grace Burrowes, Susanna Kearsley, Carolyn Brown, Mike Litwin and Jennifer Fosberry!

Our New York office has moved! The new mailing address is 232 Madison Ave., Suite 1100, New York, NY 10016. All phone, fax, and emails remain unchanged.

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Sourcebooks Reports Successful Year and Announces Initiatives

Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Gigaom.com, reports a unique strategy for combating the practice known as “showrooming”.

In showrooming, customers enter a bookstore, browse, then select (or scan the barcode of) the book they want to purchase, walk out of the store and order it from an online bookstore. Which makes the independent store a mere display space for customers to order books from its competitors. Last Christmas Amazon actually promoted the practice, outraging indy stores. One got so mad it stopped doing business with the behemoth. (See Can You Survive without Amazon?)

Barnes & Noble, the highest-profile target of showrooming, is now in a position to fight fire with fire. Microsoft’s investment in B&N’s Nook business gives the bookstore chain the potential for a showroom that loops back to its own inventory via the Nook.

“B&N CEO William Lynch says that the company plans to embed NFC (near field communication) chips into Nooks,” reports Owen. “Users could take their Nook into a Barnes & Noble store and wave it near a print book to get info on it or buy it.”

It’s an interesting concept, but there’s a big flaw in the reasoning.  Showrooming enables customers to scan a high-priced book in a brick and mortar store, then buy it at a discount on an Internet store.  In other words, if you scan a $20.00 book in a Barnes & Noble bookstore, then go to B&N’s online store, you’ll be able to buy it for, say, $16.00.  Then why, you will ask, can’t I pay $16.00 inside the bookstore?

For a showroom to work properly you need two components: a physical space with physical books to browse; and a virtual space to actually buy them. Think of a library where physical books are on display for browsing only. Customers choose the titles they want, swipe a credit card, and wait a short time while the book is printed on an Espresso-type printer.

We’ve been buttonholing readers with this mad scheme for years, and you can see some of our postings about kiosks here.

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as Showdown for Showrooms

Taking Hawaii: How Thirteen Honolulu Businessmen Overthrew the Queen of Hawaii in 1893, With a Bluff
by Stephen Dando-Collins

On a January afternoon in 1893, men hunkered down behind sandbagged emplacements in the streets of Honolulu, with rifles, machineguns and cannon ready to open fire. Troops and police loyal to the queen of the sovereign nation of Hawaii faced off against a small number of rebel Honolulu businessmen–American, British, German, and Australian. In between them stood hundreds of heavily armed US sailors and marines. Just after 2.00 p.m., the first shot was fired, and a military coup began.

This is the true, tragic and at times amazing story of the 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani of Hawaii and her government. It’s also the story of a five-year police state regime in Hawaii following the overthrow, and an attempted counter-coup by Hawaiians in 1895. And of how Hawaii became a US possession.

In Taking Hawaii, award-winning historian and novelist Stephen Dando-Collins (Legions of Rome series The Inquest) reveals previously little-known facts uncovered during years of research on several continents, in the most dramatic and comprehensive chronicle of the end of Hawaii’s monarchy ever published. Using scores of first-hand accounts, this often minute-by-minute narrative also shows for the first time how the queen’s overthrow teetered on a knife-edge, only to come about purely through bluff.

Taking Hawaii, an E-Reads Original, reads like an exciting novel. Yet this tale of a grab for power, of misjudgment and injustice, truly took place. Judge for yourself whether you think the queen of Hawaii was wronged, or was wrong.

Pea OD

Richard Curtis, literary agent and founder of E-Reads, the independent ebook publisher, recently posted an article on Digital Book World about print on demand. He was subsequently interviewed about it by GoodeReader.

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“E-Reads has been using Lightning Source for its POD services since we began in 2000. LSI is the biggest in the industry, perhaps in the world, in print-on-demand. Because they are a division of Ingram, a book distribution company that has very successfully made the transition from a company that serviced print publishers to a company that now services the digital book industry, we feel that there are advantages to being with LSI that you simply cannot get with any other POD publisher. Among other things, their core source service enables us to reach indie bookstores, a great many of which we could not otherwise reach.”

One aspect of POD that Curtis mentioned in his recent blog post is the prohibitive cost per book when comparing a typical print run of a trade paperback with the cost of printing one title at a time per customer request. Lightning Source has countered that cost in a deal with EPAC, one of the largest POD suppliers in Germany.

“From speaking to executives at LSI and asking if there is any possibility in the future that the costs of producing PODs might come down, they have told me that there are developments that they cannot currently discuss that make them hopeful that the prices will come down.”

But why such a keen interest in print-on-demand? Isn’t the point of digital publishing and the surge in popularity of e-reading related to all the negative things that digital has stripped away, like eliminating paper and ink costs, shipping costs, and wait times to receive new books?

“Many authors want their books available in paper and many readers still want to read books in paper even though they are available in digital format. I’m considered somewhat of a trailblazer in the digital world but I still much prefer to hold a printed book in my hand than to read one on a screen. Even though POD used to represent about 50% of our income in the days when there were no Kindles or Nooks or viable digital readers, POD now represents about 8% of E-Reads revenue, the rest being from digital. Even though POD books are very expensive compared to those printed in the traditional way. A book that might have been $12 to $15 in a traditional print run might cost $20 as a POD, but people are willing to pay it.”

While POD might be a smart move for the indie authors and a certain demographic of readers, whether the publishing industry as a whole will adopt POD as a viable solution remains to be seen.

“I think the industry is being forced into it. The closing of Borders and of so many independent bookstores, the reduction of floor space in bookstore chains like Barnes&Noble, all point to a reduction to the space available to deliver printed books to the consumer on the street. This same segment of the population is going to have to turn to POD. The publishing industry for the last 100 years has distributed its books on a returnable basis. At the beginning of the industry 5-10% of books were returned; now we’re up to as much as 50% of books being returned by bookstores. It’s no longer possible for publishers to sustain 50% returns when POD is an alternative.

“My vision for POD is kind of the Espresso vision, where the Espresso Book Machine will come down in size and complexity to where it will be truly closer to desktop than refrigerator sized. When that happens, you’ll see bookstores with kiosks with thousands of books displayed where you can choose one, but they’re not on a bookshelf, they’re on a screen. You can browse electronically, pick one out, and have a cup of coffee while it prints. It may not be in the immediate future, but I would say within the next ten years you will be able to go into a space and print the book you want. Right now, you have that by simply going on Amazon, but if you prefer the experience of going into a store and browsing for a book that looks interesting, you will see that model evolving. And when someone predicts 10 years, it’s usually five.”

Print-On-Demand: The Future of Publishing? A Talk with Richard Curtis
By Mercy Pilkington

Science fiction and humor seldom interface successfully – unless your name is John DeChancie.  But for DeChancie it’s a piece of cake.  His wickedly funny Castle series has been cracking readers up for years. But it’s going to be hard to top The Kruton Interface. For one thing, it features a hero named Wanker.

Just when Captain David Wanker thinks his career has hit rock bottom, he’s assigned to the starship Repulse, the lowest-rated ship in the Space Forces. The navigator gets lost, the engineer speaks only Gaelic, the security personnel have narcolepsy, and the ship’s doctor needs medication.

No sooner does he takes command than his job as captain is lost to automation invented by a scientist who thinks he’s Groucho Marx. Worse yet, when he meets up with the inhabitants of the planet Kruton, a world that is one huge law firm, he finds himself a defendant in the biggest lawsuit ever to hit the Galactic courts. Hilarity not only ensues–it practically goes supernova!

“Unerring Marxmanship. This book would have left Harpo speechless.” — “William Tenn” (classic science fiction author, pseudonym of Philip Klass)

“Madcap science fantasy–fun filled adventure!” — Booklist

“DeChancie always delivers!” — Mike Resnick (Hugo Award winner)

Catch up on your John DeChancie – once you catch your breath after reading The Kruton Interface.

Ruth Dickson, author of the button-popping, clasp-unfastening sex guide Married Men Make the Best Lovers, isn’t through with you. It’s time for the advanced course in love-making, positions and tricks guaranteed to drive your lover up the wall but never out the door.

With her classic, breezy, entertaining style, she instructs the uninformed and enlightens the already educated with a bit of science and a lot of blunt truth about the hows, whys and special variations of sex for fun – in or out of wedlock. From “The Nitty Gritty” to “The Other Side of the Bed”, Now That You’ve Got me Here, What Are We Going to Do? is an advanced course in the art of love and the pleasures of sex.

If you seek cogency on digital publishing subjects you’ll always find it in Laura Hazard Owen’s postings.  A good example is a recent one on the implications for consumers of the settlement agreements with the Department of Justice in its conspiracy lawsuit against five major publishers and Apple.

What does the settlement mean for customers? Here’s a summary:

1. Let the Discounting Begin. “Readers are likely to see lower prices on e-books published by HarperCollins, Hachette and Simon & Schuster — at least at Amazon, which expressed its glee over the settlement. But you won’t see those lower e-book prices until at least June…I wouldn’t be surprised to see some shockingly cheap bestsellers from those publishers — think massive summer promotions where big titles by authors like James Patterson, Jodi Picoult and Nicholas Sparks are $1.99.”

2. Amazon rivals will discount too. “Other e-book retailers, like Barnes & Noble and Kobo, are likely to want to enter into new contracts quickly as well so that they are on a more even playing field with Amazon.”

Owen points out that Amazon competitors “may not be able to afford to discount a wide range of e-books as deeply as Amazon can.” But that has not prevented Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and even the struggling Sony from maintaining a healthy market share of the e-book retail business.

3. Bundling of e-books, and e-book/p-book combo packages. “Justice notes that agency pricing ‘prevented e-book retailers from experimenting with innovative pricing strategies…such as offering e-books under an ‘all-you-can-read’ subscription model where consumers would pay a flat monthly fee,’ bundles or buy-one-get-one-free promotions. The settlement opens the door for those types of promotions on Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster titles.”

4. Less predatory loss-leader pricing. “When it comes time for Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins and Hachette to negotiate their new contracts, the settlement allows them to ‘negotiate a commitment from an e-book retailer that a retailer’s aggregate expenditure on discounts and promotions of the Settling Defendant’s e-books will not exceed the retailer’s aggregate commission under an agency agreement in which the publisher sets the e-book price and the retailer is compensated through a commission.’”

5. Will Apple now sell e-books at a discount? “If it simply removes Simon & Schuster, Hachette and HarperCollins titles from its shelves without negotiating new contracts — yes, this would mean Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography, published by Simon & Schuster, would no longer be available through iTunes — it will be losing a large part of its catalog. If Apple agrees to negotiate new contracts that don’t require agency pricing, it could also make agreements with the many publishers who have not been able to sell their books in the iBookstore before. That would mean a much wider book selection for iBookstore shoppers.’

Read details in What the DOJ e-book lawsuit means for readers now

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as E-Book Prices Must Come Down

To contemplate publishing books without partnering with Amazon is to lose a lot of sleep, weight,  hair or all of the above.  Luckily most of us steer well clear of any action that might provoke the behemoth to put the Big Chill on our Buy buttons.

To deliberately terminate one’s relationship with Amazon is almost inconceivable. Almost but not quite.  We have the example of an executive that did it and has lived to tell this David and Goliath tale.

His name is Randall White and he’s the head of a distributor called Educational Development Corporation that also has a publishing imprint of about 1800 titles like Everyone Poops and The Noisy Body Book. Now it is known as The Company that Opted Out of $1.5 Million in Amazon Sales. White simply got tired of Amazon’s practice of  buying EDC’s books from a distributor and drastically discounting them. “They were becoming showrooms for Amazon,” he complained to David Streitfeld, reporting his story for the New York Times (Daring to Cut Off Amazon).

White had another reason to be irritated.  His books are sold via a network of “independent sales agents,” ladies who market EDC books from their homes and were losing food off their table as a result of Amazon’s tactics. Seizing the “chance to make 7,000 women happy in one day,” he pulled the plug on Amazon, or perhaps Pressed Flush is a better metaphor. Yet he claims his firm is doing better than ever.

When we have more poop on EDC’s war with Amazon we’ll let you know.

Richard Curtis

This blog post was originally published on Digital Book World as David Poops on Goliath

Dave Duncan fans have been waiting and waiting for a decade for the fourth and final volume of his “Seventh Sword” quartet, and at last their hunger will be satisfied.  E-Reads is honored to bring The Death of Nnanji to the world for the first time anywhere.

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For fifteen years the truce has held. Swordsmen of the Tryst of Casr have kept the peace and extended the rule of law over half the World, but now sorcerers have started killing swordsmen again, and swordsmen traitors are aiding them.

Shonsu—who was Wallie Smith before he became a swordsman of the seventh rank and liege lord of the Tryst—must once more gird on the seventh sword of Chioxin, and this time he rides out to fight the war that he hoped would never come. As he leads his army forth, its two most junior members are Vixini, son of Shonsu, and Addis, son of Nnanji, who has an oath of vengeance to fulfill. Their failure or success will determine the fate of the World for the next thousand years.

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Those who read and enjoyed the original three volume of “The Seventh Sword” will remember a series of surprise endings, especially in the third volume, so those of you who are not familiar with them will understand why we’re a little cagey in relating the backstory – we don’t want to spoil it for you!  You will want to start with The Reluctant Swordsman, The Coming of Wisdom, and The Destiny of the Sword before taking up this breathtaking climactic work in the Seventh Sword quartet.

Click here for the complete collection of Dave Duncan’s E-Reads books

Pamela Sargent is everything but an underachiever.

It should be enough that she is one of fantasy and science fiction’s leading ladies. But she is so much more, and the Science Fiction Research Association has recognized her accomplishments as a scholar and editor by bestowing on her its Pilgrim Award for a lifetime of contributions to science fiction and fantasy scholarship.

Did we say she was a Nebula Award winner, a Locus Award winner, a Hugo finalist? Did we say that she is a distinguished editor of anthologies celebrating the contributions of women in the history of science fiction? Did we say the American Library Association selected her Earthseed one of the best books for young adults?

Did we say Earthseed and its sequels (Tor), about which blogger P. J. Hoover said “It’s like space and The Hunger Games all blended into one”,  have been optioned for film by Paramount?

Oh yes – did we say how proud E-Reads is to carry ten of her works, with more on the way?