E-Reads has signed a deal with UK publisher Gollancz to publish e-book editions in the UK and Commonwealth of almost 400 science fiction and fantasy titles as part of Gollancz’s Gateway initiative.

Orion deputy CEO and publisher Malcolm Edwards and Gollancz digital publisher Darren Nash negotiated the deal, which includes works by more than 50 authors, with E-Reads founder and president Richard Curtis and agent Danny Baror of Baror International. Titles by authors such as Greg Bear, Harlan Ellison, James Gunn, Fritz Leiber and George Zebrowski will be published in Gateway editions in 2011.

Deputy CEO and publisher Malcolm Edwards said: “Richard Curtis has been a pioneering figure in e-book publishing in the USA, and E-Reads has acquired rights in a lot of books which were on our wish list for Gateway. I’m therefore delighted that we’ve managed to persuade Richard that we’re able to offer a persuasive plan for selling them in our markets.”

Curtis said: “Though E-Reads has been distributing its e-books in the UK, we felt that our authors would be better served having a British publisher take charge of sales and marketing. And what better publisher than Gollancz, whose amazing fantasy and science fiction list is a perfect fit for our own?”

Gollancz’s Gateway project launched earlier this month, making more than 1,000 titles by authors including Philip K Dick and Arthur C Clarke available as e-books through all major e-retailers.

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.

Apropos of our recent posting The Real Kindle Killer…

Richard Curtis did not just witness the evolution of the publishing industry from print to digital, he had a significant hand in shaping it.  In a Digital Book World interview conducted by Rich Fahle, the agent and e-book publisher candidly discusses his role. The video may be seen below or on DBW’s website.

From the interview:

“Agents find themselves more and more providing services they never needed to render in the past: cover approval, correcting cover copy, editing, spellchecking authors’ manuscripts, marketing and other tasks that should be the publisher’s, but publishers either can’t or won’t do some of these things. They keep pushing the burden of responsibility back on the author. And if the author can’t do it or is helpless or doesn’t want to, the agent has to do it…

Mr. Curtis said he expects to eventually see product placement in digital books that will generate ads for e-books. “If you see a link in a novel to a product being advertised, you’re generating synergy between the content and the advertiser. It will be the same principle as product placement in movies and television,” he said.
(Richard Curtis, New York literary agent and digital book publisher, commenting in the Wall Street Journal on Amazon’s introduction of a Kindle carrying advertising.)

Product placement in novels? Hmm, just how would that work….?

Donna applied one last dab of lipstick and critically appraised her makeup in the magnifying mirror on her vanity table.  She frowned as the  image revealed the merest hint of a wrinkle on her brow. Tonight she had to be perfect: she’d been casually dating Todd for three weeks but she knew that tonight he was going to make his move. For the third time in five minutes she peered out of her bedroom window searching the street for his familiar car with the dented right fender. From the moment she’s set eyes on his face she’d wondered what it would be like to kiss that sensuous mouth…

Richard Curtis

Agent and E-Reads publisher Richard Curtis was interviewed by Gatekeepers Post publisher Jeff Rivera. The two industry leaders explored the emergence of a corps of gatekeepers that is very far from the establishment elite that we grew up with.

You can listen to the podcast here.

You can also read Richard Curtis’s posting about Gatekeepers here . ************************************

The Gatekeepers Post is the leading social media book publishing community on the web Richard Curtis is probably one of the most respected people in the book publishing industry. He’s incredibly smart, wise and a true visionary who foresaw the eBook revolution years before the masses. In today’s audio interview with the veteran literary agent and Publisher of E-eads, he discusses with us the true pros and cons authors need to keep in mind when they are deciding between publishing directly or publishing with an e-book publisher such as his company. If you’re about to load your book on Kindle yourself, you might give serious thought to listening to this interview first.

Another prominent e-book publisher, Smashwords’ Mark Coker, has checked in with Galley Cat’s Jeff Rivera with ten predictions for the coming year. Here are the headlines.

1.Ebook sales rise, unit consumption surprises

2. Agents write the next chapter of the ebook revolution

3. More big authors reluctant to part with digital rights

4. Self Publishing goes from option of last resort to option of first resort among unpublished authors

5. Big 6 publishers increase ebook royalties

6. Ebook prices to fall

7. The customer is king- Readers will decide which books become hits, not publishers.

8. International ebook market explodes, causing publishers to rethink territory rights restrictions

9. Discoverability becomes HOT

10. Big 6 publishers refuse to abandon DRM

For the juicy details check out Galley Cat: Predictions for 2011 from Smashwords Founder

And compare Coker’s to those of E-Reads founder Richard Curtis.

As he did last year, Galley Cat‘s Jeff Rivera invited literary agent and E-Reads’ President Richard Curtis to make some predictions in the book and e-book industry for the coming year. He produced ten, and here’s one that will raise a few eyebrows:

The Big Six publishers will raise their current royalty rate over the standard 25% they currently offer.

To read all ten, visit Publishing Predictions for 2011 from Richard Curtis

“Enhanced e-books” was one of the most overused catchphrases in 2010. Publishers stampeded to load up conventional e-books with all manner of enhancements ranging from author out-takes to big-name intros to film and video clips. The idea was to justify boosting the price of their souped-up e-books.

Some of these products were interesting, entertaining and attractive, But were they worth those extra bucks? Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg of the Wall Street Journal asked that very question in Testing Enhanced E-Books.

Ana Maria Allessi, publisher of HarperMedia, says definitely yes. “When both digital editions are available, and consumers are given the choice, in half the cases they’ll pay more for extra content,” she says. Sourcebooks’ publisher Dominique Racca thinks so too: “I can imagine a product where you multiply by 100 percent because it has so much more value than the non-enhanced editions.”

But a very different view was expressed by Tony Woodlief, oddly enough in the Wall Street Journal too. He had a one word explanation for why most enhanced e-books will flop.  Click here if you’d like to learn what it is.

And if you’d like to hear it expressed poetically…

Publishers expressed enchantment
With the notion of enhancement.
Audio, video, music, flix,
Bangles, baubles, Bar Mitzvah pix.
A tune or two was all it took
To constitute a mobile vook.
They tossed in every kind of crap
And designated it an app.*

Richard Curtis

* From 2010 (The App) by Richard Curtis with permission of Publishers Weekly, PWxyz, (c) 2010 Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The Wall Street Journal.

Speculation has been running at fever pitch: What’s this year’s theme of literary agent Richard Curtis’s end-of-year poem? And which publishing executives has he singled out for poetic immortality?

For seven or eight years in the mid 1980s and early ’90s Publisher’s Weekly ran Curtis’s annual summary, in tongue-in-cheek verse, of the highlights and lowlights of the year in the publishing industry. The annual rhymes carried such titles as, “Merger, He Wrote,” (1986), “Wedding Bells Are Breaking Up That Old Industry of Mine” (1989) and “Stop the Millennium, I Want to Get Off” (1990).

After a hiatus of some fifteen years, the verse-atile agent returned to PW in 2007 with “The Year of the Platform,” which boasted such lines as

Are our values turning asswards
When opening books requires passwords?

2008′s effusion, “The Coming of the POD People,” had this memorable doggerel:

Agents now submit their schlock
By means of email as dot-doc.

In 2009′s poem, “The Yr of the Tweet“, Curtis solidified his claim to a place in Westminster Abbey when he managed to devise a rhyme for “Shatzkin”.

What delights will 2010 (The App) reveal?  How about this one:

They tossed in every kind of crap
And designated it an app.

Click here to read it in its entirety. Many of Curtis’s verses plus his prose spoofs are collected in The Client From Hell and Other Publishing Satires.