Through a recent survey, Cathedral Rock Publishing has discovered that eBook readers support additional content, such as music, audio and video, and are willing to pay more for this additional interactive content.
The survey of 105 users, conducted over July and August 2011, asked several questions to understand why readers do - or don't - access eBook content. When asked if they had downloaded an eBook, 85% of eBook device owners said "yes." Of those who had yet to download an eBook, a third said that they "preferred the feel of a book" and two-thirds said that they had a smartphone or similar smaller device and the screen size was not suitable for reading eBooks.
The survey also asked participants content would appeal to them in an eBook. More than three quarters of respondents (77%) identified music as a plus, while 19% answered "other types of audio." 56% said they would like video and 58% favored color visuals in eBooks.
The survey also asked people how they want to use multimedia content embedded in the eBook. More than three quarters (76%) wanted to import music and video into iTunes.
Finally, the survey investigated pricing. How much are consumers willing to pay for a multimedia eBook? All respondents said that they would pay more for it, with 10% stating they would pay more than $10. 16% said they would pay $10. 25% people said they would pay $8, and 40% said they would pay $6.
John David Balla, co-founder of Cathedral Rock Publishing, explained the rationale behind the survey: "This is an ongoing study to uncover what is driving the evolution of eBooks. We all know that eBook buying has exploded, but what do readers want in terms of rich content - and how different will the reader's experience be in the coming years? Understanding all these elements is important for publishers and authors as they consider how to package and present information readers want. The opportunities for content in the world beyond paper, are limited only by imagination - and what readers are open to."
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
New Kindle Exclusive: Free Subscription to Fantasy & Science Fiction Magazine
Amazon.com is offering a free subscription to the digest edition of Fantasy & Science Fiction magazine is now exclusively available in the Kindle Store. Kindle customers who subscribe will get access to all of the magazine's editorial content -- editor's recommendations, "Curiosities" (odd books of enduring interest), film reviews, book reviews, cartoons and humor, and "Coming Attractions" (highlights of each issue) -- along with one short story, all at no cost. Customers can start reading the magazine today on their Kindle or free Kindle reading apps for Android, iPad, iPhone and iPod touch.
"Fantasy & Science Fiction is the definitive magazine of the genre," said Russ Grandinetti, Vice President of Kindle Content. "We know our Kindle customers are huge fans of this category, and we're excited to offer them a free and exclusive subscription to the magazine to read anywhere."
Stephen King, bestselling author and long-time fan of Fantasy & Science Fiction, said: "This is the best fiction magazine in America. Kindle readers are in luck."
Fantasy & Science Fiction, which publishes six times a year, was founded in 1949 and is the original publisher of classics by a wide variety of great writers, including Stephen King, Daniel Keyes and Kurt Vonnegut. Each bimonthly issue offers compelling short fiction and the science-fiction field's most respected and outspoken opinions on books, films, and science.
A subscription to the extended edition of the magazine, which is also a Kindle exclusive, is available for just $12 a year and includes everything in the digest edition plus several additional short stories and novelettes. Individual issues of the extended edition are available for $2.99.
Stephen King, bestselling author and long-time fan of Fantasy & Science Fiction, said: "This is the best fiction magazine in America. Kindle readers are in luck."
Fantasy & Science Fiction, which publishes six times a year, was founded in 1949 and is the original publisher of classics by a wide variety of great writers, including Stephen King, Daniel Keyes and Kurt Vonnegut. Each bimonthly issue offers compelling short fiction and the science-fiction field's most respected and outspoken opinions on books, films, and science.
A subscription to the extended edition of the magazine, which is also a Kindle exclusive, is available for just $12 a year and includes everything in the digest edition plus several additional short stories and novelettes. Individual issues of the extended edition are available for $2.99.
Google Books hits 2.5 million eBooks downloaded by hungry fans
The number of eBooks sold continues to grow after surpassing traditional book sales in early 2011. In addition to the online retail industry, dominated by Amazon, there is an exponentially growing appetite for free eBooks. While Google has been successful with "Google Books", it seems that they aren't the only player and certainly don't have the last word in digital publishing despite the media attention they command.
Google Books surpassed the 2.5 million mark for eBook downloads, according to The Huffington Post on June 1st, 2011. However, there are smaller players, like Free-eBooks.net competing strongly in this space. In fact, Free-eBooks.net, has experienced record amounts of downloads too, as eBook reader sales double and billions of smartphone users join in, to solidify the acceptance of the "eBook."
"It's an honor for us to be on par with a giant like Google," exclaims Nicolas Gremion, CEO of Paradise Publishers Inc., who own Free-eBooks.net. He draws a direct comparison because coincidentally, "As of June 1st, we've also served over 2.5 million eBooks to our loyal members. That's equal with Google."
Free-eBooks.net's subscriber base, now approaching the one million mark, is responsible for downloading an average of nearly 19,000 ebooks, every single day. Gremion believes that, "It goes to show that it's possible to compete and win with quality services, resourceful marketing and a positive reputation. These qualities are foundations to building value and equity anywhere, including the online world."
"Plus, we continue to innovate and leverage new market opportunities," says Gremion. "We're entering the mobile space with our popular Smartphone apps, expanding into the growing Spanish market and creating unique, technology solutions to empower more authors. This will both expand and accelerate the production and availability of ebooks, along with other creative digital content. The publishing industry is trying to redefine itself at the moment. We believe that innovation combined with social media opportunities, and not necessarily the deepest pockets or biggest company, are the keys to success."
Paradise Publishers Inc. is a U.S.-based, global, online publisher of both fiction and non-fiction books. It distributes digital eBooks at no cost via http://www.Free-eBooks.net and is about to launch a highly anticipated social publishing site http://www.Foboko.com aim to help anybody become an author and easily publish, promote and profit from their own eBooks.
Google Books surpassed the 2.5 million mark for eBook downloads, according to The Huffington Post on June 1st, 2011. However, there are smaller players, like Free-eBooks.net competing strongly in this space. In fact, Free-eBooks.net, has experienced record amounts of downloads too, as eBook reader sales double and billions of smartphone users join in, to solidify the acceptance of the "eBook."
"It's an honor for us to be on par with a giant like Google," exclaims Nicolas Gremion, CEO of Paradise Publishers Inc., who own Free-eBooks.net. He draws a direct comparison because coincidentally, "As of June 1st, we've also served over 2.5 million eBooks to our loyal members. That's equal with Google."
Free-eBooks.net's subscriber base, now approaching the one million mark, is responsible for downloading an average of nearly 19,000 ebooks, every single day. Gremion believes that, "It goes to show that it's possible to compete and win with quality services, resourceful marketing and a positive reputation. These qualities are foundations to building value and equity anywhere, including the online world."
"Plus, we continue to innovate and leverage new market opportunities," says Gremion. "We're entering the mobile space with our popular Smartphone apps, expanding into the growing Spanish market and creating unique, technology solutions to empower more authors. This will both expand and accelerate the production and availability of ebooks, along with other creative digital content. The publishing industry is trying to redefine itself at the moment. We believe that innovation combined with social media opportunities, and not necessarily the deepest pockets or biggest company, are the keys to success."
Paradise Publishers Inc. is a U.S.-based, global, online publisher of both fiction and non-fiction books. It distributes digital eBooks at no cost via http://www.Free-eBooks.net and is about to launch a highly anticipated social publishing site http://www.Foboko.com aim to help anybody become an author and easily publish, promote and profit from their own eBooks.
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Science Fiction/Fantasy Books Expected to Grow 3.4% in 2011
According to the report, the science fiction/fantasy segment is gaining market share, adding half a percent in 2011 compared to 2010, as it more than triples its 1% growth rate from the past two years.
"The sci-fi/fantasy segment has been a stable growth segment for the past few years," notes Michael Norris, Simba Information's senior trade analyst. "Since the book market took a big hit in 2007, it has been inching closer to its previous high-point."
Title output for fantasy rose sharply to 6,389 titles, growing 14.6%, followed by science fiction with 3,714 titles, growing 10.1% in 2010. Simba's report, which uses a consolidated bestseller list comprised of ratings from USA Today, The New York Times and Publisher's Weekly, finds science fiction performed strongly on the list with 76 titles by 58 authors, while fantasy held 321 titles by 192 authors, although its success was led by the Twilight Saga.
"Even though a lot of titles are hit or miss with audiences, both as books and as media tie-ins, there will continue to be a thirst for this segment of fiction for the foreseeable future," added Norris.
Simba's report, Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2011, details the overall market for trade books, segmented by 18 major categories including health & fitness, romance, self-help, science fiction/fantasy and others. It includes demographic and psychographic information on the average book buyer, along with company profiles of the leading publishers including Penguin Group, Macmillan and Random House.
Sunday, July 17, 2011
A Few Pros About Self Publishing
By Kim G Lain
• Creative Control - Design your own cover or let us help you!
• Financial Control - Determine the number and type of books you want!
• Inventory Control - Order when you want to and when you need to!
• Competitive Pricing - (as in VERY affordable - compare for yourself!)
• Fast Turnaround - As quick as 7 days!
You can develop your manuscript on your time, at your leisure, at your own pace, right at your PC and then simply upload and wait for your professionally bound, bookstore quality books to arrive. You determine the amount you want to publish and you determine the amount of money you feel you can spend at any given time. Again, many authors publish a hundred or so books at first and then find themselves ordering hundreds more.
Creative Control -
You may have a favorite literature category, you like to read and there are scenarios you have never seen written in your genre, then you've most likely experienced frustration. Now you are left to ponder and to speculate. The reason your favorite sub-genre has been ignored is money matters in book publishing companies of today.
A great example is fantasy fiction literature. Until a few years ago, the number of fantasy books (i.e. Dragon books and Warlock books) that had been published could be counted on two hands. Without saying there's current development of ebooks. And ebook sales are only getting bigger. A large collection of fantasy fiction literature has entered the marketplace and is available or in some cases free of charge. Some offer their ebooks free of charge.
Why are all these bizarre and wonderful sub genre literary selections appearing? The new "e" platforms [electronic] platforms allow authors to self publish their creative works, as we know them in the literary field. These writers have about 100% freedom to write about virtually anything that comes to their creative mind. Do not feel left out. Start writing. Write until you've put down all your ideas, then edit. Your goal is to get self-published to an ebook format to share on the world-wide web. Then think about publishing in normal book form. Note, before ebook formats - self publishing became easy and affordable for almost anyone. However, the editors in publishing companies made the decisions on what choices we had to read. Now, readers and authors can make those decisions.
*** Self-Publish! ***
The Internet and companies like Amazon have made this all possible with their self publishing platforms. They allow writers to publish their ebooks on their websites and gain access to large numbers of potential readers. This particular business model has become very successful. Publishers are scrambling to try to figure out how they will survive in the age of digital books.
If you are an author who has an agreement with a traditional book publisher, I am sure you have had issues with their editors in making changes to your creative work. Moreover, I bet you have some wonderful manuscripts lying around that no one would purchase. With the self publishing options of today, you can publish your manuscript without a publisher or editor who changes your book in a fashion you are not satisfied.
Retaining creative control of your content is but one of the many advantages of self publishing your ebook. Remember you have control with self publishing.
Some of today's top selling authors are still with traditional publishers, but this will change soon. The superstar authors of tomorrow are likely to be self published authors.
• Creative Control - Design your own cover or let us help you!
• Financial Control - Determine the number and type of books you want!
• Inventory Control - Order when you want to and when you need to!
• Competitive Pricing - (as in VERY affordable - compare for yourself!)
• Fast Turnaround - As quick as 7 days!
You can develop your manuscript on your time, at your leisure, at your own pace, right at your PC and then simply upload and wait for your professionally bound, bookstore quality books to arrive. You determine the amount you want to publish and you determine the amount of money you feel you can spend at any given time. Again, many authors publish a hundred or so books at first and then find themselves ordering hundreds more.
Creative Control -
You may have a favorite literature category, you like to read and there are scenarios you have never seen written in your genre, then you've most likely experienced frustration. Now you are left to ponder and to speculate. The reason your favorite sub-genre has been ignored is money matters in book publishing companies of today.
A great example is fantasy fiction literature. Until a few years ago, the number of fantasy books (i.e. Dragon books and Warlock books) that had been published could be counted on two hands. Without saying there's current development of ebooks. And ebook sales are only getting bigger. A large collection of fantasy fiction literature has entered the marketplace and is available or in some cases free of charge. Some offer their ebooks free of charge.
Why are all these bizarre and wonderful sub genre literary selections appearing? The new "e" platforms [electronic] platforms allow authors to self publish their creative works, as we know them in the literary field. These writers have about 100% freedom to write about virtually anything that comes to their creative mind. Do not feel left out. Start writing. Write until you've put down all your ideas, then edit. Your goal is to get self-published to an ebook format to share on the world-wide web. Then think about publishing in normal book form. Note, before ebook formats - self publishing became easy and affordable for almost anyone. However, the editors in publishing companies made the decisions on what choices we had to read. Now, readers and authors can make those decisions.
*** Self-Publish! ***
The Internet and companies like Amazon have made this all possible with their self publishing platforms. They allow writers to publish their ebooks on their websites and gain access to large numbers of potential readers. This particular business model has become very successful. Publishers are scrambling to try to figure out how they will survive in the age of digital books.
If you are an author who has an agreement with a traditional book publisher, I am sure you have had issues with their editors in making changes to your creative work. Moreover, I bet you have some wonderful manuscripts lying around that no one would purchase. With the self publishing options of today, you can publish your manuscript without a publisher or editor who changes your book in a fashion you are not satisfied.
Retaining creative control of your content is but one of the many advantages of self publishing your ebook. Remember you have control with self publishing.
Some of today's top selling authors are still with traditional publishers, but this will change soon. The superstar authors of tomorrow are likely to be self published authors.
USA TODAY Launches 'Books.usatoday.com, to Expand Coverage of Books
USA TODAY has expanded its coverage of books with its new online destination books.usatoday.com. The new site allows consumers to discover, discuss, share, preview and purchase books online. It is available on computers, smart phones and tablets.
Books.usatoday.com provides readers with an interactive experience to browse books across a variety of genres, including fiction, non-fiction and children's books; read reviews; and, share personal recommendations in conversations that also allow for tweeting about books or responding to other readers' comments.
Unique to the books.usatoday.com site is the opportunity for consumers to now preview a book from the USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list and purchase it from a vendor of their choice, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the iBookstore or IndieBound, an association of independent booksellers.
USA TODAY's respected Best-Selling Books list ranks the 150 top-selling titles each week, based on analysis of sales from such U.S. booksellers as bookstore chains, independent bookstores, mass merchandisers and online retailers. More than 10,000 books previously ranked on USA TODAY's Best Selling Books list are also now included on books.usatoday.com with a dedicated page.
Books.usatoday.com complements USA TODAY's print books coverage. Anchored by Thursday's USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list, USA TODAY in print continues with Book Buzz, which reports on new best-sellers and publishing news, and includes special code tags for smart phones for an extended, interactive version of the booklist.
Books.usatoday.com provides readers with an interactive experience to browse books across a variety of genres, including fiction, non-fiction and children's books; read reviews; and, share personal recommendations in conversations that also allow for tweeting about books or responding to other readers' comments.
Unique to the books.usatoday.com site is the opportunity for consumers to now preview a book from the USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list and purchase it from a vendor of their choice, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, the iBookstore or IndieBound, an association of independent booksellers.
USA TODAY's respected Best-Selling Books list ranks the 150 top-selling titles each week, based on analysis of sales from such U.S. booksellers as bookstore chains, independent bookstores, mass merchandisers and online retailers. More than 10,000 books previously ranked on USA TODAY's Best Selling Books list are also now included on books.usatoday.com with a dedicated page.
Books.usatoday.com complements USA TODAY's print books coverage. Anchored by Thursday's USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list, USA TODAY in print continues with Book Buzz, which reports on new best-sellers and publishing news, and includes special code tags for smart phones for an extended, interactive version of the booklist.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
8 Easy Steps to Self Publishing Books From Your Website Content
By Shelley Hitz
Interested in self-publishing books? If you have a website, you can re-purpose your top articles into a book. Think about it. After you write heaps of quality articles and lots of traffic on your website, why not reuse it, all the same articles in a printed book, PDF eBook, audio books and Kindle book getting the most out of your time and work.
These are My 8 Painless Steps to Self Publishing Books:
This is what I did with my website Teen-Beauty-Tips.Com. That was the autumn of 2008 when I stumbled upon the concept of self-publishing books. One of our associates, also a speaker, showed us his self-published book.
Quality was great and we found out that he was able to buy his self-published books on his cost of just $ 2-3 for every book. Not only would there be added revenue to promote books at speaking events, but it also gives immediate credibility of a "published author." "I thought," Wow... I can I do this."
The Nuts and Bolts of Publishing My First Book
And so, I put together an draft for my book based on the finest articles on my website. So, I came up with the title.
Next, I started to copy and paste my articles into a Word document template. I subsequently converted my Word document using the free of charge edition of PDF995 (click on properties, then advanced option and select the "Statement [5.5 5 X 8.5 5] "From the dropdown menu for the paper format.)
Despite working full time as a physiotherapist and speaking, as well as travelling from time to time, I had a 190-page book ready to print in a month.
I had a low budget (or should I say no budget) so I took the DIY method. I researched styles of my template and did a book cover in Photoshop. I researched self-publishing and decided to go with Createspace (a company with Amazon), since there are no upfront costs and they list you quickly on Amazon.Com.
As an example, my 190 page black and white soft cover book only cost me $3.13 + Shipping, with the help of the Pro Plan. The Pro Plan is a fee of $39 the first year and then an annual fee of $5, but is well worth the cost in an increase in royalties and decreased cost to buy books. I highly recommend the Pro Plan, by the way. There is actually no reason to go with the Pro Plan (that is, unless you don't sell any books at all!).
Same Book, Multiple Formats
When my book was released on Createspace and Amazon, I also had it offered in the PDF eBook format. I give away the PDF format away to my newsletter subscribers, which once more has helped me to build my list in a very small niche (Christian teen girls) to about 2700 and expanding.
I therefore decided to make my book as an audio book using Audacity and a $ 30 microphone to record it. I am now selling MP3 downloads through ClickBank and also sell a Disc of my audiobook on Kunaki.C Com. The Kunaki can I buy Disc's at cost for as little as $ 1 (+ shipping), as I also sell them at my events and online through my website.
Eventually, I took my Word document took out the pictures embedded in my file and saved it as an HTML document. I subsequently uploaded it to Amazon's digital text platform, and I now offer Kindle version from my website as well.
Making Money Selling Books
In such a small and specialized niche, I'm not getting rich by selling books from my website. But there is a regular paycheck from both online and offline sales, and as my traffic increases (now over 1000 visitors per day), so my sales.
Of course, if you want to "Hit it Big" in publishing, you will want to hire a professional to design your interior book template and your book cover design. I ultimately decided to have a designer update my book cover for me.
If you want to go the TRUE self publishing route and do all the leg work yourself, then you can form your own book publishing company and use Lightning Source. In this case, a book like Dan Poynter's Self Publishing Manual is a great resource to guide you step by step.
You Can Do It!
Given that you've already put so much time and energy into writing your website, it could be worth taking some extra time and re-purpose identical articles to a hard good, as a paperback book, CD and digital products as a PDF eBook, Kindle book and MP3 downloads for your visitors.
If you do not want to be a national bestseller, but simply want to provide extra resources to your website visitors and another paycheck, then download my free book templates, sign up for a free Createspace account and get started! Oh, and have fun...Soon you'll be a "Published author."
Download your free book templates at http://www.Self-Publishing-Coach.com and get more advice about self publishing books.
Shelley Hitz is an entrepreneur, speaker, author and consultant to organizations, individuals and businesses who want to multiply their impact through self publishing. She teaches from personal experience. Over a two year span, (More...)while working full-time, she self published five books, multiple audio CDs, authored two websites that attract thousands of visitors each month, and created multiple products that she sells through her website and at her speaking engagements.
Interested in self-publishing books? If you have a website, you can re-purpose your top articles into a book. Think about it. After you write heaps of quality articles and lots of traffic on your website, why not reuse it, all the same articles in a printed book, PDF eBook, audio books and Kindle book getting the most out of your time and work.
These are My 8 Painless Steps to Self Publishing Books:
- Write down an layout for the book chapters with the top articles from your website.
- Enter your book in a Microsoft Word template (or your preferred software) formatted for your preferred book size.
- Save your book to PDF.
- Select a book designer for your book cover or choos a DIY format.
- Decide amongst all the publishers who you want to use to publish your book.
- Sign up for an account with self-publishing and upload your documents, if relevant.
- Now begin your book marketing by selling copies online at Amazon, via your own website and in person when you speak or at events.
- Now it is the time to layout the book into a PDF ebook, audio book and Kindle book.
This is what I did with my website Teen-Beauty-Tips.Com. That was the autumn of 2008 when I stumbled upon the concept of self-publishing books. One of our associates, also a speaker, showed us his self-published book.
Quality was great and we found out that he was able to buy his self-published books on his cost of just $ 2-3 for every book. Not only would there be added revenue to promote books at speaking events, but it also gives immediate credibility of a "published author." "I thought," Wow... I can I do this."
The Nuts and Bolts of Publishing My First Book
And so, I put together an draft for my book based on the finest articles on my website. So, I came up with the title.
Next, I started to copy and paste my articles into a Word document template. I subsequently converted my Word document using the free of charge edition of PDF995 (click on properties, then advanced option and select the "Statement [5.5 5 X 8.5 5] "From the dropdown menu for the paper format.)
Despite working full time as a physiotherapist and speaking, as well as travelling from time to time, I had a 190-page book ready to print in a month.
I had a low budget (or should I say no budget) so I took the DIY method. I researched styles of my template and did a book cover in Photoshop. I researched self-publishing and decided to go with Createspace (a company with Amazon), since there are no upfront costs and they list you quickly on Amazon.Com.
As an example, my 190 page black and white soft cover book only cost me $3.13 + Shipping, with the help of the Pro Plan. The Pro Plan is a fee of $39 the first year and then an annual fee of $5, but is well worth the cost in an increase in royalties and decreased cost to buy books. I highly recommend the Pro Plan, by the way. There is actually no reason to go with the Pro Plan (that is, unless you don't sell any books at all!).
Same Book, Multiple Formats
When my book was released on Createspace and Amazon, I also had it offered in the PDF eBook format. I give away the PDF format away to my newsletter subscribers, which once more has helped me to build my list in a very small niche (Christian teen girls) to about 2700 and expanding.
I therefore decided to make my book as an audio book using Audacity and a $ 30 microphone to record it. I am now selling MP3 downloads through ClickBank and also sell a Disc of my audiobook on Kunaki.C Com. The Kunaki can I buy Disc's at cost for as little as $ 1 (+ shipping), as I also sell them at my events and online through my website.
Eventually, I took my Word document took out the pictures embedded in my file and saved it as an HTML document. I subsequently uploaded it to Amazon's digital text platform, and I now offer Kindle version from my website as well.
Making Money Selling Books
In such a small and specialized niche, I'm not getting rich by selling books from my website. But there is a regular paycheck from both online and offline sales, and as my traffic increases (now over 1000 visitors per day), so my sales.
Of course, if you want to "Hit it Big" in publishing, you will want to hire a professional to design your interior book template and your book cover design. I ultimately decided to have a designer update my book cover for me.
If you want to go the TRUE self publishing route and do all the leg work yourself, then you can form your own book publishing company and use Lightning Source. In this case, a book like Dan Poynter's Self Publishing Manual is a great resource to guide you step by step.
You Can Do It!
Given that you've already put so much time and energy into writing your website, it could be worth taking some extra time and re-purpose identical articles to a hard good, as a paperback book, CD and digital products as a PDF eBook, Kindle book and MP3 downloads for your visitors.
If you do not want to be a national bestseller, but simply want to provide extra resources to your website visitors and another paycheck, then download my free book templates, sign up for a free Createspace account and get started! Oh, and have fun...Soon you'll be a "Published author."
Download your free book templates at http://www.Self-Publishing-Coach.com and get more advice about self publishing books.
Shelley Hitz is an entrepreneur, speaker, author and consultant to organizations, individuals and businesses who want to multiply their impact through self publishing. She teaches from personal experience. Over a two year span, (More...)while working full-time, she self published five books, multiple audio CDs, authored two websites that attract thousands of visitors each month, and created multiple products that she sells through her website and at her speaking engagements.
How I Learned to Love My Kindle and Publish My Own Book
By David Lambourne
I never intended to buy a Kindle; in fact I swore that I would never do so. I hated the idea of reading an entire book on a screen; I saw no justification for replacing an object I loved with something as bland and soulless as an 'e-reader'. The gadget looked like a close cousin to Alan Sugar's famously naff 'E-Mailer', last spotted in Alan Partridge's 'static home' on the outskirts of Norwich. Alan, I suspected, must have a Kindle by now.
All this was a bit naive. I was willfully blinding myself to a process which by now should be dreadfully familiar, whereby a piece of technology - a digital camera, a microwave oven, a mobile phone - goes from being a gimmick to something apparently essential to civilised life. Just before Christmas, browsing Amazon, I found myself in the Kindle section, and ended up reading the unanimously rave reviews for what the company said was its best-selling product. Some kind of powerful subliminal pressure was at work, and sure enough it worked. Before I knew it I had clicked on the 'Buy now' button and the machine was on its way.
No doubt you know what a Kindle looks like: a bit like an iPad, only smaller and lighter and very grey, even when it's switched on. Compared with the iPad, or any other tablet for that matter, it is very limited in what it can do. For some reason I was expecting a touch-screen, whereas the Kindle's main navigation tool is a little square button with ridges on all four sides, alongside a rather fiddly keyboard of tiny round keys that calls for a good set of fingernails if you are going to operate it with any degree of precision. Navigation across the screen is jerky and unreliable: it is far too easy to click on the wrong link. For reading you get a choice of two fonts, an ugly serif and a plain sans-serif, which you can view in different sizes. Every page is in black and white. You turn a page by squeezing the right or left edge; every time you do this a reverse image of the text flashes at you distractingly, interrupting the reading experience, which in my view should be as seamless as possible. The Kindle can access the internet, but it is slow and clunky, and prone to crash if you ask it to do anything in a hurry. The worst thing it does (the facility is wisely included under the label 'experimental') is to read to you in a mid-Atlantic robotic voice, with the sort of wooden phrasing that makes it abundantly clear that it doesn't understand a word it is saying.
Once you start using the Kindle, however, much of your resistance to it fades away. It has two great advantages over the book: it can stores as many titles as the average library in a space smaller than a sandwich; and it is serviced by an impressively efficient support system that enables you to download a vast number of titles more or less instantaneously wherever you have internet access. And some of what it provides is ridiculously good value. Virtually every important classic can be downloaded for less than two pounds, many of them (for example, the Collected Balzac) in bundles of up to a hundred and thirty books in a single file. Hundreds of individual volumes are absolutely free. If you have a use for these books, the Kindle will pay for itself within a week. The downside is that a lot of them -- the cheaper downloads in particular - are very poorly formatted. Poetry in particular is a disaster area, much of it coming out as a solid block of words without line-breaks. Paragraphing is often haphazard, as is the rendering of text in italics. The bigger and cheaper collections are particularly bad: often the original text appears to have been scanned into an OCR programme and uploaded to Kindle without anyone bothering to proof-read a single page. (The organisations responsible for many of these bundles of classic books tend for some reason to have deliberately sinister names -'Golgotha Press' for example.)
All of the above may sound like quibbling, but the fact is that many of these flaws crop up pretty frequently, even with the more expensive items. Everyone likes a bargain, but it is a pity to have to read a deathless classic (or a thriller, for that matter) in a form that is constantly interfering with the reading experience.
My grumbles (a Kindle fan called them 'whinges' when I published them as an Amazon review) rather faded into insignificance when, quite by accident, I discovered something that you can do with Kindle that very few people seem to know about, and yet which promises to open up an an enormous new field of opportunity for writers who haven't yet been able to break into print. For the Kindle can be used to publish your own books, very easily and for absolutely nothing. As if that wasn't enough, Amazon will pay you between 35% and 70% of every sale you make (ex VAT) on its Kindle site.
Browsing the Kindle store bestsellers I accidentally downloaded a novel called 'Switched'. (It's very easy to hit the wrong button with the Kindle, particularly if like me your hands are a little clumsy.) The book was about teenage trolls; its author was a young American called Amanda Hocking and it cost me all of 49 pence. Despite the rather glaring awkwardness of the writing, 'Switched' was ranked among the top fifty Kindle bestsellers. In fact Amanda Hocking has a total of nine books on Kindle, all of them in the top hundred, which is pretty good considering that the entire Kindle list now comprises some 639,000 titles. Clearly she has found herself a loyal audience, and is selling a lot of books. Partly this may be due to the fact that she writes in trilogies, and prices the first volume of each at below £1.00, but people don't go on buying books by a particular author simply because they're cheap. Her marketing strategy works because the people who read her books want more.
I Googled Amanda Hocking's name, and came up with more than a million results. According to Wikipedia she is 26, has written 17 novels in her spare time, and in less than a year has become 'an e-book millionaire'. She started publishing her novels as e-books in April 2010. By March 2011, she had sold about a million copies and earned in excess of two million dollars.
Most remarkably of all, all of these books were self-published. This is a fact that is well known to her Kindle reviewers; and presumably explains the clumsiness of much of the writing. Interestingly enough it doesn't seem to put her readers off. In fact many of them may well like the fact that the book has been published more or less as she wrote it, without any editor or proof-reader (i.e. authority figure) interfering by boringly tidying things up. That's the Internet for you: it's nothing if not libertarian.
Instructively Amanda was turned down by a large number of publishers before she resorted to self-publishing. What particularly interested me about her story is that like many people I have a number of unpublished manuscripts gathering dust in drawers and cupboards. Some of these are books which failed to find a publisher, but among them is one that was published and is now out of print: a novel for children called 'The Musclemen.'
'The Musclemen' was published by Oxford University Press in 1991. When writing it I had in mind a similar audience to that of the Roald Dahl books, which my own children had enjoyed immensely from quite a young age, and still continued to read into their teens. I meant it to be quite a challenging, even controversial story: an all-out attack on commercialism and particularly the commercialism of modern toys, which I had been observing with horrified fascination since my early days as a parent - my eldest son was born in 1973. In many ways the plot of 'The Musclemen' resembles that of the 'Toy Story' films, although it was actually written and published some four or five years earlier. (I'm not accusing Pixar of plagiarism; this is more a case of what Jung would have called 'synchronicity'.) 'The Musclemen' has a fairly simple plot - hateful toy robots wreak havoc in conventional middle-class household, only to be defeated by an alliance of more conventional play-room characters led by a teddy bear called Hodge. The final nemesis of the villainous Musclemen, as the robots are called, is brought about by their own meanness and capacity for violence. The book relates to Toy Story thematically as well as in terms of plot, in that it pits toys dependent upon technology (Buzz Lightyear/the Musclemen) against toys that encourage the child to use his or her imagination (Woody/Hodge). I have always thought that it would make a great film - particularly if made by Pixar.
'The Musclemen' was initially well-received and was made an 'Independent on Sunday' Christmas Books for Children recommendation, but sales were disappointing, and it was soon remaindered. In hindsight this was predictable. I was at a point in my life where I was seized by an attack of shame and embarrassment whenever anything I had written found its way into the public arena - it felt rather like one of those dreams in which you find yourself at a dinner party without your trousers. As a result I did nothing to promote the book, and nor unfortunately did OUP. The jacket was nicely drawn but insipid, and the whole production looked cheap and dull, like an easy reader. I had wanted illustrations - Quentin Blake would have done very nicely - but my editor at Oxford warned against it: she thought that pictures of toys would associate the book in its readers' minds with Noddy and his friends. I probably should have pointed out that that might depend on the illustrator, but I was a first-time author, and only too glad to be getting published at all.
Once the rights reverted to me I could have published an edition myself, but to do it properly would have cost more money than I wanted to risk, and its publishing history with Oxford did not encourage me to think that I would get much in the way of a return on my investment. In any case, self-publishing carried for me the stigma of the vanity press. If a publisher wasn't going to put their money behind it, then perhaps it didn't deserve to be revived.
Kindle changed all that.
Reading about Amanda Hocking's success immediately brought 'The Muscleman' to mind. How easy would it be, I wondered, to give the book a new lease of life by publishing it myself on Kindle? The copyright had reverted to me, and I still had the text on file in a version of Word. I googled 'self-publishing on Kindle' and was immediately taken to a page on Amazon.com which showed me how to add a book to the Kindle list. The process is extremely simple and amazingly it is completely free. To begin with it all looks quite complicated - there are a number of websites that give you advice on formatting - but unless you insist on setting every page yourself it is really amazingly simple. First download Mobipocket Creator. Then compile your book into a continuous Word Document, save the string of chapters as a single HTML file (select Web Page Filtered), and build it into a Kindle document with Mobipocket Creator. After that all you have to do is open an account for Kindle at amazon.com (you can't do it at amazon.co.uk for some reason) and follow the instructions for self-publishing. You set the price, your book can be downloaded by anyone with a Kindle, and you get to keep 70% of the proceeds (if there are any). Brilliant.
The whole process took me about a fortnight. I could have done it quicker, but I wanted to revise the book and give it a new title - 'New Toys'. My son Henry designed me a very professional-looking (and rather scary) cover. I uploaded the cover and book to Kindle, and by the next morning it was already available on the amazon.co.uk website and on my Kindle.
The main job now is marketing. The book is on sale for £1.71 a copy ex VAT (you have to pay VAT on Kindle downloads, unlike books), and if you want to look at the first chapter there is a feature on the Kindle system that allows you to download a sample for nothing. Incidentally, you don't actually need a Kindle to access the Kindle store; if you go to amazon you can download a simple application for reading Kindle books on your pc or laptop.
If you want to see what your book looks like on Kindle, incidentally, there is a simple way of uploading it onto your e-reader without committing yourself to putting it in front of the public. Amazon give you a Kindle email address; all you have to do is format the book as above and send it to your Kindle email address as an attachment. And there is is, thirty seconds later. This is actually an excellent aid to proof-reading: the fact that the text comes up on your Kindle screen creates that little bit of distance that allows you to read, evaluate and edit it almost as if it was someone else's work. You can even annotate the file as you read.
I don't believe that 'New Toys' will make me an e-book millionaire like Amanda Hocking - I don't have her energy, or her connection with the 'Young Adult' market - but publishing it on Kindle does at the very least enable me to put the book back into the marketplace, in the hope that some at least will read and enjoy it. It doesn't end there. At present I have a new novel - 'The Boy Scully', part one of a trilogy called 'The Engineer's Children' - doing the rounds of the publishers. This book is aimed at adults, and is about a country something like England that for four centuries has been divided into closed communities along gender lines. The story is told by a seventeen-year-old boy called William Scully who has just been expelled from an exclusive public school and placed in state custody, where he is to be interrogated in connection with some unspecified crime his father is supposed to have committed. It is part novel of adolescence (with a twist) and part novel of ideas. What effect does social conditioning have on an individual's sexuality? And if you have no option of being straight, does that necessarily make you gay? Interesting questions, but not ones to which this or any book can provide a final answer.
As a teaser I have placed the first volume on Kindle at a low price: just to see if anyone buys it. (I've published it under a pseudonym, but you can crack that by searching the title). Three sales to date in a couple of days. Is this the start of something?
If it does take off, of course, I should still have the option, if my sales hold up, of taking the traditional route. Interestingly Amanda Hocking herself is about to leave self-publishing behind, having last month signed a 2 million dollar, 4-book deal with St. Martin's Press for a young-adult paranormal series to be called 'Watersong'. "I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc.," is how she explains her decision.
Fair enough, and I wish her well. She and all the other self-publishing e-book successes have done me and all aspiring writers a great service by showing us a way by which anyone who can't find a publisher can get their works published for next to nothing. Funnily enough though, I can't see Amanda's books doing well in a paper and cash medium. Some things just don't translate.
David Lambourne is a bookseller living in Cambridge UK. He has four children. He has written a study of Novelists in the Nineteen-Thirties (Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell) and published a children's book called 'The Musclemen' (OUP, 1991) -- now available on Kindle under the title 'New Toys'. He is now thinking of retiring and devoting his time to becoming an e-book millionaire.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Lambourne
I never intended to buy a Kindle; in fact I swore that I would never do so. I hated the idea of reading an entire book on a screen; I saw no justification for replacing an object I loved with something as bland and soulless as an 'e-reader'. The gadget looked like a close cousin to Alan Sugar's famously naff 'E-Mailer', last spotted in Alan Partridge's 'static home' on the outskirts of Norwich. Alan, I suspected, must have a Kindle by now.
All this was a bit naive. I was willfully blinding myself to a process which by now should be dreadfully familiar, whereby a piece of technology - a digital camera, a microwave oven, a mobile phone - goes from being a gimmick to something apparently essential to civilised life. Just before Christmas, browsing Amazon, I found myself in the Kindle section, and ended up reading the unanimously rave reviews for what the company said was its best-selling product. Some kind of powerful subliminal pressure was at work, and sure enough it worked. Before I knew it I had clicked on the 'Buy now' button and the machine was on its way.
No doubt you know what a Kindle looks like: a bit like an iPad, only smaller and lighter and very grey, even when it's switched on. Compared with the iPad, or any other tablet for that matter, it is very limited in what it can do. For some reason I was expecting a touch-screen, whereas the Kindle's main navigation tool is a little square button with ridges on all four sides, alongside a rather fiddly keyboard of tiny round keys that calls for a good set of fingernails if you are going to operate it with any degree of precision. Navigation across the screen is jerky and unreliable: it is far too easy to click on the wrong link. For reading you get a choice of two fonts, an ugly serif and a plain sans-serif, which you can view in different sizes. Every page is in black and white. You turn a page by squeezing the right or left edge; every time you do this a reverse image of the text flashes at you distractingly, interrupting the reading experience, which in my view should be as seamless as possible. The Kindle can access the internet, but it is slow and clunky, and prone to crash if you ask it to do anything in a hurry. The worst thing it does (the facility is wisely included under the label 'experimental') is to read to you in a mid-Atlantic robotic voice, with the sort of wooden phrasing that makes it abundantly clear that it doesn't understand a word it is saying.
Once you start using the Kindle, however, much of your resistance to it fades away. It has two great advantages over the book: it can stores as many titles as the average library in a space smaller than a sandwich; and it is serviced by an impressively efficient support system that enables you to download a vast number of titles more or less instantaneously wherever you have internet access. And some of what it provides is ridiculously good value. Virtually every important classic can be downloaded for less than two pounds, many of them (for example, the Collected Balzac) in bundles of up to a hundred and thirty books in a single file. Hundreds of individual volumes are absolutely free. If you have a use for these books, the Kindle will pay for itself within a week. The downside is that a lot of them -- the cheaper downloads in particular - are very poorly formatted. Poetry in particular is a disaster area, much of it coming out as a solid block of words without line-breaks. Paragraphing is often haphazard, as is the rendering of text in italics. The bigger and cheaper collections are particularly bad: often the original text appears to have been scanned into an OCR programme and uploaded to Kindle without anyone bothering to proof-read a single page. (The organisations responsible for many of these bundles of classic books tend for some reason to have deliberately sinister names -'Golgotha Press' for example.)
All of the above may sound like quibbling, but the fact is that many of these flaws crop up pretty frequently, even with the more expensive items. Everyone likes a bargain, but it is a pity to have to read a deathless classic (or a thriller, for that matter) in a form that is constantly interfering with the reading experience.
My grumbles (a Kindle fan called them 'whinges' when I published them as an Amazon review) rather faded into insignificance when, quite by accident, I discovered something that you can do with Kindle that very few people seem to know about, and yet which promises to open up an an enormous new field of opportunity for writers who haven't yet been able to break into print. For the Kindle can be used to publish your own books, very easily and for absolutely nothing. As if that wasn't enough, Amazon will pay you between 35% and 70% of every sale you make (ex VAT) on its Kindle site.
Browsing the Kindle store bestsellers I accidentally downloaded a novel called 'Switched'. (It's very easy to hit the wrong button with the Kindle, particularly if like me your hands are a little clumsy.) The book was about teenage trolls; its author was a young American called Amanda Hocking and it cost me all of 49 pence. Despite the rather glaring awkwardness of the writing, 'Switched' was ranked among the top fifty Kindle bestsellers. In fact Amanda Hocking has a total of nine books on Kindle, all of them in the top hundred, which is pretty good considering that the entire Kindle list now comprises some 639,000 titles. Clearly she has found herself a loyal audience, and is selling a lot of books. Partly this may be due to the fact that she writes in trilogies, and prices the first volume of each at below £1.00, but people don't go on buying books by a particular author simply because they're cheap. Her marketing strategy works because the people who read her books want more.
I Googled Amanda Hocking's name, and came up with more than a million results. According to Wikipedia she is 26, has written 17 novels in her spare time, and in less than a year has become 'an e-book millionaire'. She started publishing her novels as e-books in April 2010. By March 2011, she had sold about a million copies and earned in excess of two million dollars.
Most remarkably of all, all of these books were self-published. This is a fact that is well known to her Kindle reviewers; and presumably explains the clumsiness of much of the writing. Interestingly enough it doesn't seem to put her readers off. In fact many of them may well like the fact that the book has been published more or less as she wrote it, without any editor or proof-reader (i.e. authority figure) interfering by boringly tidying things up. That's the Internet for you: it's nothing if not libertarian.
Instructively Amanda was turned down by a large number of publishers before she resorted to self-publishing. What particularly interested me about her story is that like many people I have a number of unpublished manuscripts gathering dust in drawers and cupboards. Some of these are books which failed to find a publisher, but among them is one that was published and is now out of print: a novel for children called 'The Musclemen.'
'The Musclemen' was published by Oxford University Press in 1991. When writing it I had in mind a similar audience to that of the Roald Dahl books, which my own children had enjoyed immensely from quite a young age, and still continued to read into their teens. I meant it to be quite a challenging, even controversial story: an all-out attack on commercialism and particularly the commercialism of modern toys, which I had been observing with horrified fascination since my early days as a parent - my eldest son was born in 1973. In many ways the plot of 'The Musclemen' resembles that of the 'Toy Story' films, although it was actually written and published some four or five years earlier. (I'm not accusing Pixar of plagiarism; this is more a case of what Jung would have called 'synchronicity'.) 'The Musclemen' has a fairly simple plot - hateful toy robots wreak havoc in conventional middle-class household, only to be defeated by an alliance of more conventional play-room characters led by a teddy bear called Hodge. The final nemesis of the villainous Musclemen, as the robots are called, is brought about by their own meanness and capacity for violence. The book relates to Toy Story thematically as well as in terms of plot, in that it pits toys dependent upon technology (Buzz Lightyear/the Musclemen) against toys that encourage the child to use his or her imagination (Woody/Hodge). I have always thought that it would make a great film - particularly if made by Pixar.
'The Musclemen' was initially well-received and was made an 'Independent on Sunday' Christmas Books for Children recommendation, but sales were disappointing, and it was soon remaindered. In hindsight this was predictable. I was at a point in my life where I was seized by an attack of shame and embarrassment whenever anything I had written found its way into the public arena - it felt rather like one of those dreams in which you find yourself at a dinner party without your trousers. As a result I did nothing to promote the book, and nor unfortunately did OUP. The jacket was nicely drawn but insipid, and the whole production looked cheap and dull, like an easy reader. I had wanted illustrations - Quentin Blake would have done very nicely - but my editor at Oxford warned against it: she thought that pictures of toys would associate the book in its readers' minds with Noddy and his friends. I probably should have pointed out that that might depend on the illustrator, but I was a first-time author, and only too glad to be getting published at all.
Once the rights reverted to me I could have published an edition myself, but to do it properly would have cost more money than I wanted to risk, and its publishing history with Oxford did not encourage me to think that I would get much in the way of a return on my investment. In any case, self-publishing carried for me the stigma of the vanity press. If a publisher wasn't going to put their money behind it, then perhaps it didn't deserve to be revived.
Kindle changed all that.
Reading about Amanda Hocking's success immediately brought 'The Muscleman' to mind. How easy would it be, I wondered, to give the book a new lease of life by publishing it myself on Kindle? The copyright had reverted to me, and I still had the text on file in a version of Word. I googled 'self-publishing on Kindle' and was immediately taken to a page on Amazon.com which showed me how to add a book to the Kindle list. The process is extremely simple and amazingly it is completely free. To begin with it all looks quite complicated - there are a number of websites that give you advice on formatting - but unless you insist on setting every page yourself it is really amazingly simple. First download Mobipocket Creator. Then compile your book into a continuous Word Document, save the string of chapters as a single HTML file (select Web Page Filtered), and build it into a Kindle document with Mobipocket Creator. After that all you have to do is open an account for Kindle at amazon.com (you can't do it at amazon.co.uk for some reason) and follow the instructions for self-publishing. You set the price, your book can be downloaded by anyone with a Kindle, and you get to keep 70% of the proceeds (if there are any). Brilliant.
The whole process took me about a fortnight. I could have done it quicker, but I wanted to revise the book and give it a new title - 'New Toys'. My son Henry designed me a very professional-looking (and rather scary) cover. I uploaded the cover and book to Kindle, and by the next morning it was already available on the amazon.co.uk website and on my Kindle.
The main job now is marketing. The book is on sale for £1.71 a copy ex VAT (you have to pay VAT on Kindle downloads, unlike books), and if you want to look at the first chapter there is a feature on the Kindle system that allows you to download a sample for nothing. Incidentally, you don't actually need a Kindle to access the Kindle store; if you go to amazon you can download a simple application for reading Kindle books on your pc or laptop.
If you want to see what your book looks like on Kindle, incidentally, there is a simple way of uploading it onto your e-reader without committing yourself to putting it in front of the public. Amazon give you a Kindle email address; all you have to do is format the book as above and send it to your Kindle email address as an attachment. And there is is, thirty seconds later. This is actually an excellent aid to proof-reading: the fact that the text comes up on your Kindle screen creates that little bit of distance that allows you to read, evaluate and edit it almost as if it was someone else's work. You can even annotate the file as you read.
I don't believe that 'New Toys' will make me an e-book millionaire like Amanda Hocking - I don't have her energy, or her connection with the 'Young Adult' market - but publishing it on Kindle does at the very least enable me to put the book back into the marketplace, in the hope that some at least will read and enjoy it. It doesn't end there. At present I have a new novel - 'The Boy Scully', part one of a trilogy called 'The Engineer's Children' - doing the rounds of the publishers. This book is aimed at adults, and is about a country something like England that for four centuries has been divided into closed communities along gender lines. The story is told by a seventeen-year-old boy called William Scully who has just been expelled from an exclusive public school and placed in state custody, where he is to be interrogated in connection with some unspecified crime his father is supposed to have committed. It is part novel of adolescence (with a twist) and part novel of ideas. What effect does social conditioning have on an individual's sexuality? And if you have no option of being straight, does that necessarily make you gay? Interesting questions, but not ones to which this or any book can provide a final answer.
As a teaser I have placed the first volume on Kindle at a low price: just to see if anyone buys it. (I've published it under a pseudonym, but you can crack that by searching the title). Three sales to date in a couple of days. Is this the start of something?
If it does take off, of course, I should still have the option, if my sales hold up, of taking the traditional route. Interestingly Amanda Hocking herself is about to leave self-publishing behind, having last month signed a 2 million dollar, 4-book deal with St. Martin's Press for a young-adult paranormal series to be called 'Watersong'. "I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc.," is how she explains her decision.
Fair enough, and I wish her well. She and all the other self-publishing e-book successes have done me and all aspiring writers a great service by showing us a way by which anyone who can't find a publisher can get their works published for next to nothing. Funnily enough though, I can't see Amanda's books doing well in a paper and cash medium. Some things just don't translate.
David Lambourne is a bookseller living in Cambridge UK. He has four children. He has written a study of Novelists in the Nineteen-Thirties (Christopher Isherwood, Henry Green, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell) and published a children's book called 'The Musclemen' (OUP, 1991) -- now available on Kindle under the title 'New Toys'. He is now thinking of retiring and devoting his time to becoming an e-book millionaire.
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=David_Lambourne
Thursday, June 30, 2011
Readers Love Free Ebooks But Not Piracy
Bibliotastic co-founder Bernard Gerard noted, "As a survey of users on a free ebook website it is not surprising that most cited free ebook sites as their main source of ebooks in the future. More surprising though is that so few admitted to pirate ebook sites. Perhaps they did not want to admit to illegal behaviour, but it contrasts sharply with other surveys that have suggested a greater proclivity to ebook piracy."
An online poll published as "The Digital Entertainment Survey" in May received widespread media attention largely due to its finding that one in eight women (12.5%) over the age of 35 have admitted to downloading a digital book illegally. That they have downloaded one ebook illegally does not, of course, mean that pirate sites are, or will become, their main source of ebooks in the future.
"While ebook piracy is definitely a threat to the publishing industry," continued Gerard, "it shouldn't lead to a decline in literary output any more than music piracy has stopped people from writing new songs. In fact the digitisation of books is lowering the barriers to entry in publishing, allowing authors to easily self-publish. The selling prices are lower, which benefits the consumer, but the writer gets to keep a greater share of the revenue which can often mean more money per book than in traditional book publishing."
Bibliotastic survey: "Where will you get most of your books from in 5 years' time?"
The survey was conducted between 11 May and 11 June 2011 and involved 125 participants. Details can be found here: http://www.bibliotastic.com/content/where-will-you-get-your-books
An online poll published as "The Digital Entertainment Survey" in May received widespread media attention largely due to its finding that one in eight women (12.5%) over the age of 35 have admitted to downloading a digital book illegally. That they have downloaded one ebook illegally does not, of course, mean that pirate sites are, or will become, their main source of ebooks in the future.
"While ebook piracy is definitely a threat to the publishing industry," continued Gerard, "it shouldn't lead to a decline in literary output any more than music piracy has stopped people from writing new songs. In fact the digitisation of books is lowering the barriers to entry in publishing, allowing authors to easily self-publish. The selling prices are lower, which benefits the consumer, but the writer gets to keep a greater share of the revenue which can often mean more money per book than in traditional book publishing."
Bibliotastic survey: "Where will you get most of your books from in 5 years' time?"
- Free ebook sites 54%
- Online book/ebook retailer 26%
- Bookstores 9%
- Library 8%
- Pirate ebook sites 2%
The survey was conducted between 11 May and 11 June 2011 and involved 125 participants. Details can be found here: http://www.bibliotastic.com/content/where-will-you-get-your-books
Sunday, June 19, 2011
Mobile Tablets, Like iPad, are Usurping e-Readers as Reading Device of Choice for Consumers
Digital publishing company YUDU Media (www.yudupro.com) has published a new report summarizing key research, facts and figures on the e-book market, which continues to grow at a blistering pace. The report, titled, "Rise of the e-book: e-book stats and trends," discusses some of the key components of the industry in its current form, aiming to provide analysis and insight into some of its most recent developments.
A sampling of the research included in this report:
"The e-book market shake-up is likely to become more pronounced over the course of the year, with a growing number of publishers and consumers alike choosing a tablet as their hardware of choice," said Richard Stephenson, CEO of YUDU Media. "While 2010 may be remembered as the birth year of consumer e-books, 2011 may well be considered as the beginning of the end for the dedicated e-book reader."
The e-book market in 2011 will experience exponential growth which will impact the book publishing industry as a whole. YUDU's report offers a deeper analysis of the e-book industry with evidence that transitions in the market go beyond a simple upward sales trend. Ongoing technology innovations and shifts in consumer behavior are driving the continued growth of the e-book market, which publishers are embracing to meet consumer demand and factoring in as part of their overall growth strategy in order to compete in this rapidly changing environment.
Those interested in more detail can access the white paper online at www.yudupro.com/e-book_whitepaper or on the iPad/iPhone by downloading the YUDU Media App and selecting 'e-book Report.'
A sampling of the research included in this report:
- E-book sales now outpace print book sales, as sales of e-books nearly tripled in the US from 2009 to 2010.
- Tablets such as the iPad appear to be overtaking e-reader devices such as the Kindle as the platform of choice for reading e-books; Forrester predicts that by 2015, there will be twice as many owners of tablet PCs than there are of dedicated e-readers.
- Apple's iBookstore is gaining rapidly on Amazon.com as the highest volume sales platform for e-Books.
- E-books have helped fuel success for self-published authors, who are no longer beholden to large, traditional publishing houses to get their works into the hands of readers.
"The e-book market shake-up is likely to become more pronounced over the course of the year, with a growing number of publishers and consumers alike choosing a tablet as their hardware of choice," said Richard Stephenson, CEO of YUDU Media. "While 2010 may be remembered as the birth year of consumer e-books, 2011 may well be considered as the beginning of the end for the dedicated e-book reader."
The e-book market in 2011 will experience exponential growth which will impact the book publishing industry as a whole. YUDU's report offers a deeper analysis of the e-book industry with evidence that transitions in the market go beyond a simple upward sales trend. Ongoing technology innovations and shifts in consumer behavior are driving the continued growth of the e-book market, which publishers are embracing to meet consumer demand and factoring in as part of their overall growth strategy in order to compete in this rapidly changing environment.
Those interested in more detail can access the white paper online at www.yudupro.com/e-book_whitepaper or on the iPad/iPhone by downloading the YUDU Media App and selecting 'e-book Report.'
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Biblio.com Partners with Literary Tourist to Promote Independent Bookstores
Independent book marketplace Biblio.com announced today that it has partnered with Literary Tourist to help support and promote independent brick-and-mortar bookstores.
Literary Tourist was launched last week by owner Nigel Beale, who acquired Book Hunter Press in late 2009 and re-created it as a literary destination website and bookstore directory for book lovers. The new site features a refined database of over 8,000 used bookstores including reviews and information about each store. It also contains expanded listings for literary landmarks, rare book libraries, book fairs, writing festivals and other book-related events.
"Our goal with Literary Tourist is to help book lovers find the kind of bookstores, literary locales and pastimes that will add some oomph and excitement to their travels," says Beale. "We hope to make this site one of the best 'literary destinations' on the Web, and in so doing, in a small way, to help pump new blood and energy into literary culture throughout North America, and, if we're successful, around the globe."
Biblio augmented Literary Tourist's existing bookstore database, with its own extensive database of booksellers and bookstores.
The original database first went on-line in 2000. For almost a decade it was updated manually. Beale notes that bookselling and bookstores are changing so quickly that "it is a challenge to keep up with all the closings and start-ups." Both companies have partnered to create an easy solution to this challenge. Literary Tourist uses BiblioDirect, powered by Biblio, for booksellers to maintain and update their directory listings. BiblioDirect also serves as a portal for booksellers to maintain their accounts on Biblio.com, Biblio.co.uk, IOBAbooks.com, ABAA.org.
Through their partnership both companies seek to increase traffic in physical bookstores, keeping these vital cultural institutions and landmarks open while preserving the business of independent bookselling.
Literary Tourist was launched last week by owner Nigel Beale, who acquired Book Hunter Press in late 2009 and re-created it as a literary destination website and bookstore directory for book lovers. The new site features a refined database of over 8,000 used bookstores including reviews and information about each store. It also contains expanded listings for literary landmarks, rare book libraries, book fairs, writing festivals and other book-related events.
"Our goal with Literary Tourist is to help book lovers find the kind of bookstores, literary locales and pastimes that will add some oomph and excitement to their travels," says Beale. "We hope to make this site one of the best 'literary destinations' on the Web, and in so doing, in a small way, to help pump new blood and energy into literary culture throughout North America, and, if we're successful, around the globe."
Biblio augmented Literary Tourist's existing bookstore database, with its own extensive database of booksellers and bookstores.
The original database first went on-line in 2000. For almost a decade it was updated manually. Beale notes that bookselling and bookstores are changing so quickly that "it is a challenge to keep up with all the closings and start-ups." Both companies have partnered to create an easy solution to this challenge. Literary Tourist uses BiblioDirect, powered by Biblio, for booksellers to maintain and update their directory listings. BiblioDirect also serves as a portal for booksellers to maintain their accounts on Biblio.com, Biblio.co.uk, IOBAbooks.com, ABAA.org.
Through their partnership both companies seek to increase traffic in physical bookstores, keeping these vital cultural institutions and landmarks open while preserving the business of independent bookselling.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Amazon Launches New Publishing Imprint, Montlake Romance
Amazon.com has launched Montlake Romance, the fourth and latest imprint from Amazon Publishing. Connie Brockway, two-time winner of the Romance Writers Association's "RITA Award" for best historical romance, and bestselling author of seventeen novels, including "My Dearest Enemy" and "The Bridal Season," will be the debut author of Montlake Romance. Brockway's new romance, "The Other Guy's Bride," will be published in Fall 2011 and will be available to North American readers in Kindle, print and audio formats at www.amazon.com, as well as at national and independent booksellers.
"Romance is one of our biggest and fastest growing categories, particularly among Kindle customers, so we can't wait to make ‘The Other Guy's Bride' and other compelling titles available to romance fans around the world," said Jeff Belle, Vice President, Amazon Publishing. "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."
Montlake Romance takes its name from the central Seattle neighborhood of Montlake, and will publish a broad range of front list titles in popular romance sub-genres, including romantic suspense and contemporary and historic romance novels, as well as fantasy and paranormal. The new imprint joins AmazonEncore, AmazonCrossing and Powered by Amazon as part of the Amazon Publishing family. Montlake Romance books will be available to North American readers in Kindle, print and audio formats at www.amazon.com, as well as at national and independent booksellers.
For more information on Montlake Romance and upcoming titles, visit www.amazon.com/montlakeromance.
"Romance is one of our biggest and fastest growing categories, particularly among Kindle customers, so we can't wait to make ‘The Other Guy's Bride' and other compelling titles available to romance fans around the world," said Jeff Belle, Vice President, Amazon Publishing. "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."
Montlake Romance takes its name from the central Seattle neighborhood of Montlake, and will publish a broad range of front list titles in popular romance sub-genres, including romantic suspense and contemporary and historic romance novels, as well as fantasy and paranormal. The new imprint joins AmazonEncore, AmazonCrossing and Powered by Amazon as part of the Amazon Publishing family. Montlake Romance books will be available to North American readers in Kindle, print and audio formats at www.amazon.com, as well as at national and independent booksellers.
For more information on Montlake Romance and upcoming titles, visit www.amazon.com/montlakeromance.
Sunday, May 8, 2011
Lulu.com Launches New Open Publishing Platform
Lulu.com (http://www.lulu.com/) is releasing the final pieces of its full publishing platform. Now, anyone can be a publisher without having to spend the years and invest the dollars formerly required to build book printing, ebook creation, book and ebook distribution, and book selling businesses.
The Lulu Open Publishing Platform is accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs) enabling publishers, website builders, and entrepreneurial content owners to easily publish the books they and their authors have created. "Lulu is making all the tools we have built over the last eight years available to anyone and everyone to better serve their markets," says Lulu CEO Bob Young. "Our remarkable global book printing network, ebook creation tools, and distribution services are now available to a new generation of publishers and entrepreneurs to serve their markets at lower cost, more profitably than ever before possible."
Lulu's Open Publication APIs enable publishers, businesses, and developers to create web applications, powered by Lulu, and marketed under their own brand names. Today, Lulu is announcing the final pieces of the platform - two new APIs to complete the publishing cycle.
The first, a new Document Conversion API, will convert any Word, RTF, and HTML document to a print-ready PDF. These document conversion tools rely in part on Aspose Corp's world-class solution for Word document conversion. Lulu makes that solution available to anybody who wants to publish a book.
The other is Lulu's new E-Commerce API. This will allow developers to place orders for their users programmatically. Developers will be able to sell their books from their own sites, keeping control of the user's information. After the sale is made, the developer can send the order information to Lulu and access an established global network to print and ship the book directly to customers. The developer is able to easily fulfill all their orders. According to Lulu's Director of Technology, Ryan Bloom, "This is our most requested API, and marks a big step forward for Lulu." Bloom added; "Due to the importance of all aspects of online commerce security, Lulu is looking forward to working closely with those partners who sign on to use our new E-Commerce API tools."
The Lulu Open Publishing Platform is accessible via application programming interfaces (APIs) enabling publishers, website builders, and entrepreneurial content owners to easily publish the books they and their authors have created. "Lulu is making all the tools we have built over the last eight years available to anyone and everyone to better serve their markets," says Lulu CEO Bob Young. "Our remarkable global book printing network, ebook creation tools, and distribution services are now available to a new generation of publishers and entrepreneurs to serve their markets at lower cost, more profitably than ever before possible."
Lulu's Open Publication APIs enable publishers, businesses, and developers to create web applications, powered by Lulu, and marketed under their own brand names. Today, Lulu is announcing the final pieces of the platform - two new APIs to complete the publishing cycle.
The first, a new Document Conversion API, will convert any Word, RTF, and HTML document to a print-ready PDF. These document conversion tools rely in part on Aspose Corp's world-class solution for Word document conversion. Lulu makes that solution available to anybody who wants to publish a book.
The other is Lulu's new E-Commerce API. This will allow developers to place orders for their users programmatically. Developers will be able to sell their books from their own sites, keeping control of the user's information. After the sale is made, the developer can send the order information to Lulu and access an established global network to print and ship the book directly to customers. The developer is able to easily fulfill all their orders. According to Lulu's Director of Technology, Ryan Bloom, "This is our most requested API, and marks a big step forward for Lulu." Bloom added; "Due to the importance of all aspects of online commerce security, Lulu is looking forward to working closely with those partners who sign on to use our new E-Commerce API tools."
Amazon Books Launches Author Interview Series
Amazon.com has premiered "Author Interviews@Amazon," the new author interview series that will be available in a new content destination called The Backstory (www.amazon.com/thebackstory). Author Interviews@Amazon launches with five video interviews, including celebrity chef and James Beard Award-winning Tom Douglas, New York Times bestselling debut author Joshua Foer, young adult authors Holly Black and Cassandra Clare, and Gossip Girl producer John Stephens.
New author interviews will be announced via the Amazon.com Books Facebook page and on Omnivoracious.com, the Amazon.com Books blog. Customers will be able to post questions for visiting authors that will be incorporated into each interview. All edited videos will be available on the book's detail page and accessible from archives in The Backstory.
"We're extremely lucky to have fascinating and talented authors gracing our hallways here at Amazon and taking time to chat with us," said Mari Malcolm, Managing Editor, books at Amazon.com. "We love these conversations so much that we wanted to share them with our customers. We hope that customers will take the opportunity to submit questions on our Amazon Books Facebook page or through our blog, Omnivoracious. They can also contact us at authorinterviews@amazon.com with questions for visiting authors."
The Backstory will feature Author Interviews@Amazon interviews and other exclusive author content such as guest reviews, interviews, authors' favorite playlists, recipes and more.
New author interviews will be announced via the Amazon.com Books Facebook page and on Omnivoracious.com, the Amazon.com Books blog. Customers will be able to post questions for visiting authors that will be incorporated into each interview. All edited videos will be available on the book's detail page and accessible from archives in The Backstory.
"We're extremely lucky to have fascinating and talented authors gracing our hallways here at Amazon and taking time to chat with us," said Mari Malcolm, Managing Editor, books at Amazon.com. "We love these conversations so much that we wanted to share them with our customers. We hope that customers will take the opportunity to submit questions on our Amazon Books Facebook page or through our blog, Omnivoracious. They can also contact us at authorinterviews@amazon.com with questions for visiting authors."
The Backstory will feature Author Interviews@Amazon interviews and other exclusive author content such as guest reviews, interviews, authors' favorite playlists, recipes and more.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
eReader Company Kobo Secures $50 Million to Compete with Kindle and Nook
"Kobo will use the new funding to continue its explosive growth internationally," said Greg Twinney, CFO of Kobo. "As the eReading space continues to heat up, Kobo is committed to providing an innovative experience that lets consumers read anytime, anyplace and share their love of reading with friends."
Kobo kicked off its European expansion last week, with the announcement of its plans to launch local content stores inGermany -- the largest book market outside of the US -- and Spain starting in May 2011. Local stores for France, Italy and the Netherlands will follow this summer -- an industry first. In providing local content and reading experiences for European readers, Kobo continues to build on the vision of giving people around the world the freedom to read on any device, and share their love of reading with friends.
Starting today, consumers can buy the highly anticipated BlackBerry PlayBook which comes pre-loaded with the Kobo eReading app -- in leading retailers across the US and Canada. RIM selected Kobo as its strategic eReading partner, given its ability to service customers around the globe.
The Kobo eReading app delivers a personalized reading experience and allows users to choose the perfect text size and style, select between day and night mode, both featuring uninterrupted reading with seamless page turns and chapter transitions. Plus, readers can switch between single or side-by-side page view simply in landscape orientation or simply rotate the Playbook to read in portrait orientation. Kobo is offering a free copy of Thomas Cleary's translation of The Art of War exclusively to BlackBerry PlayBook customers. Users can sign in or create their Kobo account from the BlackBerry PlayBook and the free eBook will be added directly to their library.
Since Kobo's launch in December 2009, Kobo has:
- One of the largest stores worldwide: over 2.3 million eBooks, newspapers and magazines with titles ranging from the NYT bestseller list, the hottest new releases, thrillers, romance and over a million free books -- Kobo has built one of the largest stores in the world.
- Over 3.2 million Users: with over 1 million users added in the last 90 days
- An Open Platform: Kobo is dedicated to an open cloud-based platform, enabling users build their lifetime library, and access it from any device.
- A leading eReader: Kobo has developed and launched two industry leading eReaders; the Kobo eReader and the Kobo Wireless eReader.
- Top ranked eReading applications; for iPad, iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Palm WebOS, Windows, MacOS
- Localised Stores: Kobo already offers locally merchandised English language stores in the US, Canada, UK, Australia,New Zealand and Hong Kong -- with Germany and Spain launching in May, and France, Italy and the Netherlandslaunching this summer.
- Leading Tablet Partners; including Samsung, Research In Motion and HTC have chosen Kobo as their global eReading platform for their mobile devices.
- Leading Retail Partners; including Indigo (Canada), Best Buy (US & Canada), Borders (US), Walmart (US & Canada) Angus & Robertsons (AU), Whitcoull's (NZ), WHSmith (UK), Swindon (Hong Kong)
- The Most Comprehensive Social eReading Experience -- Kobo's Reading Life; an industry-first social experience that enables passionate readers to connect with friends to discuss their favourite books on Facebook, build their Reading Life, and earn awards -- just for reading.
Sunday, April 17, 2011
Free Digital Publishing for the iPad
Thanks to the Apple iPad and new tools like iBuildApp.com, digital publishing is easier than ever. Silicon Valley based startup iBuildApp recently added an iPad publishing solution to their suite of iPhone templates designed for the non-coder.
iPad publishing has created new revenue streams for businesses who can publish materials without printing and shipping costs. Create your own iPad magazine, catalog, or book app. iBuildApp solution has templates, is automated, and totally free to create and update. See it here: http://ibuildapp.com/ipad_self_publishing/.
The solution also delivers a good experience for the reader. "We believe that a digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a magazine reader," said Rafael Soultanov. When someone swipes from page to page they can choose different stories to read. Images are vivid, video is optimized. If a reader wants to comment or share what they're reading, they just tap a button.
The fully functional publishing app takes just 2-3 hours to create and publish content. Just copy/paste content into our pre-made templates for the iPad, for free. The iBuildApp iPad solution will be integrated with other CMS platforms such as Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. It simply requires snippets of code from iBuildApp to be inserted into the CMS code.
Services make it less complicated for authors to publish and manage their own publishing (magazines and books). By using a service, publishers can focus on their content and leave the formatting, publishing and distribution to iBuildapp. Unlike other services iBuildApp Self-Publishing Solution provides authors with a free online editor, free formatting and design templates and integrated publishing for iPad and Web.
iPad publishing has created new revenue streams for businesses who can publish materials without printing and shipping costs. Create your own iPad magazine, catalog, or book app. iBuildApp solution has templates, is automated, and totally free to create and update. See it here: http://ibuildapp.com/ipad_self_publishing/.
The solution also delivers a good experience for the reader. "We believe that a digital magazine or newspaper should feel like a media app, not like a magazine reader," said Rafael Soultanov. When someone swipes from page to page they can choose different stories to read. Images are vivid, video is optimized. If a reader wants to comment or share what they're reading, they just tap a button.
The fully functional publishing app takes just 2-3 hours to create and publish content. Just copy/paste content into our pre-made templates for the iPad, for free. The iBuildApp iPad solution will be integrated with other CMS platforms such as Wordpress, Drupal and Joomla. It simply requires snippets of code from iBuildApp to be inserted into the CMS code.
Services make it less complicated for authors to publish and manage their own publishing (magazines and books). By using a service, publishers can focus on their content and leave the formatting, publishing and distribution to iBuildapp. Unlike other services iBuildApp Self-Publishing Solution provides authors with a free online editor, free formatting and design templates and integrated publishing for iPad and Web.
Hannover House Sets New E-Book Royalty Standards and Initial Releases
In the wake of continuing debate between publishers and authors regarding the establishment of fair and reasonable royalty rates for the emerging E-Book platforms, Hannover House (http://hannoverhouse.com/index.php ) has announced a new standard rate of thirty percent of E-Book net revenues for authors. This new rate for all Hannover House authors surpasses the current industry standard of twenty-five percent E-Book royalties being offered by most major publishers.
Initial E-Book releases from Hannover House will launch in June, and include two non-fiction titles from author Barr McClellan, and two fiction thrillers from author Vivian Schilling. McClellan's "Made in the USA" was published in hardcover format in March of 2010, and his New York Times Bestseller, "Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK," was originally published in September 2003. Schilling's acclaimed thriller "Quietus" was originally released in hardcover format in January 2002, and her debut thriller "Sacred Prey" was originally published in September 1994. Both "Blood, Money and Power" and "Quietus" have sold more than 100,000 units each in various print formats, and are expected to be significant sellers again once released on the various E-Book platforms.
"It was important for Hannover House to make a statement that we stand with our authors in support of fair and reasonable royalties for new media formats," said Eric Parkinson, C.E.O. of Hannover House. "E-Books provide publishers with greater efficiencies and lower costs of production, freight and storage, so it only makes sense that the author's share should increase, not decrease as other publishers have claimed. If we don't compensate the authors fairly for these emerging formats, the publishing industry will jeopardize the supply of quality material by removing the financial incentives for authors."
The launch of Hannover's initial E-Book titles will be promoted with ads in the New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly and multiple internet sites targeted to reach avid readers.
"These royalty rates will not jeopardize the profitability of our publishing division," said Parkinson. "We believe that paying a fair royalty will build author loyalty as well as encourage other, established authors to consider Hannover House for their future publishing needs."
In other news, Hannover House announced the creation of the new position of "Publisher - Editor" to administer all acquisition and release activities for the company's book division. A search for qualified candidates has commenced, with the goal of having this key managerial post in place prior to the Book Expo America convention in late May. Hannover House book titles are available through most major book retailers, including Barnes and Noble, Borders Group, Hudson Group, Books-A-Million, Hastings and all major internet book selling sites.
Initial E-Book releases from Hannover House will launch in June, and include two non-fiction titles from author Barr McClellan, and two fiction thrillers from author Vivian Schilling. McClellan's "Made in the USA" was published in hardcover format in March of 2010, and his New York Times Bestseller, "Blood, Money and Power: How LBJ Killed JFK," was originally published in September 2003. Schilling's acclaimed thriller "Quietus" was originally released in hardcover format in January 2002, and her debut thriller "Sacred Prey" was originally published in September 1994. Both "Blood, Money and Power" and "Quietus" have sold more than 100,000 units each in various print formats, and are expected to be significant sellers again once released on the various E-Book platforms.
"It was important for Hannover House to make a statement that we stand with our authors in support of fair and reasonable royalties for new media formats," said Eric Parkinson, C.E.O. of Hannover House. "E-Books provide publishers with greater efficiencies and lower costs of production, freight and storage, so it only makes sense that the author's share should increase, not decrease as other publishers have claimed. If we don't compensate the authors fairly for these emerging formats, the publishing industry will jeopardize the supply of quality material by removing the financial incentives for authors."
The launch of Hannover's initial E-Book titles will be promoted with ads in the New York Times Book Review, Publisher's Weekly and multiple internet sites targeted to reach avid readers.
"These royalty rates will not jeopardize the profitability of our publishing division," said Parkinson. "We believe that paying a fair royalty will build author loyalty as well as encourage other, established authors to consider Hannover House for their future publishing needs."
In other news, Hannover House announced the creation of the new position of "Publisher - Editor" to administer all acquisition and release activities for the company's book division. A search for qualified candidates has commenced, with the goal of having this key managerial post in place prior to the Book Expo America convention in late May. Hannover House book titles are available through most major book retailers, including Barnes and Noble, Borders Group, Hudson Group, Books-A-Million, Hastings and all major internet book selling sites.
Friday, April 8, 2011
E-books Empower Independent Publishers
Though few experts predict the demise of the big publishing houses, their future role in providing the majority of content for today's reading public is now hotly debated by industry insiders. In the same way that cable TV has eaten into the monopoly once held by the big networks, smaller publishers aim to take a bigger piece of the publishing pie.
And the main reason why is the change in technology and the emergence and extraordinary rise of the digital-publishing phenomenon. "E-books sales have exploded more than 500 percent in only a few years," says Larry Leichman, founder of Arbor Books New Jersey, an independent book-services and ghostwriting company. "And as e-books continue to become more and more popular, the low cost of producing and distributing books gives independent writers a tremendous boost. Just look at the sales figures for Amanda Hocking, a self-published author who produces YA fantasy books. She's routinely at the top of Amazon's bestseller list."
In fact, Amazon.com is a major force in this independent-publishing revolution. Perhaps no other entity has done so much to level the publishing playing field. Amazon provides the marketplace and lets consumers decide what's popular. More and more people are turning to reader reviews instead of big-name critics at newspapers and magazines when it comes to helping them decide their next e-book purchase.
And, according to Amazon.com, e-book sales have already surpassed hardcover sales and will surpass paperback sales in 2011. "Everything is going digital," says Joel Hochman, president of Arbor Books' ghostwriting division. "This trend is helping independent publishing earn the same respect as independent films and music."
Traditional publishers are surely feeling the heat from this growing revolution. Some houses, such as Simon & Schuster, are dumping their paperback divisions in favor of a push toward digital, but fierce competition with self-publishers could further erode their bottom lines.
With e-book sales growing exponentially, the barrier to entry into the market is now lower than ever. Small presses and individual authors no longer have to worry about the cost of manufacturing. This in turn leads to higher royalty payments to writers.
Today's improved, light-weight electronic readers are also making more choices available. Since many authors are now releasing their "older" out-of-print titles as e-books and offering them at huge discounts, it can cost just a few bucks to try out a new author. Ultimately, this means more people reading more titles by more authors than ever before. This is sweet music to the independent movement.
And the main reason why is the change in technology and the emergence and extraordinary rise of the digital-publishing phenomenon. "E-books sales have exploded more than 500 percent in only a few years," says Larry Leichman, founder of Arbor Books New Jersey, an independent book-services and ghostwriting company. "And as e-books continue to become more and more popular, the low cost of producing and distributing books gives independent writers a tremendous boost. Just look at the sales figures for Amanda Hocking, a self-published author who produces YA fantasy books. She's routinely at the top of Amazon's bestseller list."
In fact, Amazon.com is a major force in this independent-publishing revolution. Perhaps no other entity has done so much to level the publishing playing field. Amazon provides the marketplace and lets consumers decide what's popular. More and more people are turning to reader reviews instead of big-name critics at newspapers and magazines when it comes to helping them decide their next e-book purchase.
And, according to Amazon.com, e-book sales have already surpassed hardcover sales and will surpass paperback sales in 2011. "Everything is going digital," says Joel Hochman, president of Arbor Books' ghostwriting division. "This trend is helping independent publishing earn the same respect as independent films and music."
Traditional publishers are surely feeling the heat from this growing revolution. Some houses, such as Simon & Schuster, are dumping their paperback divisions in favor of a push toward digital, but fierce competition with self-publishers could further erode their bottom lines.
With e-book sales growing exponentially, the barrier to entry into the market is now lower than ever. Small presses and individual authors no longer have to worry about the cost of manufacturing. This in turn leads to higher royalty payments to writers.
Today's improved, light-weight electronic readers are also making more choices available. Since many authors are now releasing their "older" out-of-print titles as e-books and offering them at huge discounts, it can cost just a few bucks to try out a new author. Ultimately, this means more people reading more titles by more authors than ever before. This is sweet music to the independent movement.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
ClickBank Continues to See Significant Growth in Independent eBooks Space
Long time ClickBank clients and Internet marketers Rasheed Ali and Huey Lee have recently launched a new information product, "Autopilot Income Machines." This extensive, multi-media product contains a mixture of video and PDF training materials in eBook format, supported by software, and aims to be one of the most comprehensive products of its kind.
"We've been online for almost 10 years now and have been with ClickBank since 2003. We've built multi-million dollar businesses on the sale of eBooks and still cannot find a worthy replacement, even video, that can achieve what a simple, well written eBook can achieve for its reader," said Ali. "Our latest product is an eBook ‘blueprint,' supported by video training that will give the reader a richer, multi-modality, learning experience to help enhance their retention and functional use of the information."
"There has been a lot of buzz recently around the increase in consumer desire for eBooks and this creates strong opportunity for independent authors seeking to establish a following," said Brad Wiskirchen, CEO, ClickBank. "Historically, we have provided an established channel for innovative, independent vendors to bring their products to market. This is no different. We are leveraging our network to provide a unique opportunity for authors, sellers and publishers to reach a new market of readers."
ClickBank offers titles from independent authors in a wide range of categories that include Education, Fiction, Green Products, Self-Help and many more, with titles that range from Do-It-Yourself Solar Energy to Official Secret Restaurant Recipes. Companies such as Relationship Headquarters, a relationship counseling resource founded by Licensed Professional Counselor Bob Grant, have seen first-hand the success that's possible when selling eBooks through ClickBank. Relationship Headquarters' success over the last 7 years includes over $3 million in sales and over 80,000 products sold to date through ClickBank.
"As with anything you do, success depends largely on partnering with the right companies," said Jill Menghini, Manager of RelationshipHeadquarters.com. "ClickBank provides all of the resources that you need in one place. We have received rave reviews on their customer service and that has translated into return customers and increased success for us."
Publishing Upheaval Leads Author to New Career as Indy Screenwriter/Producer
Three years ago, author Gini Graham Scott was a successful writer specializing in books on work relationships, professional development, and business success, with books published by major publishers, including AMACOM and Random House. She had also sold a service connecting writers to publishers and agents, the film industry, and the media, which she still works with as a consultant. But then the economy tanked, publishers cut back, and the e-book revolution happened, making it harder than ever to make a living writing one's own books.
But after two desperate years of living on the edge while commuting between L.A. and Oakland, Gini Graham Scott has found a new career as an indy screenwriter and producer, as well as helping would-be writers, speakers, and businesspeople write, publish, and promote their own books through her new company: Changemakers Publishing and Writing (www.changemakerspublishingandwriting.com). As an indy filmmaker, she has written and produced over three dozen short films and trailers for features, which are now featured on YouTube at changemakersprod. Her most recent films are trailers for the feature, The Engagement at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU15IABpr_4, and for a documentary for geocaching, Hide and Seek at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szRNRoJB5Pk
Scott has additionally written a book on low-budget filmmaking: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO WRITING, PRODUCING AND DIRECTING A LOW-BUDGET SHORT FILM to be published by Hal Leonard in November. In the meantime, an e-book version is available through Smashwords and Kindle, and she is currently working on her next book for filmmakers: FINDING FUNDS FOR YOUR FILM, since she is doing exactly that for some of her feature films. She is also leading workshops on writing, producing, and promoting short films, as well as on how to write, publish, and promote one's own book and find a publisher or agent.
But after two desperate years of living on the edge while commuting between L.A. and Oakland, Gini Graham Scott has found a new career as an indy screenwriter and producer, as well as helping would-be writers, speakers, and businesspeople write, publish, and promote their own books through her new company: Changemakers Publishing and Writing (www.changemakerspublishingandwriting.com). As an indy filmmaker, she has written and produced over three dozen short films and trailers for features, which are now featured on YouTube at changemakersprod. Her most recent films are trailers for the feature, The Engagement at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rU15IABpr_4, and for a documentary for geocaching, Hide and Seek at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szRNRoJB5Pk
Scott has additionally written a book on low-budget filmmaking: THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO WRITING, PRODUCING AND DIRECTING A LOW-BUDGET SHORT FILM to be published by Hal Leonard in November. In the meantime, an e-book version is available through Smashwords and Kindle, and she is currently working on her next book for filmmakers: FINDING FUNDS FOR YOUR FILM, since she is doing exactly that for some of her feature films. She is also leading workshops on writing, producing, and promoting short films, as well as on how to write, publish, and promote one's own book and find a publisher or agent.
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