When it comes to self-publishing an eBook there are only a few companies out there that are worth an authors time. Amazon has Kindle Direct Publishing which dominates the marketplace and accounts for 75% of all digital book sales in North America. Barnes and Noble and Kobo are two other companies that offer indies the ability to market their books domestically and internationally. Wattpad is one of the largest to publish in the serialized format and has some authors with over 190 million reads. Needless to say, all of these companies are tremendously profitable and are the only avenues that have a widespread appeal.
Links of the week May 5 2014 (19)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
12 May 2014
Publishers were in a perfect position five years ago to provide a viable self-publishing program. They missed the boat and Amazon become the unstoppable juggernaut that pocketed hundreds of millions of dollars piggybacking on the indies. The Seattle based company is vilified by everyone in the publishing industry because they developed and executed an idea that the traditional publishers were unable to do.
Nobody can speak every language on earth, not even all those languages that boast of a written literary tradition - which is surely fewer than the over 7,000 languages catalogued by Ethnologue, but greater than the 46 or so included in the Translation Index by Three Percent. Thus the need for literature in translation. And with translation comes another set of problems.
Publishers not just willing, but eager to put out works in translation-and, as I detailed in an earlier article, the number of is growing - can encounter problems in the research phase. There are various ways a publisher hears about an author who piques their interest: a newspaper article with a fleeting mention of a once-popular foreign author; a glance at the bookshelf of a great-aunt who immigrated from Hungary; a rave from a foreign friend or acquaintance; a tip or submission from a translator; an agent. If a publisher is interested, then the questions that follow are: Is anything available in English? Where can I read it? Has anything by Author X been translated before? Is anybody working on it now?
Right now there's no great way to find out ALL of that information. UNESCO's Index Translationum is a useful tool: it is an international bibliography of translations, - providing information on works that have been translated all over the world since 1979. However, unpublished translations will not show up on their radar. And neither will they show up in Three Percent's Translation Index, which shows a list of published literature translated into English in the past year. There are literary journals, many of which increasingly feature translations; there is the excellent Words without Borders, which to date has published almost 2,000 pieces from 101 languages. But these are inevitably just a fraction of what actually exists.
Publishing is a messy business. Many of its practices and some of its thinking pre-date digital. Some of it pre-dates computers. Its digital journey will not be linear, and even if it emerges fully-formed from this electronic swamp, chances are that it will still be a messy business.
In his overview of the Publisher Association's Statistics Yearbook 2013, PA president and Elsevier director of strategy Nick Fowler commented that the most "remarkable feature" of the yearbook is "the sheer breadth of activity covered". He is right. Publishing (of books and journals) is a £4.7bn activity undertaken by 27,000 employees. Not bad for a business that some believe is defunct.
Had we not had Fifty Shades (or less spectacularly Hunger Games), we would be looking at different rates of growth, less high in 2012, and much higher in 2013. The rate of decline in growth might have been less dramatic, and perhaps even detectable earlier. Including sales from self-published writers might have changed its shape again. But perhaps not as much as some might suspect. The overall fiction market for print and e-books was worth £523m in pre-recession 2008, and in 2013 clocked up total sales of £599m.
Your back catalogue and publishing pipeline are packed end to end with books. Turning them into ebooks is getting easier and easier. But what if your customers want something that doesn't look like or work like an ebook?
What if you can't make what the consumer wants?
The rise of digital content - websites and apps - is the first time we the consumer have an alternative to the book model to help us help ourselves. It's not just new kinds of content (blogs, wikis, databases) but also self-documenting tools, better software, online classes and workshops, webinars, and online communities where people help each other. Digital gives your customers alternatives and ebooks aren't it. Your ebooks aren't the new thing. They are the old thing photocopied onto a facsimile of the new thing. EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. are nothing more than a print artifact delivered digitally.
Mo Yan is the second Chinese author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.
Last month at a talk organized by the Beijing Normal International Writing Center, Nobel Prize winner Mo Yan and Syrian-born poet (and perennial Nobel candidate) Adonis, (along with other Chinese writers) spoke on topics ranging from cultural identity, the spirit of introspection and the writer's mission.
Adonis and Mo Yan, two authors who both reach an international audience, agree that the "one factor which facilitates and hinders their efforts is translation."
But even though it's difficult, Adonis believes that it is through translating literature and poetry that we can explore the mentality of "the others" at a deeper level, and that the importance of translation is that it should serve as "the most fundamental element of world culture in the future". He added that, "The importance also lies in the language that a translator uses, especially one that he uses while translating poems. It can enrich his mother tongue. To some extent, it can change the structure of his mother language."
Charlie Redmayne looks at the many skills, traditional and new, that contemporary publishing demands.
In an age where retailers, tech companies, authors and now even agents are becoming publishers, we have to ask ourselves: what does it mean to be a publisher in the 21st century? How can we add most value in a marketplace where the value chain is changing so fast?
There is one thing that all of us agree on. We are nothing without the content. So content is king; the author is king. So the question we really need to be asking ourselves is: how can we best serve our authors? What do we need to do to ensure that they don't want to be published by anyone else? How do we continue to add value? If the only value we bring is in the size of the advance, then ultimately we lose.
What this doesn't mean is throwing out all the tried and tested practices. We need to do all the things we have always done - only better - and complement them with new skill sets and expertise. And we need to do it bigger, better and faster.
We need to be innovative and creative, and setting the agenda - to challenge the way people think about books and storytelling. I was recently in San Francisco and was listening to a panel of young (seriously young) entrepreneurs. They were fascinating (even if sometimes misguided - just because you disrupt does not mean you will succeed), but they thought differently and challenged us. My favourite comment was: "The process of reading is inefficient because you have to move your eyes; we could blast text into your eyeballs at thousands of words a minute and you could read a novel in 10 minutes." Lunacy? Maybe. But have a look at Spritz; it's amazing what's possible.
5 May 2014
Writers need to be careful about putting their children in memoir or in fiction. We're their custodians.
I've been asked this question so often I've begun to assume that the world is teeming with aspiring writers wondering what Thanksgiving dinner will be like after they publish that lightly fictionalized exposé of Mom's actionable parenting skills and Dad's affair with the babysitter. When asked, I usually reply: "Write what you want. People rarely recognize themselves on the page. And if they do, they're often flattered that a writer has paid attention."
A recent surge of media interest has involved the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose multivolume memoir-novel 'My Struggle' has been criticized for revealing too much about his close relatives. In a Paris Review interview, Knausgaard says the question of whether a writer ought to use his family as material is akin to asking the question: Would you save the cat or the Rembrandt from the burning house? He says we must save the cat, choose life over art - a somewhat surprising answer from a writer who portrays his own family in such intimate detail.
Specific advice differs from one person to another, but most agree that good Literary Citizenship entails buying from local bookstores, attending readings, subscribing to literary magazines, interviewing writers, reviewing books, reading a friend's manuscript, blurbing books, and so on.
I agree with the value in all of these activities. Yes, by all means, if you want to build a literary career, you've got to form professional networks in your field. You've also got to support the small presses, bookstores, literary magazines and libraries in which you hope to see your own work showcased. This is so obvious that it's surprising it has to be mentioned at all. But it does have to be mentioned, and those who write the blogs and manifestoes of advice are good to do so.
With fewer books reviewed in newspapers and magazines, who picks up the slack? Do the owners of media conglomerates step in to review a book here and there? Do the CEO's of publishing houses get on the blog-wagon and start reviewing the books that help pay their six-figure salaries? Doubtful. It is writers, working mostly without pay, reviewing books, interviewing fellow writers, and tweeting and posting messages about books they love and authors they admire on social media.
Bestselling author John Shors offers readers more than literary imagery of his novels' settings. He actually takes them there.
He leads tours of the Southeast Asian temples and hidden jungles that inspired his books. The idea: Get people excited about his work, and sell books -- a lot of them.
Today's authors don't always lock themselves away for two years to write. Tighter publisher budgets, fewer booksellers, more competition and the rise of ebooks has put more pressure on novelists to aggressively market their books.
To boost buzz for her novels, Rose hired an Etsy artist for $350 to make necklaces like those featured on the covers of her recent books "The Collector of Dying Breaths" and "Seduction." And she asked New York perfumer Frederick Bouchardy to create a fragrance based on a fictional character, whose Parisian family was perfume makers.
"I was lucky that Frederick fell in love with the book and the idea of creating a perfume for my character," says Rose, who invested nothing and draws no royalties from the sales. Bouchardy sells the perfume online and in designer boutiques across the country. Rose buys $28 bottles to give away at promotional events.
On February 12, writer and columnist Damien G. Walter published a thesis on e-book sales that caused quite a stir in the publishing community.
Walter addressed several ugly industry realities, such as consumer impulse buying with low read rates, the principle of digital abundance, the glut of low-quality self-published books and physical scarcity. But here's what Walter's post doesn't do: provide a solution for the e-book industry.
As a publishing activist and speaker, I agree that buying trends indicate the e-book industry is immature. After all, statistics show that more than 60 percent of readers still prefer print. But when 58 percent of Americans have a smartphone, 32 percent own an e-reader and 42 percent own a tablet, it's clear that digital publishing is here to stay.
The biggest boon to writers since the printing press is also book retailers' greatest challenge: online retailers publish everyone. Many would let my grandmother publish a novel, broken Italian English and all. And every book that enters the market dilutes it, confusing and discouraging readers looking for content. Ideally, online retailers would develop more stringent requirements. If an e-book has sold zero to 10 copies in the past year, it should be taken down. A low-selling printed book can go out of print and not take up shelf space in a bookstore; the same concept should apply online.
Nielsen Books & Consumers 2013 survey shows that, in the UK, ebooks now account for one in four of all consumer book purchases, up from one in five in 2012 - and in adult fiction, the category most affected by the move to digital, the proportion bought as ebooks is now more than 40%. Despite the growth in purchasing of digital books, however, the overall book market in the UK declined in 2013 - even with the significant impact of the Fifty Shades trilogy on the market in 2012 removed from the equation.
Despite the increase in tablet ownership, more than 60% of ebooks in the UK were bought in 2013 to be read on a dedicated, rather than a multifunction, device. And only half of all the books bought by e-reader owners in 2013 were ebooks - meaning that half of their purchases were in printed format, of course. Meanwhile, a much lower proportion - a third - of the books bought by tablet owners were digital in 2013; two thirds of their book purchases were printed books