On my way home from the Romance Writers of America National Conference in San Antonio, Texas, I met a fellow writer in the airport. She was so dazzled by the success stories spotlighted at the conference, the growing number of indie and hybrid romance authors who reported earning substantial and even impressive income from their writing by taking advantage of self-publishing. After attending workshops with titles like "How to Make Six Figures Quietly as an Indie Author," she was ready to jump in with both feet and try her luck. She planned to quit her day job to focus on her writing, even though she had not yet completed a manuscript. My stomach sank as I considered her prospects and the incredible risk she was taking based on the undeniable success of several select authors. Had she been given false hope, or were her chances as good as the hype suggested?
Links of the week July 28 2014 (31)
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:
4 August 2014
So who is buying all of these books that are supposedly paying the bills and replacing the day jobs of the new authorpreneurs? Has there been a surge in spending by consumers, their money supplying the gold for this gold rush? Or perhaps, given the lower prices of ebooks particularly those by indie authors, there's been an increase in the number of books consumers are buying and reading, such that there's a spreading of the possibly increasing wealth to include a greater number of authors? There's no evidence of either trend.
Morgan Entrekin is happy with the relationships he's developed with Amazon. As the president of independent publisher Grove/Atlantic Books, he witnessed the industry change as Amazon's introduction of the Kindle helped publishers like him embrace the digital revolution that has battered other industries.
It's the future that he's worried about.
"Right now [Amazon] is allowing me a perfectly fair margin, but what happens when they have total control or twice as much of the market share than they have now?" he said.
The relationship between Amazon and publishers started out as mutually beneficial. Amazon brought publishers into the digital age, and publishers were happy to provide the content in return for a new revenue stream. As e-books grew and brick-and-mortar businesses like Borders struggled, the business dynamics between Amazon and publishers changed. Publishers like Hachette - after being boosted by Amazon's investment and innovation - are now uncomfortably reliant on the ecommerce site and looking for ways to maintain a grip on an evolving industry but finding none.
Effective book publicity relies on planning ahead and defining success for you and your book. You can't get there without asking where you are going and what you want to happen when you arrive.
The key is asking questions and seeking answers that are both realistic and sustainable. The best answers for you are not necessarily the same best answers for another author. Sure there are some overlap and common practices, but the options for book publicity are so widespread and varied that it can be overwhelming to authors and publishing professionals alike.
It's sometimes difficult for writers to separate the emotional experience of writing and publishing a book from the more clinical and objective planning of publicity and marketing, especially if the author is still in the throes of editing and producing the book. Recording expectations and then researching how to achieve them early on in the publishing process can help to create a healthy divide between these two worlds.
Self-help has been around for thousands of years, and it has been loved and hated for just as long. The earliest progenitor of self-help books was an Ancient Egyptian genre called "Sebayt," an instructional literature on life ("Sebayt" means "teaching"). A letter of advice from father to son, The Maxims of Ptahotep, written circa 2800 B.C., advocated moral behavior and self-control. Ancient Greek texts offered meditations, aphorisms, and maxims on the best ways to live.
Despite its ubiquity, it's hard to say whether or not self-help books really help anyone. There is very little scholarship on the subject. Publishing statistics claim that 80% of self-help book customers are repeat buyers, which could indicate that they are not helping. Some suggest that buyers of self-help books don't read more than the first twenty pages, if they open them at all. Just the act of buying a self-help book is reported to make someone feel better.
28 July 2014
The Booker opened up to the world - and to some, the publishing world looked a little narrower. With American authors eligible for the first time, the resulting lineup is unsurprisingly Anglo-American in flavour - chair of judges AC Grayling said publishers had been concentrating on pushing their US authors - but also overwhelmingly white and male. No African or Indian authors, and only one British woman. Globalisation often tends towards a monoculture, and the other much-debated rule change, whereby past success increases the number of books a publisher may submit, can only push the prize towards the establishment. The small-press surprises and unknown debutantes that have been a fixture of recent years are notably absent - though notable too is the prize's first crowd-funded long-listee, eco-activist Paul Kingsnorth's Old English tale of resistance to the Norman invasion.
At the start of the year, everyone was convinced Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch would win; things turned out to be not so predictable. Her absence may be the only big surprise in a solid lineup, but there are rich rewards to be found.
A new report claims that self-published authors have surged to 31% of ebook sales on Amazon.com, and are now earning more ebook royalties than writers published by the "Big five" traditional publishers. Despite research published earlier this month finding professional UK authors' incomes plunging below minimum standards, self-publishing champion Hugh Howey says the new results, in his third Author Earnings report, prove DIY authors are "here to stay".
While it should be a jolt to see that indies are earning nearly 40% of the ebook dollars going to authors," the report concluded, "we are starting to take this reality for granted. That's real progress. As it has proven to be in other fields of entertainment, the indie movement in literature is not a blip and not a gold rush. It appears to be here to stay."
In the Opinion Pages of the New York Times on July 20, 2014, seven poets were asked to respond to the question, "Does poetry matter?"
Perhaps no other art form is asked to defend its value, impact, relevance, and existence as often as poetry. Through the centuries poets have explained how poetry connects us to ourselves. With a mastery of language and its possibilities, poets elevate the material of everyday communication to art that requires reflection and contemplation, and ultimately elucidates our location in the world.
At the Academy of American PoetsThe website of the wonderful Academy, which was founded in 1934 to support American poets at all stages of their careers and to foster the appreciation of contemporary poetry. Any poet or poetry lover would find it worth a visit. it's clear to us that while this may elude some, we're actually having a poetry boom. Not only is poetry alive in the U.S., many millions of people are reading and sharing poems online. Poetry may be the art most suited for mobile technology. And, hundreds of thousands of people are attending and participating in poetry readings, workshops, conferences, slams, and festivals each year. We have rounded up some quantitative examples to demonstrate how poetry matters in the U.S.:
Whether poetry is useless or dead is a question that arrives as regularly as cicadas. Newsweek proclaimed verse a corpse it in 2003; in 2013, The Washington Post's Alexandra Petri called again for a coffin and a shovel. Still, every spring, ivory towers open their gates and a few thousand new Masters of Poetry stroll out. According to Poets & Writers, there are 204 MFA programs and 21 Creative Writing PhD programs, each graduating a new crop of poets each year. When you add on the countless numbers who write poetry outside of academia, it seems pretty clear that poets aren't unicorns-rather, as in sci fi alien invasion movies, they are already among us: what's interesting is that poetry's popularity is so often called into question.
Thanks to the ease of sharing poems through email and social media, it's possible that poetry's audience might be greater now than ever. According to The Academy of American PoetsA poetry book club founded in 1934 to support American poets and foster an appreciation of poetry. www.poets.org/ director Jen Benka, the Academy's Poem-a-Day has over 300,000 readers, so large an audience that the Hearst Corporation recently partnered with the Academy to include the poems in their online and print newspapers and magazines. Benka points out, "The general perception of people who read poetry is not fully accurate. We know there is also a dedicated readership - people who love poetry who are not poets themselves who are completely dedicated to the art form and take it as seriously as poets do."
Imagine a place where you can browse through thousands of books, and buy any of them for £1 each; and drink tea and eat cake at the same time.
No, not the internet and your desk, but an actual bricks and mortar (well, steel and breeze block) bookshop just south of Bristol called Bookbarn International. Billing itself as 'England's Largest Used Book Warehouse', it is indeed a veritable house of wares: with shelves and shelves of second-hand books as far as the eye can see. On the day I visited, the shop was busy with flesh-and-blood customers scanning the shelves and eagerly filling pull-along baskets with bargains.
I hadn't come to buy books (although, reader, I did) but to catch up with Bookbarn's William Pryor. We first met at the House of Commons in June, when ALCS and Bookbarn International launched the Book Author Resale Right - a pilot programme which will compensate authors when "used" copies of their books are sold by Bookbarn International. Authors have never before benefited from the sale of second-hand books in the UK, despite the increasing prominence of the second-hand book market. Through the pilot scheme, which begins this month, Bookbarn International will file a sales report to ALCS each quarter, and then through ALCS, pay royalties of 3% of net receipts to authors on the sales of books that - as Pryor puts it - "have some value. Many of our books sell for 1p, so clearly we're not going to pay out 3% of that."