In the first post in this series, I introduced the notion of the "Internet of Bookish Things" to describe how ebooks were now nodes on the Internet that could record how books are being read. And in last week's post, "Reading Fast and Slow - Observing Book Readers in Their Natural Habitat," I began exploring what we can learn about readers using this new "superpower." Today we will continue this exploration by looking at how the attention of readers decays while progressing through a book.
Links of the week February 8 2016 (06)
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:
15 February 2016
When we first observed this phenomenon, we thought it might be a result of publishers and Jellybooks providing the ebooks for free. But then we saw numerous examples of books with completion rates of 70, 80, 90 percent and more. Surveying readers confirmed that people gave up because they genuinely did not like the book. They either didn't like the writing, couldn't identify with the main character or simply "weren't that into the book." Many a reader also stated, "I will stick it out for 50-100 pages for any book I try, but after that I move on if I don't like the book".
This year marks the diamond anniversary of Avon Books' operation in the market. For 44 of its 75 years, it has been come-hithering Valentine's Day enthusiasts with tales of romance.
Avon Romance Useful submission guidelines for romance writers on the publisher's corporate site. www.HarperCollins.com
In terms of the United States market, the Romance Writers of America - (RWA) Romance Industry Statistics page cites the romance-book business as a whole reporting a total annual sales value in 2013 of $1.08 billion. That number comes from BookStats, and it's important to remember that we don't have adequate sales figures on ebooks from most of the major online realtors, most significantly Amazon. Particularly because romance tends to be the most popular genre for self-publishing writers - and because self-publishers work primarily in digital formats it's impossible to get a good count of how many titles actually are on the market, nor how much revenue the entire category generates.
This handsome arthropod is the image used in Digital Book World Conference materials for "Data Guy," the person behind AuthorEarnings.com
The person who calls him- or herself Data Guy-and who is sporting an embroidered image of a spider these days-is surely Arachnida ambitia, an specialist in avid calculation.
In what promises to be one of the more unusual moments at FW's Digital Book World conference, March 7 to 9 in New York, this mystery analyst will present a keynote oration with easily one of the longest titles of the conference: Outside the Data Box: Taking a Fresh Look at ebook Sales, the Indie-publishing Market, and a Fast-changing Publishing Business.
In the new February Author Earnings report, released Monday (February 8), things continue to look rosy for self-publishing authors and dire for the trade. But there are also announcements of changes in the approach - not entirely clear changes, mind you but in some ways promising. We'll look at a bit of that later in this article. To grasp the industry-political context here, we must remember that many who are skeptical of the efficacy of the Author Earnings effort point to the fact that it is an agenda-driven exercise.
The novelist talks to Jasmin Kirkbride about returning to poety after being "diverted" to fiction
Louis de Bernières' house is exactly as you imagine a writer's house ought to be. Cozy yet somewhat labyrinthine, half-open doors giving hints at rooms packed with curiosities beyond: a half-built guitar on a long dining table, the flick of a cat's tail around a doorframe, stacks of musical instruments and books. One would expect the man who lives in this house to write love poetry, and de Bernières' latest collection, Of Love and Desire, doesn't disappoint.
First love: poetry
De Bernières has made his career in novels, notably Captain Corelli's Mandolin (1994), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, and the more recent The Dust That Falls From Dreams (2015). In recent years, however, he has begun to publish poetry, which he has been writing since he was very young. The latest collection includes poems from his 20s right up to the present day, the earliest one being "On Giving a Silver Heart to a Cruel Lady".
His love for poetry stems from childhood. "My father has always written poetry. My mother's pet name for him was "poet" [he pronounces the nickname "pote"] and he occasionally read these out to us, so we had a poet in the family already. And I had a teacher at my second school who used to make us learn a poem every week. They were all from the Dragon Book of Verse. A lot of them were very ti-tum-ti-tum, and quite a few of them were heroic, like how Horatio kept the bridge. I think it gave me a window onto poetry and an eternal love for it. "Poetry was what I was writing first, and when I was young, I thought I was going to be a poet, rather than anything else. When I first started getting going as a writer, I sent a collection of poetry to an agent and she said, 'I don't do poetry, I don't get it, I don't like it, there's no money in it, send me prose!', and I sort of got diverted to being a novelist.
If you know the Greek island of Paros in the Cyclades, you'll be familiar with Parikia's Panagia Ekatontapyliani, or "Church of 100 Doors." Said to date back to the 4th Century AD, it's a stately, elegiac Byzantine landmark in the Aegean. It does not, in fact, have a hundred doors, and no sure explanation for that abiding moniker, either.
When you look at the evolving industry of publishing today, it can seem to have parallel characteristics: the books business is a kind of temple based on our regard for literature. It has an honored past; some obscure traditions; and-on the face of it-at least a hundred ways in, entry points of debate and discussion, presumed thresholds to potentially lucrative business everywhere you look.
One of the many areas in which author-service offerings have arisen in recent years is the paid book review. That sub-sector of the author-services world gives us an interesting picture of the dynamics that can come into play as free enterprise and writers' needs converge. Some author-service offerings are offshoots or trial balloons sent flying by major corporate interests. Others are grassroots efforts. In your childhood you might recall your father converting the back porch into a "beauty parlor" or a travel agency for your mother to operate. Today, one or both spouses may just as likely announce an intention to assist authors in their bid for publishing success. Haircuts may be had in both instances.
"Over 2 million book proposals are submitted to literary agents in the US every year - and 96% of those are rejected," Vincent explains. "That's almost 2 million people in the US alone who are seeking a publisher for their book, every year. We realised we could use our pre-orders metrics to match our authors with publishers based on their interests. So, rather than being painfully rejected dozens of times, we can flip that equation and bring our authors dozens of interested publishers."
Biggest challenges? "Solving the chicken-and-egg dilemma," Vincent admits. "As a platform, we need readers to attract authors, and authors to attract readers. We also need authors to attract publishers, and publishers to attract authors. Building a three-sided marketplace is a seriously big challenge - we're fortunate to have well-connected advisors and to be in a position where we add value to each user segment. Our readers enjoy exclusive pre-order rewards, authors benefit from the widest range of publishing choices, and publishers benefit from making more profitable acquisitions. It's a win-win-win model, but insanely difficult to execute."
The internet and e-books were meant to signal the death of the physical book. That didn't happen. The plight of authors is another matter. As they face a perfect storm of relentless commercial pressures and repeated attacks by the federal government, the outlook for authors and their readers, and for Australia's literary culture, has never been bleaker.
Recent surveys in Britain, the United States and Australia have revealed a serious slump in the income that authors receive from their writing. In Australia, authors have seen their average income from writing decrease from about $22,000 in the early 2000s to less than $13,000 in 2015. For many authors, that means they can no longer earn a livelihood from their work. It's particularly worrying for young writers, who may abandon their craft altogether. And that's bad news for readers, who could miss out on the work of our future Tim Wintons and Richard Flanagans.
8 February 2016
Most of us have felt that we have a book inside us - the stumbling block was always finding a willing agent or the private funds to get it in front of an audience.
But the internet enables anyone to be an author with access to an audience and increasing numbers of people are discovering that they can earn an income from their own ebooks.
Tracy Bloom commissioned rollercoasters for theme parks until she started a family and gave up her job in 2007. "I intended to return to work as a marketing manager at Alton Towers after my maternity leave, but two weeks after my first child was born my husband told me we were moving to Connecticut," she says.
In need of an occupation and an income, she decided to try her hand at fiction. Her first ebook, No-one Ever has Sex on a Tuesday, became a No 1 bestselling ebook on Amazon and she now makes a living from self-published romances.
From content creation to manuscript acquisition to distribution to sales, publishing startups are combining traditional book publishing and tech startup tactics in fascinating ways to reinvigorate and reimagine book publishing. These book startups pride themselves on retaining much of the quality of a traditional publisher, while solving key problems with traditional publishing: high overhead, low tolerance for risk, and slow time-to-market.
Traditional publishers rely on a large team of editors, designers, marketers, and publicists to get a book into the hands of readers. Some digital book publishers swap out the work of the salaried employees for the participation of free community members.
Translation, as Salman Rushdie has noted, has its roots in the Latin for "bearing across." Rushdie - born in Mumbai, or Bombay as it was known then - acknowledges the common fear that something always gets lost in translation, yet he hopes, too, that something can be gained.
In Rushdie's native India, where there are 22 official languages and easily 100 more spoken in dozens of communities from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, publishers have a bounty of languages to get lost in and to gain from. The emergence of smartphones and tablets - enabling so-called "mobile reading" - promises to make India a nation of translations
The rise of mobile communications is bringing with it a flood of media previously accessible only to relatively affluent, mostly urban Indians. According to Minakshi Thakur, Publisher - Hindi and Senior Commissioning Editor at HarperCollins Publishers India, the best hope of seeing a flourishing intra-national translation market is to nurture this audience of so-called digital natives. "I think that is the gap we need to fill, and that is where the future readership is going to come from. That gives me a lot of hope for translations," Thakur told me. "Even though we are working a lot in many different ways to make our literature travel within India from one language to another, and from Indian languages to English, we're not able yet to sell as much as we would like."
Setting yourself up for success with audio will rely heavily on you, which is scary, I know. Don't worry-we'll get through this. If you can get your ducks lined up properly now, you'll find it flows later on.
Like art (something we can cover later), good audio requires having an idea of what it is you want before you even think of approaching talent. You might not believe you have an ear for it, but as the author you have an inside track on the perfect narrator. We'll start with that first, and I'll walk you through my process for producing the audio for Into the Nanten, the world's first real-time fantasy blog turned world's first real-time fantasy podcast (so if this feels daunting, know that I totally get you).
Here's the biggest question to ask yourself: What story am I trying to tell?
The voice is the biggest indication to readers of what kind of story they're about to hear. Into the Nanten is told in first person by a warrior-turned-adventurer, much inspired by Heart of Darkness and the exploits of Stanley and Livingston. I knew I needed a voice that would reflect the tone and world.
The character, Marceles, is male, which makes for the easiest qualifier. He's in his thirties, so he needs to sound mature. He's a bit of a womanizer, well educated, and confident to the point of cocky. I wanted someone with British inflection, ideally deep tone, and with enough range to do some voices as Marceles encounters new people in the depths of the jungle.
Once you have this pinned down, it hones you in on a small subset within the ocean of voice actors for hire. The first step is finding samples. Sites like Voices.com or VoiceBunny.com will allow you to filter based on gender, age, language, and accent-then you can listen to samples. I tend to use sites like this to browse, but not to make contact. Posting a job to a site like this may lead to interest from actors, but it will leave you with extra work and a lot of rejections to hand out.
Lee and Low is a children's book publisher that specializes in cultural diversity. And in its survey of diversity issues in U.S. publishing, the company has handed us a much-needed chance to discuss something healthily difficult: the issue of gender in the publishing workforce.
But what has captured the lead in so many conversations of the last week has been something we're much less good at discussing - and something quantified in the UK industry some time ago, but not as clearly in the States before now: the gender imbalance.
My seven-year-old is a voracious reader. Long gone are the days when I had to read something to him or hope that he missed the inappropriate language spray-painted on a street sign. Now I'm in the process of teaching him that not everything he reads is true or completely accurate. And the same can be said about much of what is written on the future of publishing.
Everything being said about the state of publishing is (relatively) true-but not everything that is true is being said, as there are data points and trends being left out of the broad discussion. I'd agree that ebook growth has slowed down for many of the major houses, and that it now accounts for 20-25 percent of their revenues. I'd also agree that the future of publishing is a world in which both print and digital live together, benefitting from each another and helping to drive overall sales.
When a new technology gets talked up and fails to fundamentally change everything in a short amount of time, the conversation turns negative. But that doesn't mean change is over. It is the pause in the action, the short breath of time where most traditional firms tout their belief that disruption is over, only to soon find out that real change has just begun. What we are experiencing rather is just the break between the waves. And the next wave could forever change publishing.
How is Nigeria's literary scene changing? Emma Shercliff, a publisher based in the nation's capital, Abuja, takes a look.
Despite a vibrant literary scene, Nigerian-based authors are not well known outside Nigeria When I was last in the UK, I conducted a survey among dozens of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances in the UK publishing industry, asking, 'How many Nigerian authors can you name?'. Most people managed to identify Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Ben Okri, but not a single one of them mentioned an author based in Nigeria.
Nigerian literary greats Amos Tutuola and Chinua Achebe were first published by UK publishing houses, Faber and Heinemann, in 1952 and 1958 respectively. This was the beginning of a long tradition of novels written by African authors being published in the West before being imported back to the author's country of origin. The celebrated Heinemann African Writers Series, established in London in 1962, had an enormous influence on the (predominantly male-authored) African literary canon, publishing more than 350 titles between 1962 and 2000. Popular novels, such as those published as part of Macmillan's Pacesetters series, were widely distributed and read throughout Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, although they were actually conceived, edited and illustrated in the UK. It has only been over the past ten years that a new generation of publishing houses - such as Kachifo, Cassava Republic and Parresia Publishers - have started publishing contemporary fiction in Nigeria. This is providing an outlet for a new generation of writers in a literary landscape still dominated by large educational publishing houses.