If you know anyone who writes books, or if you follow any authors on social media, you're probably used to regular cries of doom and gloom about the death of writing and how Amazon is killing the book as we know it. Some of this may even be true. But if anything, it's the massive increase in writing of all kinds that is killing (or changing) the book industry, and Amazon is just one part of that phenomenon. Books - like so many other forms of media - are becoming a commodity.
Links of the week January 5 2015 (02)
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 January 2015
Within weeks of the launch, authors were complaining that it was devaluing their books, in some cases by large amounts - and that they couldn't opt out of the program because anyone participating in the Kindle Direct Publishing Select program (which requires exclusivity) was automatically added to Kindle Unlimited. One author said that the income she received from her Amazon Kindle offerings fell by more than 75 percent after the launch of the rental service, and others provided similar figures in complaints posted on various writing-related sites and in Kindle author forums.
From China to India, Indonesia to Taiwan, international publishers are keeping a close eye on books, readers and new digital developments in Asia and South Asia. This region includes vastly diverse publishing markets, each with their own set of opportunities and challenges.
Our top 12 articles of the year on publishing in Asia offer a broad look at the region. Browse our Asia archive for more in-depth reporting.
11: China Licensing of UK Children's Books Gains Momentum By Liz Bury Tight restrictions on foreign transactions did not deter UK kids publishers from striking numerous deals following the China Shanghai Children's Book Fair.
A few months ago, I began to get an ache in my leg. A creeping pain, like a spreading bruise, slowly working its way up the hamstrings towards the back. It was, I quickly realised, a symptom of what must surely be known as Writer's Leg. A variant on the more familiar Writer's Cramp - and occasionally to be associated with Writer's Block - it is caused by sitting down all day, getting up only to make a cup of tea.
It can only be combatted by moving around more regularly - particularly by making more cups of tea.
Otherwise, writing Darkmouth was a remarkable experience. It began on the train, an idea hit upon during the regular commute to and from my job as an editor on the Irish Times. These days, people ask why I started writing a book for pre-teen readers, but the truth is that I didn't. I started writing a book for myself. One that would be adventurous and fantastical and a bit ridiculous at times. That would include a reluctant hero and a whole universe of creatures to explore. A book, in other words, that I would want to read.
On the same day when gunmen murdered 12 people and injured many more at the Parisian satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo, a controversial new novel by Michel Houellebecq - who graces the cover of the magazine's current issue - hits bookstores.
In the days leading up to the end of 2014, Houellebecq's novel, Soumission (Submission), was already making headlines when a copy was uploaded to cyberspace two weeks ago, first as a poorly copied PDF, then in EPUB and MOBI formats. According to the blog Aldus, it's the first time in France that a pirated version of a book appears in a digitized version before the official launch. Articles proliferated to the point that a journalist colleague posted on her Facebook page that during the period before and after the release of Houellebecq's book, she would temporarily "unfollow" all her friends who were regularly quoting extracts from the PDF.
In a television interview, Houellebecq said that it was clear that religion was on the rise and not only Islam. He added that as he got older, he found atheism to be "a painful position" to maintain, echoing what he had said in the Paris Review interview - that he was no longer an atheist, but rather, an agnostic."My book describes the destruction of the philosophy handed down by the Enlightenment, which no longer makes sense to anyone, or to very few people. Catholicism, by contrast, is doing rather well. I would maintain that an alliance between Catholics and Muslims is possible. We've seen it happen before, it could happen again."
The Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg made a New Year's resolution to read two books a month in 2015, and he's inviting his 31 million Facebook friends to join him.
Over the weekend, Mr. Zuckerberg created a Facebook page, "A Year of Books," where readers can follow along and discuss the books he's reading. He posted his first selection, "The End of Power," by Moises Naim, at close to midnight Eastern time on Jan. 2.
The announcement sent Mr. Naim's publisher, Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus, scrambling over the weekend. "We had no prior notice and learned about it at the same time as everybody else did," said David Steinberger, president and chief executive of the Perseus Books Group. "Orders are pouring in."
For publishers, an unanticipated endorsement from a celebrity or chief executive can be both a dream come true and a logistical nightmare. But responding to sudden spikes in demand has become easier with advances in digital publishing. A few years ago, Perseus created a digital platform, Constellation, that allows it to quickly fulfill new orders. While in the past it might have taken two to three weeks to print and ship additional copies, the company can now restock a book almost instantly. "The End of Power" was listed as out of stock for a few hours on Monday, but quickly became available again.
Zhang Jiajia's work strikes a chord with Chinese readers, who no longer want to "be lectured."
On the list were 50 Chinese writers who made more than 1 million yuan in royalties last year.
Among them were Nobel prize winner Mo Yan, who came at #13 with earnings of 6.5 million; "Established writers" Yu Hua and Jia Pingwa "respectively took 33rd with 2.65 million yuan and 47th with 1.5 million;" and YA authors Han Han and Guo Jingming came in 6th and 7th place, with earnings of 15 million yuan and 13 million yuan.
The paper reports that the authors on the list fall roughly into three categories: "established writers of serious literature, writers of online literature, and popular reading and children's writers."
Also popular are writers of online literature. Tangjia Sanshao earned 50 million yuan not only from books, but film, comics, and game adaptations, as indicated on another list. An edition from the Doulou Dalu series. An edition from Tangjia Sanshao - Doulou Land series. Tangjia published 14 books in 2014, with an astonishing total of 3 million words."My secret," the author of the fantasy novel The Doulou Land said, "is that you need to keep writing, and write fast." He has a reputation of writing up to 8,000 Chinese characters a day while writing every day straight for 86 months to write his series, along with the help of a "premium keyboard" specially designed for him to match his typing speed.
5 January 2015
Last summer, Harvard University Press (HUP) asked a book designer to create a T-shirt for its softball squad's intramural season. The front of the shirt bore the expression r > g, signifying that the rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of growth in income (g)-the central thesis of Capital in the Twenty-First Century by French economist Thomas Piketty, which HUP's Belknap Press had published in April. Capital had leapt to the top of The New York Times bestseller list for hardcover nonfiction and stayed on the list for 22 weeks. It continues to sell robustly worldwide in 30 languages, and in English alone there are nearly 500,000 copies in print-the fastest-selling book in the press's nearly 102-year history.
The success of Capital is astonishingly unlikely. Acquired by London-based HUP editor Ian Malcolm, the book made French bestseller lists in 2013, but there were only about 40,000 to 50,000 copies in print there. "We knew it was an important subject and an important book, and he had data no one else had," says William Sisler, HUP's director. "But it was 700 pages by a French economist, so we had relatively modest expectations of it doing especially well in the United States." Still, the press made Capital its lead book for spring 2014, and commissioned a translation by Art Goldhammer, an associate of Harvard's Center for European Studies.
And there's the rub: Capital is an outlier. Holding the odd bestseller aside, the digital disruption of the print world that is transforming commercial publishing also affects publishers of scholarly books and journals - and is changing structures for teaching, research, and hiring and promoting professors. Time-honored traditions appear vulnerable to overhaul or even extinction. Sarah Thomas, vice president for the Harvard Library and Larsen librarian for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, says, "We are still in the Wild West of sorting out how we will communicate our academic developments effectively."
These were the 10 most popular stories about children's and YA books on publishersweekly.com in 2014.
4. The Accidental Bestseller
Nobody loves a good story more than an editor, so we asked children's editors to tell us how they came to publish their favorite sleeper bestsellers.3. Facts & Figures 2013: For Children's Books, Divergent Led the Pack
In our annual Facts & Figures roundup, each year has its superstar - 2013 was officially the year of Divergent.2. Spring 2015 Children's Sneak Previews
We shared a sneak peek at next spring's lists, ranging from picture books to YA novels.1. Children's Books: A Shifting Market
In early 2014, we took a look at the sales numbers in the children's category - which were greatly boosted by Divergent and The Hunger Games.
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 feeling a bit hungover heading into the new year. The 50 Shades of Grey exuberance of 2011 and 2012 feels long ago. The first seemingly viable ebook subscription services launched at the end of 2013 (Scribd, Oyster) and Amazon launched its own ebook subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, mid-2014.
The main difference between Kindle Unlimited and Scribd and Oyster - all of which cost around $10 a month - is that Kindle Unlimited has way fewer books that people have heard of. That's because Scribd and Oyster have been able to attract big-5 publishers (HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, likely soon Macmillan) that hope to shake Amazon's dominance in the ebook market, so they see no reason to make their books available on Kindle Unlimited.
"What is now being proven is that market is not infinitely elastic," publishing industry consultant Mike Shatzkin wrote on his blog on New Year's Eve. "It seems likely that the low-priced indie authors are disproportionately affected by KU. Who bought indie author ebooks in the first place? The price-sensitive reader! Who switches from buying individual ebooks to the subscription service first? The price-sensitive reader! In other words, the subscription service offering appeals most to the same audience as those who read indie-published ebooks."
Although there was a fair amount of deal making among the global book publishing giants last year, those mergers and acquisitions did not have much of an impact on the top of Livres Hebdo/Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/'s annual ranking, based on annual revenue, of the world's largest publishers in 2013. Pearson came in first, with $9.33 billion in revenue, followed by Reed Elsevier, Thomson/Reuters, and Wolters Kluwer. All four educational and professional publishers held the same respective positions on the list in 2012.
Random House was the largest publisher of trade books in 2013, and was fifth largest overall (its position also unchanged from 2012). The company benefited from its 53% stake in Penguin and the assumption of full control of Random House Mondadori in late 2012, which was renamed Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial at the end of last year. Together, Penguin Random House and RH's German publishing group had sales of $3.66 billion in 2013 (with Penguin's revenues for the last six months of the year reported in the PRH total; revenue for the first six months were attributed to Penguin parent company Pearson). Random House's agreement with PRISA (ranked #24 on the 2013 list) to acquire the trade book segment of its Santillana Ediciones Generales business will likely be completed this year, meaning that the house will grow again in 2014.
Dani Zacarias of Worldreader argues book donations have a dramatic impact on the developing world and it is both easier and cheaper in the digital age.
A year ago I stood in central Nairobi scanning book covers laid out on a strip of cloth on the sidewalk. They were a motley collection, unified only by how out of context they all seemed. I saw a cookbook with an enormous turkey on the cover and a book about snowmen. Taken together they had the look of donated books from America: a little tattered and years out of date.
Standing there it occurred to me that the existence of ebooks is changing not just the for profit aspect of publishing, but the philanthropic as well. E-readers and tablets weigh about as much as a single book, yet represent access to countless books. Mobile phone subscriptions are currently almost equal to the number of people in the world and the gap continues to close every day. This means that giving books has never been easier or more efficient, thus enabling the kind of grand scale that changes the game altogether.
Those books on the street corner in Nairobi might have come directly from publishers or through another book donation scheme that focuses on collecting used or left over books. Either way, it is not likely that they were selected for their relevancy or utility and the lack of either represents what many organizations (including many nonprofits that deal with paper donations) have come to regard as a well intentioned but outdated model of giving. As well, those specific books missed their mark: they were probably destined for a school or library but they ended up as merchandise instead. 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., on the other hand, require only that the intended user have a device before the rest is simplified. It would be incorrect to suggest that getting devices equipped with reading applications, or promoting reading applications to owners of low-cost mobiles is simple. However, it is much easier, cheaper and simpler than bringing paper libraries large enough to be useful to the same number of people.