Bloggasm

My most recent article for PBS’ MediaShift details how a midlist science fiction author bypassed traditional publishing completely and raised $11,000 on Kickstarter. Despite the rosy outcome of his experiment, you might be surprised at his outlook on self publishing:

In August of this year, Pratt uploaded his project onto Kickstarter with video and text explaining his goal. Like before, he offered a series of prizes: For $5 you could get your name in the acknowledgments; for $10, a bookmark; for $50, “a signed limited-edition chapbook featuring a new Marla Mason story”; for $75, “a signed trade paperback” of the novel; all the way up to $2,000, which would result in Pratt writing a “Marla Mason short story just for you, featuring any supporting character of your choice, to be produced in a signed chapbook limited edition of a single copy.”

By this point, Pratt had already serialized two Marla Mason books and had received a fair amount of fan mail for the first four books. Altogether, he had collected several hundred email addresses from fans in the series, and so when he announced the Kickstarter project he sent out a note promoting it to this group. Kickstarter also pushed the project to its front page and tweeted it out to its followers, resulting in donations from people who weren’t even fans of the series. In only 13 hours, he’d met his fundraising goal of $6,000, and by the time the project closed, it was up to over $11,000.

What seems to be happening is that Amazon’s platform is being overwhelmed by spammers who “scrape” content from websites or, in some cases, actually lift entire texts, and republish them as ebooks. And, in a neat twist, each of these ersatz “books” can be marketed under several different titles as coming from different authors. Thus a book on health insurance is available as three separate publications, priced at £2.15, £2.18 and £4.35. And an ingenious entrepreneur is marketing a training course for Kindle “authors”. “You just hand the video course to your spouse, your assistant, your brother… heck – even hand it to your 10-year-old kid! They’ll be posting 10 or even 20 new Kindle books to your account EVERY DAY!”

Now anyone can ‘write’ a book. First, find some words…

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The books will be available exclusively through the Pottermore site, meaning that Rowling is self-e-publishing the novels. While self-publishing is, of course, nothing new, digital publishing and digital readership has helped self-publishing become more popular and, for authors, more lucrative. As we reported earlier this week, Amazon recently announced that self-published author John Locke had joined its “Kindle Million Club” after selling over one million copies of his e-books on the Kindle platform.

But Rowling’s decision here isn’t just another mark of legitimacy for self-publishing, nor is it simply yet another blow to the traditional publishing industry – although no doubt, both of those are true. Rowling’s announcement has several other ramifications here for the publishing industry.

J.K. Rowling’s Next Chapter: A Transfiguration Spell on the Publishing Industry

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But in this particular case, fighting piracy may not be doing a serivce to the book. Piracy, it seems, is what has driven [Go the Fuck to Sleep's] real-world, money-making, flying-off-the-shelves success. The bootleg copy hasn’t replaced the actual artifact. It has only served as a sort of free advertising. Piracy can hurt publishers, but it can also help them. Call it the double-edged cutlass.

How Viral PDFs Of A Naughty Bedtime Book Exploded The Old Publishing Model

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Amazon.com Inc. is expanding its fast-growing publishing business with a new line of romance books, its latest quest for original content to distinguish its print and digital bookselling services.

The imprint, Montlake Romance, will publish digital, physical and audio books and launch with an original new work, Connie Brockway’s “The Other Guy’s Bride,” this fall.

Amazon to Publish New Line of Romances

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Tim Carmody has a great piece at Nieman Lab looking back at the rosy outlook many newspaper publishers had with the launch of Kindle several years ago. While Kindle’s market has seen nothing but massive growth, there hasn’t been much success with selling subscriptions to e-editons to newspapers.

One possibility for this, Carmody argues, is that the Kindle still doesn’t allow the media rich environment of other tablets, meaning there’s little leeway for delivering creative advertising. However, there’s been wide speculation that Kindle could launch an Android-based tablet, and there’s little doubt in my mind that this would be the best tablet competitor to the iPad.

One of the major hurdles that other tablet makers have is pricing. Because of its app store and other economies of sale, Apple is able to sell its iPad at a much lower price than its competitors. Amazon, however, has its already massively successful Kindle store and also a newly-launched app store. With millions of credit cards in its database offering one-click purchases, Amazon can afford to sharply discount a tablet or enhanced Kindle device as a loss leader. By launching an actual tablet rather than an e-reader, Amazon will be able to cross clearly into iPad’s turf rather than existing in some kind of middle ground, and may even have more of a strategic advantage because of its moves into video streaming subscriptions. An Amazon tablet would not only enhance the retail giant’s competition with Apple, but with Netflix as well.

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In my article on the Next Web about the economics of self-publishing an ebook, I relayed several anecdotal accounts of ebook sales exploding in January. It seems these weren’t just mere anecdotes, as Publisher’s Weekly is reporting that ebook sales jumped by 116% that month. Conversely, paperback and hardback sales dropped significantly.

It isn’t hard to guess that a huge number of Kindles, iPads, and Nooks were given as holiday gifts, and because of this ebooks were pushed to a whole new level of sales. This may have been the only major boost needed to push the ebook market past the tipping point. The publishing industry will be an interesting one to cover in the coming months.

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