Bloggasm

In a New York Magazine article, the publisher Random House breaks down the profibility of its business. “The most-profitable books are highly successful authors early in their career with a contract that doesn’t reflect their success,” says Olson. Some writers sign multi-book contracts, which pay off big if the first book’s a blockbuster.

via makinglight

Have you ever watched a movie trailer and noticed a trend where one-word praises like “FANTASTIC!” and “EXTRAORDINARY” boom out in large letters that take up the entire screen? And then you see that the citations of where these reviews come from are so tiny that you can’t even read them?

That’s because those reviews were cherry-picked from unknown reviewers, likely from tiny websites or message boards which only have a few readers a day. It’s a way of making a badly-reviewed film look like it was loved by the critics.

Well, the book publish industry isn’t above such trickery. The New York Times published an article about the art of quote doctoring.

For instance, a book reviewer might write something like “This book is pure drivel, with all the brilliance drained out of it.”

The publisher then uses the clever tool of ellipsis in a blurb or advertisement like so: “pure…brilliance!” Notice the addition of the exclamation mark, which was previously non-existent.

From the article:

It happened to the Time magazine book critic Lev Grossman last October. Grossman says he was “quite taken aback” when he saw a full-page newspaper advertisement for Charles Frazier’s novel “Thirteen Moons” that included a one-word quotation — “Genius” — attributed to Time. Grossman was confused because his review “certainly didn’t have that word.” Eventually, he found it in a preview item he had written a few months earlier, which included the sentence “Frazier works on an epic scale, but his genius is in the details.” As Grossman put it, “They plucked out the G-word.”

via galleycat

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Related posts: McSweeney’s asking lifetime subscribers to subscribe once again, Interview with Hurree Babu from Kitabkhana, Dark Horse Comics can’t keep up with the success of the film version of 300

Since I wrote a detailed article on releasing your book for free online, I thought it would be appropriate to link to this Guardian article, opining at length about the differences between American and British copyright, and the merits of Google Book Search:

There are people who foresee a disaster for publishers and writers. Personally, I think that books are going to be OK, for one main reason: books are not only, or not primarily, the information they contain. A book is also an object, and a piece of technology; in fact, a book is an extraordinarily effective piece of technology, portable, durable, expensive to pirate but easy to use, not prone to losing all its data in crashes, and capable of taking an amazing variety of beautiful forms. Google Book Search is going to be a superb tool for accessing the information in books; but how much of Middlemarch or White Teeth or Tintin in Tibet is information? You can see in the Bodleian’s rich holdings of manuscripts and old books just how much of the cultural history of books, and their cultural importance, lies in their bookness. This will, I think, dilute the impact of digitisation for writers and publishers: even if you could rip an MP3 of Moby-Dick, who on earth would prefer it to a bound copy?

via ed

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Related posts: Stephen King to publish new Richard Bachman book, Google’s employees transported to work in their own buses, Dark Horse Comics can’t keep up with the success of the film version of 300, The Music Copyright Void

When Nick Mamatas’s novel, Move Under Ground, was first published, he had the kind of publicity that most small press authors don’t get. A major men’s magazine printed the first chapter as an excerpt. He had positive reviews in The Village Voice, Booklist, and The Believer. He ran a semi-popular blog to give its release extra press. But despite all this, the book only sold moderately well, and when the trade paperback later came out from Prime Books, a major chain backed out of ordering any copies.

Mamatas knew he had to find another venue to spark sales. A month earlier, another author named Peter Watts was suffering from a similar predicament. His novel Blindsight wasn’t even going to make it past its first printing, and things were looking bleak. But then he decided to release it under a Creative Commons license, and after the popular blog boingboing linked to it, word spread until he had sold enough copies to push the book into its second printing.

Watts noticed that Bookscan numbers nearly tripled afterwards, and it was recently announced that the novel was nominated for a Hugo, something he said likely wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for the CC release.

A Creative Commons (CC) license allows artists to release their works under less-restrictive guidelines than traditional copyright law. Though it has many different forms, a typical CC license permits users to distribute a piece of creative work freely as long as it’s not for commercial use.
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(Caption: Nick Mamatas)
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Mamatas was enrolled in an MFA class on technological and editorial processes, and he needed to complete a research project on this topic. With all these combined factors weighed in his mind– the mediocre sales, the success of Blindsight, the opportunity for a research topic– he eventually decided, like Watts, to release Move Under Ground under a Creative Commons license as well.

The response was immediate. John Scalzi’s popular blog The Whatever quickly linked to the online version, and within a month over 100 bloggers followed suit.

“We [had] about 2500 downloads [Editor's Note: That number is now 3,200],” he said in an email interview, “ranging from featurettes by John Scalzi and the publishing blog Galleycat, to people on Livejournal and myspace leaving comments saying ‘Check this out!’”

But in this case, one blog didn’t give him the link that he was hoping for: Boingboing. And both Watts and Mamatas agreed that the success of a book released under a CC license hinges off this crucial factor.

“The thing is, there’s a confound here,” Watts explained. “It wasn’t the CC release per se that gave me the boost; it was all the people talking about it. Boingboing doesn’t pimp every novel that comes down the pike. It has to be newsworthy in some way, and an author giving his work away is, for the time being, newsworthy. It attracts attention.”

In Watts’s case, Boingboing was the only blog he contacted after releasing the book online. After the site linked to him, it created a ripple effect and more bloggers piled on.

“Very, very few people came across the release by reading about it on my site,” he said. “Thousands upon thousands saw it on Cory’s, Kathryn’s, and John’s. They gave Blindsight the kind of push money can’t buy (at least, not the money I had to spare)”
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(Caption: Peter Watts’s Blindsight)
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Sean Wallace is the editor and publisher for Prime Books, and he has been tracking Move Under Ground’s sales closely through Bookscan. Mamatas owned the e-rights to his book, so he didn’t need his publisher’s permission–but Wallace quickly showed his approval and contributed the final text.

“The effects are largely reliant on how much word is gotten out, I think,” he said. When Wallace checked the Bookscan numbers after Mamatas released the CC novel, he saw that there was only a “minimal uptick.”

But direct book sales, he said, are only one factor to measure success. “There may be associated results,” Wallace explained “Like people buying other books by Mamatas.”

Though it’s hard to track those kinds of indirect effects, Mamatas agreed with this assessment.

“Anecdotally, a number of people have told me that they bought Under My Roof after reading Move Under Ground for free,” he said. “And a couple of newspapers have given Under My Roof some good ink, it seems after hearing about it through the publicity surrounding Move Under Ground.”

Most authors will tell you that it’s extremely difficult to measure how effective a particular form of marketing can be, and the authors I emailed who released their works under CC licenses were hard pressed to produce concrete numbers.

And though both authors reached relative success after they used the CC license, they were skeptical of its overall ability to sell books.

“So what happens when this catches on?” Watts said. “What happens when everybody releases their work through a Creative Commons licence? Then it’s no longer newsworthy, and while it will certainly continue to make my work more accessible to people who already know of my existence, it certainly won’t lure in any new readers the way the Blindsight campaign has done. It’s a niche strategy, in other words. It only works as long as most artists aren’t doing it– and as long as that’s the case, I’d certainly consider releasing my future books under a CC license.”

Over the past few years, publishers have become more willing to allow their authors to release their books this way. Watts’s publisher, Tor, printed several novels by Cory Doctorow, one of the early champions of less-restrictive copyright.

“Doctorow has set all of his stuff free with Tor’s blessing,” Watts said. “Granted, there had been some inconsistency in Tor’s perspective in the past– back when Cory was offering his first novel under a Creative Commons license, Tor was absolutely forbidding me to do the same thing– and in fact they even tried to stick a clause in my contract stipulating that I couldn’t even post excerpts on my website of more than 1700 words.”

But despite these early attempts he persisted until the restrictions were removed, and when Watts went to his editor for permission to release his book for free, he was told to wait a month and then to go ahead.

Mamatas and Watts agreed that there were few pitfalls to the CC license. Neither had any trouble selling foreign language rights to their books. Watts has offers from German and Spanish publishers, while Mamatas has had a German version of Move Under Ground published already.

Two months after Mamatas released his book for free, I asked him if there was a particular medium (other than books) more likely to benefit from the CC license.

“Well CC isn’t really for books,” he replied. “it works much better when the source being opened up is more easily adjustable, as software is. For books, stuff the nerd crowd likes: SF and fantasy, will work best. Also, various experimental texts may also work. I wonder if Douglas Rushkoff’s Exit Strategy, which involved reader-generated footnotes, would have been more successful had it been made totally open to remixing. Something short but very open-ended, a ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ book with an infinity of choices, would likely be very popular CCed.”

But in the end, despite their skepticism of the long-term benefits of the license, both said they’d likely try it again.

“I guess I’m in for the duration,” said Watts. “And when the novelty wears off I’ll just have to find some other way of getting attention. Perhaps I could get some fan to climb up a clock tower and start shooting random pedestrians, all the while shouting ‘Peter Watts’s Blindsight made me do this!’ I bet that would increase my sales even more than a CC release. And I wouldn’t have to give anything away.”

I was as astonished as anyone that the movie 300 managed to make $70 million in its opening weekend. I mean, I knew the movie had some hype to it, but I thought it was mostly within the comic and film geek world.

It turns out that the small comic book company Dark Horse Comics, wasn’t very prepared for the onslaught of book sales following the movie’s success. Which is kind of silly really since this wasn’t the first time they’ve had a comic book of theirs turned into a movie.

On the heels of my musings about 300’s “gateway” potential, and its record-breaking weekend at the box office, ICv2 is reporting that Diamond, the book’s exclusive distributor to both the direct and mainstream markets, was out of stock of the $30 hardcover as of last Thursday, March 8th. In this case, though, the finger of blame doesn’t point at the much-maligned monopoly, but rather at the publisher, Dark Horse, who once again has a hit movie tie-in (Hellboy, Sin City) but is faced with a shortage of books to fully take advantage of it.

The company quickly sold out of its 15,000-copy print run, and their next shipment will barely cover the back orders. If they don’t act quickly, they might lose out on a lot of the 300 craze and lose a lot of potential profits as well.

If you’re a Stephen King fan, you likely know that King has written several novels under the pen-name Richard Bachman, the most famous of which was likely Thinner. After it was revealed that he and Bachman were the same, King only wrote one more novel under that name, The Regulators, which was set in a similar world to his other novel (written with a SK byline), Desperation.

Well, it looks like King will be publishing a new book under the Bachman name. It’ll be titled Blaze. Follow this pdf link to read the first two chapters.

I don’t have time to read them just now, perhaps tomorrow I will.

via carnwrite

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Related posts: How much a Science Fiction novelist makes, Interview with Chandrahas Choudhury from The Middle Stage, Nick Mamatas releases his first novel under a Creative Commons license, Why bloggers aren’t always great at selling books

GOOD Magazine has published its list of the 51 Best Magazines Ever. Rather than focusing only on magazines today, not only does it highlight now-defunct magazines, it also pinpoints a few eras of certain magazines. Esquire, for instance, doesn’t make the list in its current incarnation, but rather the version of it from 1961–1973.

I have few a disagreements. I’ve been so impressed with how well Wired has incorporated its print magazine into its web content, so I wouldn’t cut it off at 1998. Why the hell isn’t Harper’s on the list? Its index alone should get it on there. And what about The Economist? It’s known in many circles as one of the most objective publications out there.

The feature also includes a brief history of the magazine industry.

via bookslut