Following the announcement of agent Ed Victor’s publishing venture Bedford Square Books, Curtis Brown UK managing director Jonathan Lloyd admits that his agency is well down the path of formulating their own strategy for republishing their clients’ out-of-print works. “We are right behind him, but with a rather larger list,” Lloyd tells The Bookseller. Meanwhile, Victor told us that while he is “having a lot of fun, going back to my roots” as a publisher, “first and foremost I’m an agent…. My day job is being a literary agent and taking care of my clients.” At the same time, Victor […]
New Business Models
Donnelley Will Provide POD and Frontlist Fulfillment for HarperCollins In Broad Supply Chain Agreement
HarperCollins has become the latest large publisher to address the shift in business from print to digital with a revised inventory model that outsources more services and reduces their fixed-cost warehouse network. Starting in November, the publisher will expand their longtime relationship with their printer RR Donnelley. All of Harper’s new releases will be fulfilled directly from Donnelley’s Harrisonburg, VA facility rather than Harper’s own network of warehouses. Donnelley will also provide global print-on-demand services to Harper, and as of July 2012, they will take over fulfillment of all titles from the Zondervan division, both frontlist and backlist. As a […]
Audible Looks to Jump-Start Audiobook Production with Entrepreneurial ACX
After a series of industry previews, Audible.com has gone live today with an ambitious new platform designed to both significantly expand the number of published books available in audio and to give rightsholders and audiobook talent a bigger stake in process. Called ACX (Audiobook Creation Exchange), the site is a marketplace for matching the vast pool of books not yet adapted for audio with acting talent and producers, in an entrepreneurial model that lets participants on both sides of the equation work at fixed-rate buyouts or a 50/50 share of back-end proceeds with no upfront costs. Royalties escalate from 50 […]
Thoughts from Makinson, Meacham
The WSJ interviews Penguin CEO John Makinson. On self-published Kindle bestsellers priced at $2.99 or less, Makinson says, “This is a new market that can’t exist economically in print. You can’t manufacture, ship and store a book at those prices. But we as publishers probably need to participate. We’ll look at new content that maybe we can popularize in different ways. We’ll also look at our backlist. Maybe there are customers for westerns at $1.99. What we need to be really careful of is ensuring that this new market doesn’t compromise the sales of Clive Cussler, Tom Clancy, Patricia Cornwell […]
Penguin Introduces Book Country, A Community for Genre Fiction Writers
Today Penguin launched the public beta of Book Country, a new subsidiary company and website whose aim is to build a writing community and social network centered around genre fiction, especially romance, science fiction & fantasy, and mysteries & thrillers. Membership is free and allows writers to post unpublished manuscripts and receive detailed feedback–ranging from genre categorization to more focused comments on specific craft aspects–from community members, essentially acting as an ongoing online workshop. Starting this summer Book Country intends to generate revenue by having members to self-publish print and e-book editions of their work for a fee, and in […]
A Few More Servings of Controversy and Questions
The controversy surrounding Greg Mortenson, his book THREE CUPS OF TEA, and his charity the Central Asia Institute continues to grow and expand in unforseen ways. Author Jon Krakauer, whose accusations were the centerpiece of what was offered on Sunday night as 60 Minutes’ own investigation, has written a 75-page book on the same subject, THREE CUPS OF DECEIT: How Greg Mortenson, Humanitarian Hero, Lost His Way. It’s the launch ebook for Byliner.com, which is providing free PDFs through April 20 (and promises that all author proceeds will go, yes, to charity: the Stop Girl Trafficking Project). That provokes all […]