Ed Victor’s Bedford Square Books–which has been controversial for splitting proceeds with its authors rather than just taking a standard agency commission–already has its first success story. Tesco buyer Garry Blackman read about Bedford Square’s plan to publish Louise Fennell‘s debut novel DEAD RICH in the Evening Standard and asked to see the manuscript. The chain placed an order “understood to be taking tens of thousands of copies” and Victor sold the rights to Simon & Schuster UK (after reportedly having been rejected by 17 publishers in his original submission). Evening Standard In a follow-up post, agent Kristin Nelson clarified […]
eNews
No, Barnes & Noble Won’t Stock Amazon Publishing Titles in Their Stores
With Amazon indicating that their New York publishing division intends to make its titles available to other ebookstores alongside their print licensing deal with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Barnes & Noble has provided a quick answer on whether they will revise their position and carry those books. According to a statement issued Tuesday afternoon by BN chief merchandising officer Jamie Carey, “Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms.” He added: “Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent. These exclusives have […]
eNews: Penguin Launches Mobile Platform; Self-Publishing Capabilities From Nelson Literary Agency
Penguin has launched a new digital/mobile toolkit, My Artist’s Way Toolkit & App, based on Julia Cameron’s 2 million copy-selling 1992 book The Artist’s Way. The platform, which will be offered as a $4.99 monthly subscription (or $3.99 a month for those who sign up for a one-year plan) with daily inspirations and weekly exercises and activities. Global digital director Molly Barton said in a statement that the platform is one “that we anticipate using for future Penguin works.” Add the Nelson Literary Agency to the list of agencies establishing ways to help their clients self-publish. Their Digital Liason Platform, […]
eNews: ProPublica Expands eBook Line; Goodreads Drops Amazon API
Online investigative journalism site ProPublica is the latest publication to produce an expanded line of ebooks, now in a “digital publishing partnership” with Open Road. (The journalism organization issued four titles as Kindle Singles last spring.) The new line of ebooks, priced at $5 or less and available as of the end of February, will be based on previously published material in expanded form, including “Presidential Pardons” (a series that ran in the Washington Post) and “Post-Mortems,” an investigation of coroner and medical examiner offices ProPublica did in conjunction with NPR and Frontline. Each ebook will also include additional material […]
DBW: Looking at Publisher-Author Relations
One fascinating if unresolved Digital Book World panel was Wednesday’s session on Changing Author-Publisher Relationships, moderated by Simon Lipskar at Writers House. It provided an update on various publishers’ efforts to engage more actively with their authors on a regular basis and better communicate the value that large-scale organizations bring to representing authors’ work in the marketplace. The financial aspects of the relationship were addressed only briefly. Random House president of sales, operations and digital Madeline McIntosh said that in a review of their “actual effective payout to authors” looking at a five-year set of their fiction lines, a range […]
More DBW: Learning How to Sell eBooks All Over the World
Kobo executive Michael Tamblyn provided a look at some of the challenges of taking ebooks global quickly. Among the biggest challenges has been Japan, home of their new parent company Rakuten. “We’ve learned a lot working in Japan,” he said. “They have everything there–it’s just evolved completely differently” than in the rest of the book publishing world. They have no metadata standards, two competing ebook standards, very little simultaneous release in print and digital, file conversion challenges, and very few centralized repositories. In many countries, as Tamblyn underscored, “we see a lot of vertical integration once we get outside of […]