HarperCollins announced that Harper Lee‘s Go Set A Watchman sold more than 1.1 million units in North America since going on sale last Tuesday, with 3.3 million copies now in print. (Earlier Penguin Random House UK indicated Watchman had sold 105,000 copies in its first day on sale.) Subscription service Entitle Books announced it will shut down on Tuesday, July 21, telling customers on its website that they can move over to Scribd for a one-month free trial. Touchstone is launching Glommable, a consumer-facing pop culture website featuring content from various Internet personalities, shareable quotes, slides, and more. Authors featured include […]
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Ingram Launches Accelerator
The book publishing-focused start-up world has always been missing an incubator or accelerator to help refine and mentor promising new companies, and now Ingram Content Group is answering that need. Building on investments made through ICG Ventures, the company announced Tuesday their 1440 Accelerator “to find and accelerate startups creating the next breakthrough innovations in the publishing industry.” (It is named for the year Johannes Gutenberg perfected his printing press.) Ingram is working with the Nashville Entrepreneur Center (which John Ingram also chairs) and Jumpstart Foundry. Set to begin in September, the program will put up to 10 startups into […]
Authors Guild Addresses “Inadequate e-Book Royalties”
As part of their series of Fair Contract Initiative communications, the Authors Guild has a long post on “today’s inadequate e-book royalties,” asserting that “half of net proceeds is the fair royalty rate for e-books.” The post acknowledges one of the big structural obstacles to change: “Major book publishers have agreed to include ‘most favored nation’ clauses in thousands of existing contracts. These clauses require automatic adjustment or renegotiation of e-book royalties if the publisher changes its standard royalty rate, giving publishers a strong incentive to maintain the status quo.” Despite that, the Guild notes there are modest variations: “Some bestselling […]
Macmillan Adds More Titles to Subscription Services
Macmillan is expanding their program to “test subscription” services for ebooks. After starting with 1,000 titles available through both Scribd and Oyster in January, the publisher is adding “more than 1,000 additional titles” to both services, along with more than 300 children’s titles. While it moves Macmillan forward with both subscription operators, it still leaves them shy of the participation levels from HarperCollins (which offers substantial backlist, and had put the 15,000-title Harlequin backlist in before Scribd recently cut their romance title selection) and Simon & Schuster, which offers its entire backlist for subscription reading.
The Pay-Per-Page Era Begins
As of yesterday, Amazon officially moved subscription payments for self-published ebooks in the Kindle Unlimited program to their new system of paying by the number of pages read by subscribers. In an email to participating authors, the company said that in June subscribers read over 1.9 billion pages (as measured by their new standardized page count). From there, authors concluded that the per page payout for July — when Amazon has promised the pool will comprise at least $11 million — will be close to .0058 cents for every page read. But, per Amazon’s procedure of determining the final pool […]
Scribd Cuts Romance Catalog, Aims for “More Mutually Beneficial Terms” with Publishers
eBook subscription service Scribd is removing an unspecified — but apparently significant — quantity of romance and erotica titles from their catalog. The news was publicized by Smashwords ceo Mark Coker on his company blog, where he estimated that that “80-90 percent of Smashwords romance and erotica titles will be dropped by Scribd, including nearly all of our most popular romance titles.” Coker suggested that “the lower the price and the higher the word count, the better the odds the book will remain. Few books priced $3.99 and above will remain. Scribd is not publicly revealing the formulas for what stays and what goes, […]