ePublishing Week in Brief – July 22d to 26th, 2013
ePublishing Week in Brief – July 22d to 26th, 2013
Google To Launch Play Textbooks In August, Partners With 5 Major Publishing Houses
At its Android and Chrome event in San Francisco today, Google announced that it is bringing textbooks to the Google Play store so students will be able to purchase and rent their textbooks for their Android devices and for reading on the web.
The company has partnered with five major textbook publishers to launch this service. These partners are Pearson, Wiley, Macmillian Higher Education, McGraw-Hill and Cengage Learning. Google says it will have a “comprehensive selection” of textbooks from these publishers in the store that will cover subjects like law, math and accounting, but it did not announce exact numbers.
The service will launch in August.
Penguin debuts Book Country e-bookstore for self-published authors
Book Country’s new Genre Map.
Authors who want to self-publish just got a new way to sell their books, in an interesting little turn of the screw this week. Since 2011, Penguin has runBook Country, an online community where writers could post their work, get critiques, and, for a sliding scale of fees, publish. But, whereas in the past, books published through Book Country would be available for sale on amazon.com, bn.com, the iBookstore, and other retail sites for ebooks, authors will now be able to sell directly from Book Country—with a sizeable advantage in royalty splits.
Authors who sell their books through the new Book Country bookstore will receive an 85% royalty, which, as Laura Hazard Owen at PaidContent points out, is “higher than the 70 percent they get in the Amazon Kindle Store and the 65 percent they get at Barnes & Noble’s Nook Press.”
http://www.mhpbooks.com/penguin-debuts-book-country-e-bookstore-for-self-published-authors/
Publishing Is Broken, We’re Drowning In Indie Books – And That’s A Good Thing
There’s no knowing how this struggle between the old and new guard will turn out. If we consider the flaws in the pricing model for hardcover books as well as the strong economics of self-publishing for authors, we can at least guess that indie books are here to stay. Three predictions:
Prediction #1 – Indie Books Get Reviewed For Real
Rotten Tomatoes for movies and Pitchfork for music show that it’s possible to give consumers good online tools for judging quality. Kirkus has been using Indie publishing as a profit center, selling review services to Indie authors for the very significant price $425, which may cost many authors more than the rest of the publication process. Kirkus would do better in the longterm to dramatically expand their uncompensated reviewing to include a good selection of indie titles and thus become the tastemaker for a new generation of readers. Goodreads is the obvious candidate as an impartial arbiter, but the site functions more like a social network than a review site and might lose the battle to a more single-minded competitor. There are also several review sites struggling to establish a reputation for fairness amongst all of the chaos: Digital Book Today, Self-Publishing Review and IndieReader.com. Storybundle has an interesting business model that allows readers to set their own pricing and also attempts to filter.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/davidvinjamuri/2012/08/15/publishing-is-broken-were-drowning-in-indie-books-and-thats-a-good-thing/6/
Little Book of Rules: California girls get book publishing deal by accident
Little Book of Rules will be published this October. (Amazon)Two California elementary-school girls inadvertently stumbled upon success by writing their brilliant thoughts about life on paper. Originally intended as an advice guide for their younger sisters, they never dreamed their small wire-bound notebook would make it onto store shelves this October.
“If I knew that it was going to get published, I would have probably wrote a little neater,” Isabelle Busath, 10, tells Fox about Isabelle and Isabella’s Little Book of Rules.
The story of how two Sacramento girls — Isabelle and her cousin Isabella Thordsen, 8, — landed a book publishing deal is quite a unique one.
They wrote 157 life rules that they kept in a small notebook until they lost it outside of a Walmart in their hometown last December. It wasn’t until January when a Walmart employee found it that their story went viral. The employee tried to locate the owners by posting it on Facebook with no success, so he went to a local Fox news channel who covered the story and eventually found the rightful owners.
Editors for the New Publishing
The literary editor is now a rare species. Gone are the days when you and your novel could enter into a collegial, comfy relationship with someone like Maxwell Perkins or Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. During the last few decades, numbers of editors have been let go by the major corporatized publishers in cost-cutting measures. Others have left of their own volition for greener pastures. Too often, the author is now on his or her own when it comes to editing…and your novel may well suffer badly from that.
Good editing is, for most writers, an essential in the process of bringing a book to completion. The fresh mind, the clear-eyed look and fearlessness when it comes to telling the truth are all earmarks of the best editors. The renowned Alan Rinzler, who edited two of my book
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/terence-clarke/jesse-coleman-and-natasa-_b_3640427.html
Business author Simon Middleton takes self publishing route for first foray into children’s fiction.
Norwich, Norfolk, UK (PRWEB UK) 24 July 2013
UK brand and marketing author and consultant Simon Middleton, author of three commercially published books, has joined the growing band of authors who are choosing the self-publishing path, with Graveyard Kings, his first children’s fiction project.
The author, whose books about branding ‘Build A Brand In 30 Days’ and ‘Brand New You’ appear regularly in the Amazon bestseller charts, has used Kindle Direct Publishing, a division of Amazon, to self-publish Graveyard Kings, which he describes as a ‘determinedly old-fashioned’ children’s novel.
West Cornwall Publishing Company to Focus on Local Authors
Johnson, co-founder and managing editor of the company, said that the location they live in actually played a role in the company’s inception. West Cornwall and the surrounding area, she said, “is filled with incredibly talented writers and a literary community that is very well known.”
The West Cornwall Publishing Company wants to provide a little more equity for authors, Johnson said, noting that they’ve seen “publishing companies charging so much and giving the authors so little in return.”