In a vote of confidence for the growing digi-lit market, E-Reads, a leading independent in the e-book and print on demand space, has uploaded more than 200 titles to Apple iPad, Kobo, Diesel and Google editions. E-Reads is converting its ten-year, 1000+ title inventory to the specifications of these and other retailers, as well as older customers.
Ken Auletta offers a short course on the agency business model and the ever-evolving history of publishing. 
This article also includes a situational analysis about the stakes for authors, publishers, bookstores, and device makers in the current competition between the printed page and the panel of pixels known as the e-Reader (Kindle, iPad, Nook and others coming online). The writer, journalist and media critic at The New Yorker has been a keen observer of media trends. His Three Blind Mice: How the TV Networks Lost Their Way put the failing big three television network model in stark context for us in 1991. Now, he has once again captured a dynamic period in media history on the page.
His recent article, Publish or Perish Can the iPad topple the Kindle, and save the book business? (The New Yorker, 30 April 2010), is similarly timely and incisive. A ‘must read’ for authors, agents, publishers and readers.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/04/26/100426fa_fact_auletta
Anyone who has dealt with an agent, a publisher, or a producer knows that negotiation is part of what makes the writing life possible. As organizing principles go, this is pretty straightforward. While we have plenty to think about in negotiating representation, publication, and (hopefully) production, one goal should remain clearly in focus: close the deal.
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Robin Davis Miller, General Counsel of The Authors Guild, offered some advice on contracts and the negotiation process at a seminar in Los Angeles. I have benefitted from her counsel. I hope you benefit, too. Here are a few notes:
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Ernest Bevin (1881-1951), British politician and statesmen, offered:
The first thing to decide before you walk into any negotiation is what to do if the other fellow says no.
Big BangsIn the hyper-paced evolution of consumer technologies, there are few developments that equal the transformative effects of e-publishing.
Traditional publishing is now adapting to the reality of the Kindle, Sony e-reader, iPod Touch, and iPhone, which are being adopted by consumers at a rate not seen since the invention of the wheel. I wasn’t present during that paradigm shift, but it is reasonable to assume that the Mesopotamians in the 5th millenium BC ‘got it’ and didn’t look back wistfully to the old, pre-wheel, pre-personal empowerment days. Now, once again in humankind’s evolution, we have a better idea that has authors and readers leapfrogging industry. Publishers have cultivated content and fed readers’ appetites. But they have become a little too comfortable with the perquisites of the traditional corporate model, like Detroit automakers, the Big Three television networks, and the music industry. In each case, we the people have found our way to a better idea, a better way.
Now Amazon’s Jeff Bezos is betting on the Kindle as a market maker, and if the rapidly increasing sales of the e-book tablet keep growing at the pace they have in the last year, he may be the man we credit with a Steve Jobs-like vision that changed the way we consume media content.
Publishers see the change happening, know that their traditional print business model is struggling and have apparently decided to profit from the chaos in the book selling market by charging similar prices for hardcover and e-books. Today at Borders, I overheard a salesperson explaining e-books to a middle-aged couple at the Sony E-Reader display this way.
“E-books are coming down in price to roughly half the cost of a hardcover, from $15 to $17.”
The couple were eager for the convenience offered by the E-Reader and when they heard about the cost-savings on titles, they decided to purchase the Sony.
Maybe I should have intervened and told them about $9.99 titles at Amazon. You don’t criticize someone’s family when you’re a guest in their living room; and I won’t disrupt Borders’ business when I am in theirs. The couple are happily curled up on their couch now with Dan Brown’s Lost Symbol on the E-Reader. Everyone is happy. As for the pricing, publishers will hang on to their profit margins and will change only when their business infrastructure collapses around them.
Meanwhile, over at Amazon, Jeff Bezos is offering e-books for download to the Kindle for $9.99. Amazon may lose on the margin in the near term, but it is establishing the $9.99 price point for books much in the same way that Steve Jobs established .99 cents as the single unit price point on iTunes, which is now the worldwide standard. More rapid adoption by more consumers will more than make up the difference.
More significantly to me, e-publishing redefines the business model. Suddenly, the artist and writer can, if they wish, become their own publishers. No more expenses like printing, shipping, trucking, warehousing, distribution, freight, fuel. It’s irresistible and, as Adam Penenberg says in his article “The Evolution of Amazon” in the July/August edition of Fast Company, “it’s irreversible.” Literary agent Richard Curtis, who is also founder of E-Reads, an independent book publisher, asks,
why would “anybody need a traditional book publisher when you can essentially make Amazon your buyer and your seller in one stroke?”
After years of playing by Publishing’s rules – willingly, loyally, and with respect for its professionalism – the time has come to try other approaches to connect with my readers. I am going to try posting a story or two in Amazon’s Kindle Store and see if I can reconnect with former readers and meet some new readers. I’ll let you know how it goes.
An author-friend published in Glimmertrain. She described it as a positive experience, the best she had had after years of publishing in newspapers and regionals. She also credited publication of her story in Glimmertrain with helping her get a good NY agent and three years of promising work on a novel and anthology of short non-fiction.
A colleague who learned that I had published a novel just shared a short story she’d written about a catastrophe averted. Her writing engages with a voice that is confident, yet doesn’t take itself seriously. She set the tone in the first sentence, kept her contract with the reader, and revealed surprises along the way. It was good getting to know this new dimension of someone I have come to know in layers, like a character in a novel. I suggested that if she had not already done so she take a look at Glimmertrain and consider submitting her story there.
She just stopped by for coffee and said that she had visited www.glimmertrain.com and decided to submit to the sisters in Portland. Here’s hoping.
UPDATE: 31 August 2009
My story, “Robert’s Rules of Order,” did not win, place, or show. Neither did my friend’s story. Eager to read the winning entries, discover some new writers, and learn what worked for the judges. Onward.
Pamela Dorman, vice president and publisher, Pamela Dorman Books/Viking, a division of Penguin Group, moderated a publishing seminar recently entitled, “Between Milk and Yogurt”: Book Publishing Today. One of the takeaways for me was this: a writer gets one chance. Even if the editor engages and provides encouraging notes to the author about his/her manuscript, perhaps even suggesting that it could work if certain changes were made.
The fact is that no editor has time to read material twice – even if the manuscript is completely rewritten. Don’t resubmit 1, 2 or 3 years later. No one has time. You get one chance.
That reads more harshly than it came across. Ms. Dorman and her panelists were unfailingly positive about their professions, yet recognized that publishing is, after all, a business.
Ms. Dorman, the publisher who successfully persuaded author Helen Fielding to entrust her with her novel, Bridget Jones’s Diary, in the American market, recounts how she did it.