Posts Tagged ‘publishing’
Written on Pluto!
You heard it here first!
Suz’s Space will be the first to write a book on Pluto. Being published in the year 3000 it will consist of bon mots, double entendres and words that don’t exist in the word world today.
Add your comment here and sign up to be the first to own this fantastic little book. I’ll be taking payment as soon as I get through all the paperwork. Each book will cost a paltry $1,000 and I’ll only be charging $50 for each signature, but for friends I promise to only double those charges.
Addendum
Yesterday I wrote a few words about publishing and the slush pile being like the piles of books in Fahrenheit 451, if you want you can read it all here and then click back to this tab for the next link in the chain.
Today I looked around to see what I could write about and found the article I really wanted to write if I’d had all the information. This article talks about publishing and how things have changed over the decades. The author, Mike Shatzkin, speaks from a higher position of authority than I do as he has actually been in publishing as was his father before him. I suggest you read it carefully as it indicates a total change in publishing behaviour.
I’m going to assume you’ve read the article. If every publisher stops publishing new books and relies totally on sales of their backlist then the industry is going to get stale very quickly. Of course, that would never happen as people want new books by their favourite authors and then they find new authors and, funnily enough, want new books by these authors too. I was going to posit a society where this had actually happened and therefore publishing companies had a minimum of staff with no slush readers, no editors and really only enough staff to manage the printing and sales of old books or even just enough staff to publish their backlist into digital format. If they went entirely digital then at some point in time they would only need one person to staff the entire organisation. It would be an interesting supposition if this did happen that at some point someone wrote and published a new book, what a furore that would cause.
Fuming, totally fuming…
I’ve been looking at my time recently and wondering when I’d next have the time to write. I’m in the middle of an article I’m writing for someone else and I have to finish that so I can get paid. I have a plethora of books going from my To Be Read pile into my To Be Reviewed pile, it’s not that I’m reading a lot but more that I’m reading steadily. While pondering it last night and transferring listings to my new website I happened to do an eBay search and didn’t like what I saw.
I’ve heard about these listings from friends who have complained mightily about them, but hadn’t actually seen them myself. They’re books created from Wikipedia pages. The one I saw is Tom Clancy’s Net Force Explorers by Lambert M. Surhone. I don’t know who Lambert M. Surhone is and I won’t know if his book is any good as I don’t intend to spend that amount of money on it. It was $108 on eBay and $69 on another website. The description on the other website infuriates me…to be honest the whole thing infuriates me.
Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles!
I would like to know when Wikipedia articles became High Quality Content. Yes, I do use them as sources occasionally, but I do try to back up that information from other sources. I believe if you’re writing a thesis you’re not allowed to use Wikipedia at all.
Wikipedia is an open source website and anyone can amend and insert information. I understand they have instituted some form of control with talk pages to discuss changes and moderators to make changes, but anyone can go in and make these changes. You don’t need qualifications or even accurate information. I haven’t asked his permission so I can’t use his name, but a popular author was complaining a while back about things on his Wikipedia page which he never knew he’d done.
Basically, you’ve got people who’ve probably done absolutely zero original work, may not have even read the books and are publishing books using other people’s research, information or misinformation. Why are publishers allowing this to happen? They’re probably self published, or even more likely, print on demand. This means anyone can go into Wikipedia, take the information, formulate it into a book and then send it off to booksellers who will order a book from a Print On Demand publishing house when they have the money. Why are otherwise reputable booksellers accepting these books for selling? I don’t know, but it probably has something to do with money.
The other thing that infuriates me is why do they think people are so stupid as to want to buy something that they can access for free. Generally people are not stupid and readers are anything but, so I just don’t get it.
Not only but also. I did a search for the ‘author’ of this book on that reputable booksellers website and came up 307,500 results. Even if he’s only selling a couple of copies of each book he must be laughing all the way to the bank. Made the ‘mistake’ of putting his name into Wikipedia and it opens up a whole new wealth of information which I don’t have time to rant over now, but the essence is still here.
Print on Demand is a whole new post and one I have very little information about.
Anyway, I’ll probably be back when I’ve cooled down and made lots more progress transferring listings, I’ve only got about 1,100 to go. This always assumes I don’t get annoyed with Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry and write a few words, I’m of the opinion it’d actually be a perfect time to open a bookshop.
And Now…The Blame Game
Whenever something disastrous happens we always play the blame game. Borders and Angus & Robertson have gone bellyup and now everyone is trying to blame everyone else. This happens all over the place, when the price of petrol goes up you can find many blogs blaming this, that or the other.
When the big retailers weren’t making quite as much money as they expected they blamed people buying from overseas using the internet and insisted buyers should buy from them and that the government should lower the import duties amount. They didn’t think they there could be anything wrong with what they were doing it had to be other people.
I see the blame game happening with Borders and Angus & Robertson. They’ve blamed the parallel import laws, buyers for not buying, some people blame the exchange rate…you know, it’s an endless round of blame.
What’s really hard is that we still need to support our local publishing industry despite the internet making it so easy to buy from overseas. We have our current authors who need our support and we also need to support future authors, making sure they have somewhere who can publish their books and also to have places their books can actually be sold. We already have such a small market here compared with overseas and this doesn’t help to get our authors seen overseas. It works the same way as the entertainment industry. Just look at the number of Australian actors who have made it big overseas, there aren’t that many of them. So it becomes more important to support our local people and then raise our voices in social media about them in order for our friends overseas to want to try them out. Let’s make the internet and social media work for our industry.
Indie Press
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while now but it keeps getting put on the back burner as I have photos to put in and it all takes time. I’m planning for it to be about Indie Press, those fabulous people who commit themselves to publishing, those dedicated people who read slush piles hoping to find something good they can publish and they do all of this in their spare time as they generally have full time jobs as well. Here they are, in no particular order:
Tehani @ Fablecroft
Tehani Wessely heads Fablecroft Publishing, she is dedicated to writing and you can read all about her on her blog. She has recently returned to work after completing maternity leave. Her dedication to writing and publishing never wavered and I met her at Aussie Con 4.
Alyssa @ Twelfth Planet
I’ve just pinched this from Twelfth Planet‘s website. Twelfth Planet Press is part of the changing face of Australian publishing. Blending print and electronic formats, Twelfth Planet Press aims to foster, develop and promote quality speculative fiction writing in fresh, exciting projects. You can see Alyssa in the photo. They are publishing one book per month in 2011, you can look forward to some quality reading.
Ticonderoga
Russell of Ticonderoga is one of those committed people and I won’t endeavour to speculate on the meaning of the word committed with him. He has a full-time job and publishes books in his spare time. I believe he has a Sara Douglas book coming out some time next year. (Edited to include the url mentioned in the comments.)
Aurealis
Aurealis publishes quality Australian Fantasy and Science Fiction. I took advantage of Aussie Con 4 to sign up and now receive their magazine in the mail. It’s one of those I don’t have to go out looking for as it arrives on my doorstep in perfect condition, choc-a-bloc with fabulous fiction.
Anyway, there will be more another day, but I think this is going to be long enough.
The Famous Five Revised
It’s been coming up a lot lately for me and I’m really annoyed by the whole idea. They’ve taken childhood classics and revised them to bring them into the modern world. They’ve done this with Nancy Drew, The Hardy Boys and The Three Investigators and are about to do the same with the Famous Five books.
With the Famous Five books they’re taking out all the old phrases such as, ‘mercy me’ and ‘awful’ swotter’. You can see the article Lashings of editing jolly bad for Blyton books and get more details for yourselves. I don’t understand why everything has to be revised and dumbed down. I think it would be better for the child’s understanding of the world to have them exposed to as much as possible and then explain to them what it used to mean and then relate it to a phrase in today’s language rather than just changing the book. I know they want more money and if they can publish another series of books then that equates to a lot of sales, but my personal belief is that it’s better to publish them as they were. I wouldn’t mind if they proofread them properly and edited out the few typos that are there, though.
Miscellaneous musings
I’ve been really struggling to get motivated to do anything tonight. Not terribly good as I have three articles to write. I’ll write something here and hopefully be more motivated tomorrow to get the other two out of the way. I’m just a bit cheesed off as I’ve been following a course of how to get the most out of Facebook. So I’ve been following everything fairly closely, creating a Fan Page, using plenty of swear words and writing some nice html for the Welcome Page until last night when the Welcome Page disappeared. It still hasn’t returned but something I’ve deleted twice has so I’m just going to wait it out for a few days before diving back in again. While I’m waiting I’ll continue with the word games on the discussion board, anyone is welcome to join in.
Varuna
I’d heard of Varuna – Sydney Writers’ Festival Blue Mountains Program and would dearly love to go but I think it’s for serious writers and I don’t consider myself a serious writer, certainly not in the realms of people like Trudi Canavan or Donna Hanson so the best I can do is to get the word out and hope that others get the chance to go. It sounds seriously wonderful. Anyway, the dates are:
Sunday May 16 – Special Children’s Program
Monday May 17 & Tuesday May 18 – Main Program
Australian Publishers Association election result
Small(er) publishers to the fore: a surprise Australian Publishers Association election result. Previously only people from large publishing companies were elected to the presidency of the Australian Publishers Association but this year Stephen May, a psychologist and the founder of Brisbane-based Australian Academic Press ran against Gabrielle Coyne, the CEO of Penguin Australia, and won. It’s a very interesting move and I do wonder how it will affect publishing in Australia. I’m not going to speculate on this, just like I’m not going to speculate on Gabrielle Coyne’s feelings at having lost. It’s going to be one of those ‘watch this space’ times, though.
Being a NYT Bestseller
I came across this Tweet “What’s it like to be a NYT bestseller? http://bit.ly/P3qyU” posted by Writeitsideways and then a couple of minutes later, another by the same person “More on the reality of NYT bestsellers http://bit.ly/2dfPVH”.
Naturally I followed the links, read the articles and followed further links. What I found was author Lynn Viehl giving us the lowdown on the reality of being a New York Times bestseller and the royalty payments that come along with it. She even shows us scanned images of two of her royalty statements and explains them to us so we can see how much money she’s not getting. Bear in mind this is in America with US dollars and therefore things will be slightly different in Australia or any other country, the thing that will remain very similar is the process. It’s complicated and involves something called ‘maths’ which is a concept I have great difficulty with so I won’t explain any of that, you’ll have to go to her articles here and here if you’re interested.
The other thing that occurred to me when I saw the Tweets was how would it be from the books point of view. I happened to speak this out loud and DD said it would be rather confused as it would be split up into so many different ways. Just imagine this, you’ve got the one entity as it’s been printed together than split up into boxes and the boxes shipped to different places and then the boxes opened up and each book taken somewhere different. Just imagine how challenging it would be for one entity to have so many different parts in so many different places! It’s like having brains in each part of your body and when the body is split up it doesn’t die; so you’ve got the different legs and arms being sent to different places but each one can still feel and think. I’d really like to read the story of that book!
I hope the last paragraph wasn’t too confusing. I just have the ideas and sometimes they don’t translate too well to print.