Tag Archives: publishing

The world’s readers

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From The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers, by Betsy Lerner:

It’s easy to forget, in this ultra-accelerated culture of ours, where even fusty book publishing is caught up in the national fervor for celebrity and where the value of all things is equated with their dollar value, that what most editors truly want is good books. No matter how much it may seem otherwise, no matter how many mediocre or just plain bad books get fed into the great machine, most of us are in awe of a brilliant manuscript and will do everything in our power to see that it reaches readers . . . [E]ditors are . . . the world’s readers. And thus the eyes of the world.

Handy promises

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At one point, the Jenny Craig weight loss company was running ads with the tagline “lose all the weight you can.”

All the weight you can?

How handy: a promise impossible to break!

Now here’s another: according to Damian Whitworth in the London Telegraph, lulu.com will turn unpublished writers into “potential J.K. Rowlings.”

But — unpublished writers are already potential J.K. Rowlings.

Lulu.com’s found, Bob Young, had his own brush with J.K. Rowlings potentiality.

The idea for Young’s digital publishing business came when he wrote his own book about Red Hat [the open source software developer he co-founded] to counter adverse media commentary on his company. The book sold well, about 20,000 copies, but he was disenchanted by the way it was edited, the tiny amount he was paid after the publishing house had stripped out costs and the enormous number of copies that languished unsold.

I think lulu.com is a wonderful company. If you have a niche book with a clearly identifiable market, easily and cheaply reachable through a manageable marketing campaign, lulu.com is definitely the way to go.

But does anyone really think that the only thing standing between a given writer’s obscurity and his Rowlingsesque success is the physical production of his book?

Amazon.com: Publisher?

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Reporting from the London Book Fair in their Lunch Deluxe e-newsletter, Publisher’s Marketplace notes some comments by Vicky Barnsley of Harper UK, speaking at a panel titled “21st century issues:”

Barnsley said, “Personally, I see Amazon as a bigger threat to publishers [than Google is],” having displayed “interest that they want to move into the publishing space…. They recently hired someone from Penguin US; they are approaching agents and trying to acquire content, which is very different from what Google is doing.”

Yeah. I’d feel threatened, too.

This is huge.

Write, or buy a lottery ticket?

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In a Guardian article on POD (publish on demand) books, we find this charming side dish:

. . . 50% of all published books with an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) tag sell fewer than 250 copies and barely more than 1% of manuscripts submitted ever get published.

Interesting numbers; I don’t doubt they are true. Yeah, the odds are stacked against us.

What I don’t understand is how POD is supposed to help. Sure, by publishing yourself, you are, technically, um, “published.” But does anyone think that by self-publishing, you can improve your chances of selling more than 250 copies? Even if Amazon does list your book?

Sure, you bypass the multiple gateways of agents, editors, publishers, distributors, and booksellers. But not the readers. Ah, the readers . . .