Amazon: Book Seller

Or Publisher?

Cayla Kluver was 14 when she wrote her first novel.  It's a fantasy novel called Legacy, and it's about a certain Princess Alera of Hytanica who's being forced to marry the handsome but obnoxious Lord Steldor when she's really interested in the handsome but mysterious Narian, who hails from Hytanica's bitter enemy, Cokyri.

When she was 15, Kluver and her mom, who live in Wisconsin, formed their own publishing company to publish Legacy. Sales were modest, but the book attracted some rave reader reviews on Amazon.com At 16, when most authors are years away from getting their first big break, Kluver is getting her second: this August, Amazon is going to relaunch Legacy on a grand scale.

The whole story is practically a fantasy: Amazon plucked Kluver out of obscurity to be the first author in its Amazon Encore program, which takes worthy but overlooked books and republishes them for a wider audience. But there's something odd about it too. If Amazon is a bookstore, it's supposed to be buying from publishers, not competing with them. Right?

Except it isn't just a bookstore. As numerous publishing journalists and bloggers have pointed out, Amazon has diversified itself so comprehensively over the past five years that it's hard to say exactly what it is anymore. Amazon has a presence in almost every niche of the book industry. It runs a print-on-demand service (BookSurge) and a self-publishing service (CreateSpace). It sells e-books and an e-device to read them on (the Kindle, a new version of which, the DX, went on sale June 10). In 2008 alone, Amazon acquired Audible.com a leading audiobooks company; AbeBooks, a major online used-book retailer; and Shelfari, a Facebook-like social network for readers. In April of this year, it snapped up Lexcycle, which makes an e-reading app for the iPhone called Stanza. And now there's Amazon Encore, which makes Amazon a print publisher too.

Time

Who Wants to Be an

Audiobook Narrator?

Ever listened to an audiobook, and grumbled, "I could do that?" A new contest will give readers around the country a chance to try it.

Until June 30th, aspiring audiobook narrators can submit three-minute demos to audiobook maestro Scott Brick, vying for a chance to win work as an audiobook narrator. To celebrate the ten-year anniversary of Brick's audiobook work, the producer is sponsoring a Share The Experience contest.

Here's more about the contest: "The winner will receive personal instruction from Scott, followed by actual recording work from a number of major publishers. The judges will include representatives from some of the biggest publishers in the business, including Random House Audio, Audible.com, Harper Collins Audio, Books on Tape and more."

Kids Books All
Grim and Grisly

Until recently, the young-adult fiction section at your local bookstore was a sea of nubile midriffs set against pink and turquoise backgrounds. Today’s landscape features haunted girls staring out from dark or washed-out covers. Current young-adult best sellers include one suicide, one deadly car wreck, one life-threatening case of anorexia and one dystopian universe in which children fight to the death. Somewhere along the line our teenagers have become connoisseurs of disaster.

Jay Asher’s “Thirteen Reasons Why,” which is narrated by a dead girl, came out in March 2007 and remains on the bestseller list in hardcover. The book is the account of a fragile freshman named Hannah Baker who kills herself by overdosing on pills and sends audiotapes to the 13 people she holds responsible for making her miserable in the last year of her life. There may be parents who are alarmed that their 12-year-olds are reading about suicide, or librarians who want to keep the book off the shelves, but the story is clearly connecting with its audience—the book has sold over 200,000 copies, according to Nielsen BookScan.

For those young readers who find death by pill overdose inadequately gruesome, there’s Gayle Forman’s “If I Stay,” which takes as its subject a disfiguring car wreck. The book has sold a robust 17,000 copies in its first two months on sale, and was optioned by Catherine Hardwicke, the director of the film “Twilight.” The story follows an appealing cellist named Mia who goes on a drive to a bookstore with her unusually sympathetic ex-punk-rocker parents.

When a truck barrels into their Buick, Mia hovers ghost-like over the scene. She sees her family’s bodies crushed, then watches on as her own mangled body is bagged and rushed to the hospital. Lingering somewhere between this world and the next, Mia must decide whether to join her parents in the afterlife or go it alone in the real world. The brilliance of the book is the simplicity with which it captures the fundamental dilemma of adolescence: How does one separate from one’s parents and forge an independent identity?

WSJ

Titlenomics, or

Creating Best Sellers

by Patricia Cohen

The release of “womenomics” (by Claire Shipman and Katty Kay) this month is just the latest example of publishers trying to knock off the title of “Freakonomics,” the best-selling 2005 book by Steven D. Levitt, an economist, and Stephen J. Dubner, a journalist.

A book title like “Prozac Nation” conveys an idea fairly quickly.

Although some critics initially complained about the book’s “annoying title,” “Freakonomics” was an instant success, generating, among other things, a column in The New York Times Magazine, a blog on the Times Web site (freakonomics.blog.nytimes.com), and a planned documentary.

So it’s no surprise that other authors hope to benefit from the reflected glory. Last summer “Obamanomics” and “Slackonomics” appeared. This year “Invent-onomics 101” made its debut. And in the fall “Scroogenomics: Why You Shouldn’t Buy Presents for the Holidays” will hit bookstores.

Capitalizing on popular titles has a long pedigree in the publishing industry. A well-turned phrase can give birth to dozens of offspring. Edward Gibbon’s monumental “History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” first published in 1776, has inspired variants for more than two centuries. Similarly titled books have chronicled the slide of other empires (the British, Ottoman, Japanese, American, Freudian); institutions (the C.I.A., the Roman Catholic Church, the American automobile industry, Hollywood, The Saturday Evening Post, the British aristocracy, the American programmer) and eternal ideals (truth and love goddesses).

NYT

How To Write a

Fictional Twitter Feed

Earlier this year, Carrie Bugbee won a Shorty Award for a fictional Twitter feed--writing tweets about the life of "Mad Men" character Peggy Olson and gaining over 13,700 Twitter followers.

GalleyCat caught up with Bugbee at O'Reilly Media's Twitter Boot Camp, where experts pondered this new social networking tool. In this exclusive interview, Bugbee tells publishers how they can build Twitter campaigns for imaginary characters--including a speculative riff on a Twitter feed for a Michael Connelly character.

Besides writing about the adventures of a young secretary in New York City, Bugbee works for Big Deal PR, building social media campaigns for different companies.

Video

Bits & Bytes

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Upgrade to Professional

Fiction  

Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Adam Epstein and Andrew Jacobson collaborated on THE FAMILIARS, an offbeat humorous trilogy set in a magical Queendom revolving around the adventures of an alley cat, who becomes the companion to an apprentice wizard; together with a precocious blue jay and a clumsy tree frog, they find a way to save their kingdom from certain doom, sold to Barbara Lalicki at Harper Children's, in a good deal, in a pre-empt, by Markus Hoffmann at Regal Literary (NA).

markus@regal-literary.com

Thriller

Debut author John Rector wrote THE COLD KISS about two young people who pick up a money-flashing hitchhiker during a blizzard and end up snowed in and fighting for their lives at a rural roadside motel, sold to Eric Raab at Tor, in a nice deal, by Allan Guthrie at Jenny Brown Associates (NA).

allan@jennybrownassociates.com

Children's: Middle grade

Author Tom Angleberger's HORTON HALFPOTT, Or the Fiendish Mystery of Smugwick Manor, or the Loosening of M'Lady Luggertuck's Corset, a humor-filled story about a good-natured kitchen boy involving a Stolen Diamond, snooping stableboys, a famous detective, the disappearance of a Valuable Wig, love, pickle eclairs, thrills, unbridled evil, and the Black Deeds of The Shipless Pirates, that all begins with the loosening of a Lady's corset, sold to Susan van Metre at Abrams Children's, for publication in Spring 2011, by Caryn Wiseman at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency (world).

caryn@andreabrownlit.com

Children's: Picture book

MANFISH author Jennifer Berne and illustrator Keith Bendis combined to produce CALVIN CAN'T FLY: The Story of a Bookworm Birdie, an adventure tale about what happens to Calvin, a starling who loves reading, learning, and libraries, after he spends the summer with his beak buried in books, while the rest of his siblings were learning to fly, sold to Allison Shaloum at Sterling, by Caryn Wiseman at the Andrea Brown Literary Agency.

caryn@andreabrownlit.com

Young Adult

Bram Stoker Award-winning author of PATIENT ZERO, Jonathan Maberry's new young adult debut is ROT & RUIN, in which a fifteen-year old Benny Imuraboy is forced to learn the harsh realities of the art of killing zombies from his older brother as the two struggle to survive in the wastelands after the zombie apocalypse, sold to David Gale at Simon & Schuster Children's, in a good deal, in a two-book deal, by Sara Crowe at Harvey Klinger (world).

sara@harveyklinger.com

Nonfiction

History/Politics/Current Affairs

British journalist and historian Bee Wilson's FORGOTTEN DREAMERS: The Original Socialists, a history of socialism, examines the socialist thinkers of the early nineteenth century, including Robert Owen (who founded New Harmony in Indiana) and Charles Fourier (who forecast seas of lemonade), explaining how the word "socialism" has come back into the political lexicon as an all-purpose term of abuse, and redefining it in a new light, sold to Lara Heimert at Basic, by Zoe Pagnamenta at the Zoe Pagnamenta Agency, in association with Simon Trewin at United Agents (NA).

UK: strewin@unitedagents.co.uk

Author Nicholas Best's GAME OVER draws on the intimate testimonies of a wide range of people, from the everyday to the famous, written in the cinematic style of Cornelius Ryan.  The book covers five dramatic days at the end of the Second World War beginning with the deaths of Mussolini and Hitler, sold to Thomas Dunne at Thomas Dunne Books, for publication in 2011, by Andrew Lownie at Andrew Lownie Literary Agency (US).

lownie@globalnet.co.uk

Professor William Hitchcock's THE AGE OF EISENHOWER: America and the World in the 1950s, a history of the Eisenhower Administration, sold to Martin Beiser at Free Press, for publication in November 2013, by Susan Rabiner at Susan Rabiner Literary Agency (World).

Memoir

The world's best known and highest-paid Hollywood stuntman and director of Smokey and the Bandit and Cannonball Run, Hal Needham wrote MAN OF ACTION, a memoir of the author's life working with Burt Reynolds, John Wayne, Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, and other stars, sold to John Parsley at Little, Brown, by Howard Yoon of the Gail Ross Literary Agency.

howard@gailross.com

john.parsley@hbgusa.com