November Issue
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BooksBeat
Basic
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Amazon Signs Authors, Writes Publishers Out of Deal
by David Streitfeld
It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.
Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.
Several large publishers declined to speak on the record about Amazon’s efforts. “Publishers are terrified and don’t know what to do,” said Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House, who is known for speaking his mind.
“Everyone’s afraid of Amazon,” said Richard Curtis, a longtime agent who is also an e-book publisher. “If you’re a bookstore, Amazon has been in competition with you for some time. If you’re a publisher, one day you wake up and Amazon is competing with you too. And if you’re an agent, Amazon may be stealing your lunch because it is offering authors the opportunity to publish directly and cut you out.
“It’s an old strategy: divide and conquer,” Mr. Curtis said.
Amazon executives, interviewed at the company’s headquarters here, declined to say how many editors the company employed, or how many books it had under contract. But they played down Amazon’s power and said publishers were in love with their own demise.
“It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.”
He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader,” he said. “Everyone who stands between those two has both risk and opportunity.”
Amazon has started giving all authors, whether it publishes them or not, direct access to highly coveted Nielsen BookScan sales data, which records how many physical books they are selling in individual markets like Milwaukee or New Orleans. It is introducing the sort of one-on-one communication between authors and their fans that used to happen only on book tours. It made an obscure German historical novel a runaway best seller without a single professional reviewer weighing in.
Publishers caught a glimpse of a future they fear has no role for them late last month when Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire, a tablet for books and other media sold by Amazon. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the company’s chief executive, referred several times to Kindle as “an end-to-end service,” conjuring up a world in which Amazon develops, promotes and delivers the product.
For a sense of how rattled publishers are by Amazon’s foray into their business, consider the case of Kiana Davenport, a Hawaiian writer whose career abruptly derailed last month.
In 2010 Ms. Davenport signed with Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin, for “The Chinese Soldier’s Daughter,” a Civil War love story. She received a $20,000 advance for the book, which was supposed to come out next summer.
If writers have one message drilled into them these days, it is this: hustle yourself. So Ms. Davenport took off the shelf several award-winning short stories she had written 20 years ago and packaged them in an e-book, “Cannibal Nights,” available on Amazon.
When Penguin found out, it went “ballistic,” Ms. Davenport wrote on her blog, accusing her of breaking her contractual promise to avoid competing with it. It wanted “Cannibal Nights” removed from sale and all mentions of it deleted from the Internet.
Penguin Moves into Self-Publishing
Venerable publisher's U.S. arm offers "direct path" into print for aspiring authors
Penguin USA will provide the service through its genre-fiction online community, Book Country, which launched in May offering wannabe authors the opportunity to post their work online and receive feedback. With 500 works of romance, science fiction, fantasy, mystery and thriller now online from 4,000 members, and "a small number" of those members having secured literary agents, Penguin has decided to provide "a direct path to publication for those who choose to go the self-publishing route."
"A growing number of authors simply want to go directly to readers with their books. We respect that new reality and the changed landscape that technology has brought to book publishing," said Molly Barton, president of Book Country and Penguin's global digital director. "Self publishing is a trend that isn't going away." Penguin's announcement follows the news last week that Amanda Hocking had become the second self-published writer to sell over 1m ebooks on the Amazon Kindle, after John Locke.
Costing between $99 and $549, depending on whether the writer wants to format their ebook themselves or plump for a "professional print and ebook" option, the Book Country self-publishing option will give writers 70% of the sale price of a book priced above $2.99, and 30% of a book priced between 99c and $2.95.
Kindle's eBook Lending Program "Probably Illegal"
The program has caused quite a stir in the publishing industry, for good reason (as you’ll see). First, let’s look at how books from some major U.S. trade publishers wound up on the Lending Library list.
Major Publishers Turn Amazon Down Amazon approached the six largest U.S. trade book publishers earlier this year to seek their participation in the program. By all accounts, each refused. Small wonder. Publishers aren’t eager to allow Amazon to undermine the economics of the e-book market, representing the lone bright spot for the industry, by permitting an estimated two to five million Amazon Prime customers to start downloading e-books for free. So books from the Big Six publishers – Random House, Simon & Schuster, Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Macmillan – are not in the Library Lending program.
Amazon’s attempts to enlist the next tier of U.S. trade book publishers, major publishers that are slightly smaller than the Big Six, appear to have fared no better. Many, perhaps all, also refused. No matter. Amazon simply disregarded these publishers’ wishes, and enrolled many of their titles in the program anyway. Some of these publishers learned of Amazon’s unilateral decision as the first news stories about the program appeared.
How can Amazon get away with this? By giving its boilerplate contract with these publishers a tortured reading.
Amazon has decided that it doesn’t need the publishers’ permission, because, as Amazon apparently sees it, its contracts with these publishers merely require it to pay publishers the wholesale price of the books that Amazon Prime customers download. By reasoning this way, Amazon claims it can sell e-books at any price, even giving them away, so long as the publishers are paid.
From our understanding of Amazon’s standard contractual terms, this is nonsense – publishers did not surrender this level of control to the retailer. Amazon’s boilerplate terms specifically contemplate the sale of e-books, not giveaways, subscriptions, or lending (Amazon does have a lending program that some publishers have authorized, but it’s a program that allows customers – not Amazon – to lend their purchased e-books). Amazon can make other uses of e-books only with the publishers’ consent.
Amazon, in other words, appears to be boldly breaching its contracts with these publishers. This is an exercise of brute economic power. Amazon knows it can largely dictate terms to non-Big Six publishers, and it badly wanted to launch this program with some notable titles.
Why did it matter so much to Amazon? It’s all about the Kindle Fire, and Amazon’s unexpected e-book device battle with Apple and especially Barnes & Noble. (More on that, in another post.)
Life Cycle of A Book
For a graphic look at the life cycle of a typical book (and a few video presentations), from concept to sale, check out this page from Publishing Trendsetter: News and dialogue for the next generation of publisher.
Printed Word, eBooks Coexist
From the battle of the tablets to the rise of mini publishing houses, reading isn’t dead, it’s just morphing in fascinating ways.
by Connie Ogle
Miami Book Fair International — the last, best refuge for lovers of print books — opens its doors Sunday amid the formidable onslaught of the digital age. E-book sales continue to rise; even the once-reluctant J.K. Rowling is finally selling her Harry Potter series digitally on her own website Pottermore. Amazon and Barnes & Noble have come out swinging against Apple and the iPad with their versions of the tablet, which — we have been told over and over, whether we want to hear it or not — is the absolute, undeniable future of reading.
And local hero Books & Books is proudly entering the print publishing business. How very 20th Century.
Owner and fair co-chair Mitchell Kaplan knows what you’re thinking: “Is he nuts?” He’s not — or at least he doesn’t think so. The first editions of B&B Press: A Project of Books & Books — a gorgeous, meticulously designed hardcover of Les Standiford’s history of Henry Flagler’s railroad, Last Train to Paradise, and Blue Christmas: Stories for the Rest of Us, a paperback collection of unorthodox holiday tales, many penned by local writers — will debut at the fair, which runs through Nov. 20 at Miami Dade College’s Wolfson campus in downtown Miami.
“I just felt that these books called out for us to do them, basically,” Kaplan says. “I don’t think I started out thinking I was going to have a publishing house, and I’d look for books. It was the other way around.”
“It was really a labor of love for all of us,” says Petra Mason, Last Train to Paradise’s creative director. “It was a lovely experience — but stressful, too.”
B&B Press is not a traditional publisher; there’s no budget to acquire manuscripts, no manuscript submissions accepted, no royalty checks sent out. Authors who contribute to the process, like John Dufresne, who came up with the concept of Blue Christmas, will share in any profits.
Oops!
We like Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. Well, sometimes. But his daily gloating over his latest book, Killing Lincoln, may just be misplaced.
Now, in a review in a leading Civil War magazine, a second expert has flunked O’Reilly’s “Killing Lincoln,” calling it “somewhere between an authoritative account and strange fiction.” The review (which is not online) appears in the November issue of North & South, the official magazine of the Civil War Society.
“The narrative contains numerous errors of people, place, and events,” writes reviewer Edward Steers Jr., author of more than five books on the Lincoln assassination. He goes on to list about 10 errors of fact in “Killing Lincoln,” which O’Reilly co-authored with Martin Dugard and which has been atop bestseller lists for weeks.
A farm where John Wilkes Booth hid after the killing was not 500 acres, as O’Reilly says. It was 217 acres, according to the review.
O’Reilly refers to John Ford’s chief carpenter as John J. Clifford. In fact, according to the review, his name was Gifford.
“Lewis Powell, the man assigned to kill secretary of state William Seward, did not speak with ‘an Alabama drawl.’ He was from Florida,” the review notes.
Steers adds that one entire passage of the book about co-conspirator Mary Surratt is flat-out untrue: The authors write that she was forced to wear a padded hood when not on trial, and that she was imprisoned in a cell aboard the monitor Montauk, which was “barely habitable.” She suffered from “claustrophobia and disfigurement caused by the hood,” and was “barely tended to by her captors.” “Sick and trapped in this filthy cell, Mary Surratt took on a haunted, bloated appearance.” None of this is true. Mary Surratt was never shackled or hooded at any time. She was never imprisoned aboard the Montauk, but taken to the Carroll Annex of the Old Capitol Prison before being transferred to the women’s section of the Federal Penitentiary at the Washington’s Arsenal.
Concludes Steers: “If all of the above sounds like nitpicking, consider this. If the authors made mistakes in names, places, and events, what else did they get wrong? How can the reader rely on anything that appears in ‘Killing Lincoln’?”
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FICTION Debut PEN Discovery Award winner Rosie Sultan's HELEN KELLER IN LOVE, exploring a documented but little-known episode in Keller's life when, at the height of her international fame in 1916, she fell in love with and almost married her secretary and aide, Peter Fagan, at a time when Annie Sullivan fell ill, to Carole DeSanti at Viking, for publication in Summer 2012, by Stuart Bernstein at Stuart Bernstein Representation (World and Audio).
Mystery/Crime Elizabeth Duncan's next two books in the Penny Brannigan mystery series, set in a small Welsh town, to Toni Plummer at Thomas Dunne Books, by Dominick Abel at Dominick Abel Associates (NA). Keith Gilman's MY BROTHER'S KEEPER, when dead bodies start turning up in the parks of the City of Brotherly Love, a hard-nosed ex-cop seeks to find out who is behind these grisly murders, to Kate Lyall-Grant at Severn House, in a nice deal, for publication in Spring 2012, by Lukas Ortiz at Philip Spitzer Literary Agency (World English).
Thriller NYT bestselling author of OBEDIENCE, Will Lavender's THE DESCARTES CIRCLE, about identical twins, one of whom is a philosophy professor and the leader of a campus group devoted to puzzle-solving; when he is accused of murdering his wife, he disappears for a week and is found alive, but tortured and mute, leaving it to his brother to discover what happened during the lost week, and whether his brother is a murderer, again to Sarah Knight at Simon & Schuster, in a two-book deal, in a significant deal, by Laney Katz Becker at Markson Thoma (World). Marcella.berger@simonandschuster.com
Women's/Romance Gena Showalter's next two titles in her NYT bestselling ALIEN HUNTRESS series, again to Lauren McKenna at Pocket, in a major deal, by Deidre Knight at The Knight Agency (world). Deidre.Knight@knightagency.net
Children's: Picture book Megan Bryant's PEEK INSIDE: IT'S EASTER TIME!, a sticker book, novelty book companion to HALLOWEEN IS HERE! and THE UNICORN PRINCESS, to Marlo Scrimizzi at Running Press Kids, for publication in 2012, by Jamie Weiss Chilton at Andrea Brown Literary Agency (World).
NONFICTION Advice/Relationships Alexis Stewart & Jennifer Koppelman Hutt's WHATEVERLAND: Learning to Live Here, a humorous self-help book with attitude that will help readers experience the joy of getting things out in the open while living a fabulous and shame-free life, to Tom Miller at Wiley, for publication in October 2011, by Shawn Coyne.
Biography Journalist, artist, and author of the forthcoming Art Schooled Larry Witham's PICASSO AND THE CHESS PLAYER: Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and the Battle for the Soul of Modern Art, from the streets of bohemian Paris to New York City, from Picasso's classic works to Duchamp's "readymades," a parallel history of the two men who have come to symbolize the question: What is art?, again to Stephen Hull at University Press of New England, by Laurie Abkemeier at DeFiore and Company (World English). Translation: ajs@defioreandco.com
Cooking Proprietor of the red-hot downtown New York sandwich shop Baohaus's Eddie Huang's FRESH OFF THE BOAT, a gonzo foodie's journey pitched in the tradition of Anthony Bourdain and a classic immigrant coming-of-age story, to Chris Jackson at Spiegel & Grau, by Marc Gerald at The Agency Group (world).
History/Politics/Current Affairs UNLIKELY ALLIES author Joel Paul's EXTRAVAGANT PRETENSE: How John Marshall Invented American Diplomacy, about John Marshall's early experience as a diplomat and statesman affected his world-view, and how he, in turn, shaped America's role in the world as Chief Justice from 1801-1835; as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court he did more than anyone in the founding generation to define the Constitution and shape America's role in the world, but few people realize how his experience as a diplomat and statesman shaped his world-view, to Jake Morrissey at Riverhead, in a nice deal, for publication in September 2014, by Roger Williams at New England Publishing Associates (World).
Former Sunday Times Magazine editor Robin Morgan and journalist and author Ariel Leve's 1963, an oral history of the year music emancipated youth and gave it the power to influence and fashion the future -- culturally, politically and economically, to Carrie Kania at It Books, by Rob Weisbach at Rob Weisbach Creative Management (World). Holocaust scholar Wendy Lower's new history of the role of German women, not only as plunderers and direct witnesses, but as actual killers on the eastern front during World War II, to Deanne Urmy at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in a pre-empt, for publication in Spring 2013, by Geri Thoma at Markson Thoma (World and audio).
Lifestyle Author of The Secret Lives of Dresses Erin McKean and illustrator of 101 Uses for a Bridesmaid's Dress Donna Mehalko's THE HUNDRED DRESSES, part field guide, part style commentary, part fashion blueprint, a catalog and taxonomy of 100 different styles of dresses, vintage and modern, with explanation of what each says about the woman who chooses to wear it, to Nancy Miller at Bloomsbury, by Lisa Bankoff at ICM (World English). Translation: Helen Manders, helen@curtisbrown.co.uk
Reference Shakespeare coach Martin Jago's TO PLAY OR NOT TO PLA Y: 40 Games for Acting Shakespeare, consisting of games, exercises and performance tips for students, amateurs, and professionals who want to master the Bard, with a foreword by Alfred Molina, to Marisa Smith of Smith & Kraus, by Janet Rosen of Sheree Bykofsky Associates (world English).
Religion/Spirituality Deborah Blake's 50 RITUALS FOR THE EVERYDAY WITCH, a comprehensive guide to a year of magical practice for the modern witch, to Elysia Gallo at Llewellyn, in a nice deal, by Elaine Spencer at The Knight Agency.
Margaret McSweeney's AFTERMATH: Growing in Grace Through Grief, exploring how to find grace in the midst of losing a loved one, drawn from the author's loss of both her parents as well as her brother and from the author's mother's journal entries and poems as she pondered the early death of her husband, to Andrea Mullins at New Hope, for publication in fall 2012, by Janet Kobobel Grant at Books & Such Literary Agency.
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