Our recent post on bundling of print and e-books (see Bundling – Publishing’s Next Battleground) set off a thread of interesting and provocative responses.  One that we found particularly cogent was written by Joe Esposito, CEO of GiantChair.  He addresses the question of why bundling is so hard. He also suggests some viable solutions. We reproduce his post here in its entirety, with thanks to Mr. Esposito for hitting a lot of nails on the head.

RC

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To bundle you need: a direct relationship with the consumer, clearance of IP issues with authors, an ISTC-ready platform (so multiple ISBNs can be grouped together on one page), ecommerce capability (shopping cart, etc.), links for fulfillment (for both e
and p), and a marketing or merchandising strategy.

A bookseller (e.g., Amazon) has a direct relationship with the consumer, but typically does not have IP clearance with authors, which makes bundled pricing difficult. A publisher that wishes to sell direct has the relationship with the author, but typically has only weak connections to consumers. This is why bundling is hard: the necessary components are rarely found in any one organization.

Part of the reason to bundle is that creates unique SKUs [stock-keeping units, sort of unique identifiers for bundled products]. In the U.S. publishers’ direct marketing is limited in part because of discounting on widely available SKUs. Thus a publisher may try to sell a book in print from its Web site for $20 and a PDF for $16, but Amazon may sell a Kindle edition for $9.95. Thus consumers who go to the publisher’s
Web site “bounce” to Amazon or B&N.

A unique SKU, however, reduces the bounce rate. Get the print and the PDF for $20 — and you can’t get this combination anywhere else.

Of course, a publisher could also try to undersell Amazon for a standalone e or p book, but that is an assault on the entire retail supply chain. I do not advocate discounting by publishers when they sell direct.

Our experience with e and p combinations with our clients has been very positive. I am amazed by the proportion of PDF sales we get, with out without the print bundle. The bundles sell better than any one format.

Why do people want the PDF (or it could be ePub or MP3 audio, etc.) if they already have the print? It depends on the type of book and the individual consumer. For intellectually serious books, people appreciate the search capability (and tiny storage requirements).

Outside our company’s own experience, there is the interesting capability of all the ebook vendors, which keep the book in an online account indefinitely. That is an interesting feature. So, for example, I read The Da Vinci Code in print and then gave it away. I will never look at that again. But I am reading Wolf Hall now, a truly serious book. I may want to refer to that again sometime. Having a cloud-based version is attractive for that reason.

I think we will see a great deal of uptake for the bundled Google Editions, especially when they are sold directly by publishers. It is an entirely new marketing paradigm and should be watched closely.

Joe Esposito

Two hundred years after a nuclear apocalypse forced humanity to flee earth, humans still remember the most feared warriors of that planet—-the Paratwa, genetically modified killers who occupy two bodies controlled by one vicious mind.

The legendary Paratwa named Reemul, known as the Liege-Killer, was the strongest of them all. Now someone has revived Reemul from stasis and sent him to terrorize the peaceful orbital colonies of Earth. Is this an isolated incident, or has the one who unleashed this terrible power announced a gambit for control over the entire human race?

This is the story arc of Christopher Hinz’s stirring trilogy consisting of Liege-Killer, Ash Ock and The Paratwa . Liege-Killer won the Compton Crook Award for best first novel and earned a nomination for the John W. Campbell Award for best new writer.

You can buy the trilogy in a variety of formats including Kindle.

No Contest.

That’s the judgment rendered by technology maven David Pogue in his New York Times column evaluating the latest version of Kindle and comparing it to rivals iPad, Nook and Sony. Here’s his pronunciamento: “Certain facts are unassailable: that the new Kindle offers the best E Ink screen, the fastest page turns, the smallest, lightest, thinnest body and the lowest price tag of any e-reader. It’s also the most refined and comfortable.”

Following is a thumbnail sketch of Pogue’s take on Kindle 3 (in his own words):

• The smallness comes in the form of a 21 percent reduction in the dimensions from the previous Kindle…Yet the screen has the same six-inch diagonal measurements as always because they shaved away a lot of that empty beige (or now dark gray) plastic margin…The background gray is a few shades lighter than on any other reader, producing much better contrast behind the black text.
• The Kindle is almost ridiculously lightweight; at 8.5 ounces, it’s a third the weight of the iPad. That’s a big deal for a machine that you want to hold in your hands for hours.
• Then there is the $140 price. That’s for the model with Wi-Fi — a feature new to the Kindle that plays catch-up to the Barnes & Noble Nook…Quite a tumble from the Kindle’s original $400 price, and a tiny sliver of what you would pay for an iPad ($500 and way, way up).
• The Kindle’s catalog of 630,000 current books is 10 times the size of Apple’s.
• E Ink is great for battery life. (Amazon says that on the new Kindle, if you turn off the wireless features, you can read for a month on a single charge.)
• The new Kindle reduces the page-turn wait to well under a second. It’s the fastest page-turner among e-readers.
• The new Kindle’s nonremovable storage now holds twice as many books: 3,500 of them.
• The tiny joystick has been replaced by cellphone-like four-way control buttons, and the page-turn Forward and Back buttons, which flank both edges, are silent now, for the benefit of sleeping spouses. And the new Kindle handles PDF documents much better now; you can even add notes to them and magnify them.

Are there flaws in Kindle 3? Yes. Problems? Some. Invidious comparisons to competitive devices? Sure.  Learn what they are in New Kindle Leaves Rivals Farther Back

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Circle September 28th in red on your calendar. That may be the last day of Barnes & Noble as we know it.

September 28th is the day of the company’s shareholders meeting. The fate of the world’s largest bookstore chain will be decided when its founder Leonard Riggio and the second biggest shareholder, billionaire Ronald Burkle, duke it out for control of the firm. You would not believe the contriving, conniving, jockeying and maneuvering going on as these sumos confront each other with hate in their eyes.

Hard as it may be to believe, because of sagging financial performance against its relentless rival Amazon, Riggio stands to be ousted from his own company’s managing board. If he is, what will happen to the company and some 1357 trade and college bookstores? No one knows, because Burkle’s intentions are unclear.  He has been articulate about what he doesn’t want – Riggio and his policies – but far from clear about what he will do with B&N if he gets his mitts on it.  (See What Does This Investor See in B&N That We Don’t See?). Burkle has not evinced much love for books, but he loves money passionately and he obviously sees plenty of value in B&N. Or is it the land that B&N’s stores sit on.

For a in-depth analysis of both men and the empire they are fighting over, read Andrew Rice’s splendid New York magazine profile The Billionaire and the Book Lover.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by New York magazine.

Better Living Through Electronics

Raz Godelnik blogging on the website of the Independent Book Publishers Association asks Is E-Reading Really Greener? We’ve been asking the same question for far too long and it’s good to hear voices other than our own talking about it.

Godelnik’s is an important one.  He’s co-founder and CEO of Eco-Libris, a company working with publishers, authors, bookstores, and book lovers worldwide to promote green practices in our industry.

To determine which format – print or digital – has a smaller carbon footprint, the IBPA applied life cycle analysis “which evaluates the ecological impact of any product, at every stage of its existence—in this case, from cutting down trees for paper to the day when the iPad and the Kindle will end their lives,” writes Godelnik.

One test was revealing, demonstrating “that you need to replace a purchase of at least 100 physical books with 100 books on your e-book (or at least the iPad, the device used for the test) to make the device “a greener option from a carbon footprint standpoint.”

However, as one team of researcher assets, “the carbon footprint is just one part of the comparison. With respect to fossil fuels, water use, and mineral consumption, one e-reader has as much impact as 40–50 print-on-paper books. And with respect to human health consequences, they claim the figure is somewhere between 50 and 100 books.”

There’s one more important criterion to bear in mind as we consider our future choices:  “Someone who (like most Americans) reads only six to seven books a year and switches to a newer e-reader version within three to four years may not be going green.” What happens to your discarded e-reader is something you probably don’t want to know, but you really need to look in faces like that of the child in our picture sitting in a park – a park strewn with all the horrors of civilization.  (See Getting Rid of E-Trash? Dump It on Asia’s Poor and Which Is Greener, E or P? Count to Ten Before Answering)

Read Is E-Reading Really Greener?. And if you’d like to learn – and do – more, visit ecolibris.net.

Richard Curtis

Random House Roadkill

Literary agent Andrew Wylie’s reputation as a shrewd, relentless businessman has earned him the sobriquet “The Jackal” but in the recent debacle of his failed raid on Random House he looked more like a chimp in a clown costume.

Sarah Weinman, writing in DailyFinance.com, wonders whether he “ever intended to be a digital publisher, or even fully understood what it meant. The origins of Odyssey Editions [the firm Wylie created for his e-book venture] seemed scatter-shot and unfocused at best, starting with a May 11 incorporation filing in the the state of Delaware, and a website domain registration six days later, on May 17, through the Wylie Agency, not Odyssey.”  Was Odyssey “a real business”, Weinman wonders, “or a publicity stunt?”

If the latter, not too many folks found it funny. Some of his authors must have been pretty shook up to be used as pawns in his chess game with Random House, which declared it would do no more business with him if he went through with his e-book scheme.

Nor could Amazon.com find much humor when Wylie offered them a two-year exclusive commitment that he then had to abandon because he didn’t quite own the rights to the books he was offering. “The question of who actually owns the digital rights to works written before e-books were even a gleam in the publishing industry’s eye is still unanswered,” writes Weinman. Wylie failed to heed Random’s warnings that it would not yield those rights without a fight, warnings that were sounded nine years earlier in a lawsuit against Rosetta Books and more recently when startup Open Road Media made a similar play. When Wylie tried the same thing we wondered Will Random House Chicken Out Again?

Random House didn’t chicken out but came out with excommunications blazing, forcing Wylie to retreat from his position and inform Amazon that the titles they thought they had were actually the property of Random House. Furthermore he had to cough up to Random the e-files Odyssey had created. Those files will still be sold on Amazon, yes, but not exclusively as Amazon had expected. E-book editions of those titles will be sold in the platforms of Amazon’s competitors, courtesy of Random House.

Now Wylie can go back to being a Jackal on the hunting grounds he is familiar with, but with claws and fangs banged up by his foray into a world he does not understand. Weinman’s observations are devastating: “Considering that it’s the offspring of a literary agency that represents 700 authors and employs far fewer personnel to handle those rights, Odyssey Editions smacks of a water-dipped toe, a publicity ploy, rather than a deep commitment to digital publishing.”

Read Weinman’s Random House’s Backlist E-Book Deal With Andrew Wylie Leaves Much Unanswered for complete details.

Richard Curtis

Dave Duncan’s “Handful of Men” quartet is now available in Kindle.

Picking up the story where his “”Man of His Word” trilogy left off, Duncan launches a new and magical adventure in Pandemia. The titles in order of publication are The Cutting Edge, Upland Outlaws, The Stricken Field and The Living God. All may be viewed and ordered on the Dave Duncan page on the E-Reads website.

The great adventure chronicled in the “Man of His Word” quartet ended happily enough. The good folk of Krasnegar discovered that a beautiful princess could, indeed, succeed her royal father and rule in her own right, and rule very well, too. And when Queen Inos married Rap, the former stableboy, he turned out to be a very good king. He never admitted that he was a sorcerer, and everyone knew that Rap was a Man of His Word, so that was all right.

The years passed. Rap and Inos raised a family, prospering in their remote little kingdom. But trouble was brewing in the great world outside. The aged Imperor grew ever more erratic, more tyrannical. His grandson Shandie, the boy Rap had befriended, was now a great soldier, struggling to suppress ever-growing upheaval in the borderlands while he waited to inherit the throne. Strange prophecies of upheaval and disaster spread. When the rumors reached even to Krasnegar, Rap scoffed at them as superstition–until one night a god appeared and confirmed that the truth was likely to be far worse. On his travels long ago, Rap himself had made a terrible blunder. Because of that, the world of Pandemia was now poised on the brink of utter disaster. The last thing Rap wanted was another adventure.

That’s too bad, because want it or not, he’s about to have one.  It all begins in The Cutting Edge.

Thanks to E-Reads’ reissue program Dave Duncan is at last receiving the recognition he has earned and deserved over a career packed with stirring, witty, romantic and thrilling works impeccably narrated as if woven on the loom of a master textile artist.  His “Seventh Sword” novels are far and away the biggest selling fantasy trilogy in E-Reads’ history. You can find them and almost two dozen other Duncans on his author page.

Now comes the breathtaking quartet of novels known as “A Man of His Word“, consisting of Magic Casement, Faery Lands Forlorn, Perilous Seas and Emperor and Clown, with handsomely redesigned covers for both the e-book and the paperback editions.

A princess and a stableboy? It sounds like the worst sort of hackneyed formula romance. Think again, for A Man of His Word may well be the most original fantasy you will ever read. Duncan’s astonishing magic manifests itself in utterly unexpected ways, some of which the late Lester del Rey admitted he had not met in fifty years as writer and editor. The world itself is unique, for there are no humans in Pandemia, only imps, elves, gnomes, jotnar, and many more, all of whom you will recognize as “human”.

In the first book, Magic Casement, the tale begins gently, even slowly, with Inosolan enjoying an idyllic childhood in a tiny backwater kingdom, too carefree and innocent even to understand that the feelings she shares with her friend Rap are more than friendship. Mystery, menace, and the gods appear in short order, and from then on the story grows in scope and power to straddle the world, and adversity thrusts rapid maturity on Rap and Inos. Populated by unforgettable characters–Aunt Kade, Little Chicken, Doctor Sagorn, and many more–Pandemia is an incredible world of credible people and infinite surprises.

One reader commented

“I think this is my favorite fantasy series of all time. The reluctant swordsman series was great, but A Man of His Word was a revelation — up until this series, I had no idea of fantasy’s potential. I remember reviews at the time complaining that Duncan’s series had subverted the fantasy genre, but for me it was the series that saved us from endless Tolkien rewrites. There was nothing like it before; not even the great James Branch Cabell comes close to Duncan’s originality in this series. Once you start the first book, you canot put any of it down. It is totally addictive. A must have for any fantasy fan. You don’t know the genre at all if you don’t know this series.”

Whatever ugly charges critics may level at traditional publishing, it’s hard to deny that when it comes to branding established authors and elevating new ones, the Establishment reigns supreme. You can talk all you want about the viral validation that the Internet bestows on self-published books, the good old book industry is still the place where literary reputations are made,  And that’s because literary agents, reviewers and book critics for high circulation magazines and newspapers, Big Six publishers and big-name editors remain the taste makers of our literary culture. (You can read all about it in Gatekeepers.)

For this reason, self-published authors have been unable to gain respectful attention in the marketplace, get noticed by Big Publishing and catapulted into fame and fortune and distribution in bookstores.  That frustrating circumstance is about to change.  Publishers Weekly has announced a new program called PW Select dedicated to reviewing self-published books and bringing the best ones (“most deserving of a critical assessment”) to the attention of traditional publishers and the public.

PW president George W. Slowik Jr,  who recent acquired the flagging book industry publication, seems determined to brand it, restore its relevance and bring it into the 21st century. PW Select is one such initiative and certainly one that is going to raise some eyebrows because authors and publishers submitting their books for review must pay a registration fee.

Anticipating the obvious question of whether the fee can influence review coverage, Slowik said “We briefly considered charging for reviews, but in the end preferred to maintain our right to review what we deemed worthy. The processing fee that guarantees a listing and the chance to be reviewed accomplishes what we want: to inform the trade of what is happening in self-publishing and to present a PW selection of what has the most merit.”

Here in full is his announcement:

We are returning to our earliest roots. PW dates to 1872, when it was first known as Trade Circular Weekly and listed all titles published that week in what was then a nascent industry. We have decided to embrace the self-publishing phenomenon in a similar spirit. Call it what you will—self-publishing, DIY, POD, author-financed, relationship publishing, or vanity fare. They are books and that is what PW cares about. And we aim to inform the trade.

To that end, we are announcing PW Select, a quarterly supplement announcing self-published titles and reviewing those we believe are most deserving of a critical assessment. The first supplement will appear in our year-end issue in December. Each quarterly will include a complete announcement issue of all self-published books submitted during that period. The listings will include author, title, subtitle, price, pagination and format, ISBN, a brief description, and ordering information provided by the authors, who will be required to pay a processing fee for their listing. At least 25 of the submitted titles will be selected for a published review. There will also be an overview of the publishing trends that can be identified from among the titles from that reading period. We will also focus on the opportunities that the self-pub world offers. A resource directory will accompany the section offering names of companies providing services in the DIY space.

The entire PW editorial staff will participate in a review of the titles being considered for review, and we’ll likely invite a few agent friends and distributors to have a look at what we’ve chosen. No promises there, just letting some publishing friends take advantage of the opportunity to see the collection.

The first reading period for self-published books will be from September 1 until the end of October. All submitted titles will be registered online by the publisher at www.publishersweekly.com/diy (which will be active before the start of the reading period); a processing fee of $149 will be charged. Once the registration process is completed, shipping instructions and a confirmation code will be issued. Additional copies of the supplement will be available for distribution.

We briefly considered charging for reviews, but in the end preferred to maintain our right to review what we deemed worthy. The processing fee that guarantees a listing and the chance to be reviewed accomplishes what we want: to inform the trade of what is happening in self-publishing and to present a PW selection of what has the most merit.

Titles submitted for our first supplement must have been published in 2010 and have a valid ISBN. We will not accept manuscripts or e-books (this time). Only final bound galleys or finished books will be accepted. Books cannot be returned; once finished the copies are donated to Housing Works Thrift Shop, a worthy local charity.

Please, please send your book in a bio-sensitive package (i.e., no bubble wrap or plastic envelopes). Also, please use packaging appropriate to the book you are submitting: no boxes full of packing peanuts or paper stuffing. We recommend reusable and recycled paper envelopes. An acknowledgment of the book’s arrival will be issued via e-mail upon receipt.

We look forward to finding the gems worthy of attention, the sleeping indie giants—after all, books are our business.

Richard Curtis

Last January we made a pinky bet guaranteeing that e-book royalties would rise above the then ceiling of 25%. Did you take that bet? Pay up, sucker!

Faster than a double-click Random House has shifted its stance on e-book royalties and opened the door to an industry-wide raise in pay for authors as predicted here. A source close to the company says it’s prepared to abandon its fiercely defended 25% net e-royalty for a sliding scale topping out at 40%.

The source of this rapidly evolving story is Rachel Deahl of Publishers Weekly whose announced yesterday that the dispute between Random and agent Andrew Wylie was settled yesterday. Whereupon, without a missing a beat, the disclosure of Random’s liberalized royalty hit the news.

Many agents have “favored-nations” arrangements with publishers entitling authors to request a new royalty rate if the rest of the book industry adopts a higher one. It is now anticipated that agents will flood Random with requests for amendments replacing recently signed ones agreeing to a 25% royalty. It will be well nigh astounding if other publishers don’t fall into lockstep with Random’s royalty or something close to it.

The big question now is, will it stop at 40%? Many observers feel it won’t, so we urge Random’s contracts team to stay close to their keyboards in case they need to compose yet another amendment. (Full disclosure: E-Reads pays 50% net royalty and has done so from our founding ten years ago.)

Below is the relevant passage from Deahl’s article, which can be read in its entirety here.

Richard Curtis

The source said Random is offering a royalty built around a sliding schedule on e-book rights for backlist titles that can approach 40% “rather quickly.” The source explained that the royalty is based on a certain number of books selling over a specified period of time and, depending on what’s negotiated, the rate will rise based on the rate of sale.

The presumption is that Random House’s improved offer on backlist digital royalties–the source said this new approach is a “good rate” and notably better than the standard 25%–will spark the other major houses to follow suit with similar offers.