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It has been suggested that I am in love with new concepts, new media. It’s true. I am absolutely in love with “new” media models (as opposed to new media models, though I am very fond of those as well). As an old media person who has witnessed successes and failures and inefficiencies, I am excited to see people shaking up existing business models because, like our outdated laws, the current models don’t reflect the reality on the ground.

To entice the talent needed to keep publishing viable in the future, the economic model must change.

I figure it’s going to take a while to find the best approach, but given the fact that so many companies have spent the past decade hoping the Internet is a fad, any forward thinking is good thinking. I would rather see mistakes made than recalcitrant publishers and authors clinging to the good old days. They weren’t that great, you know?
Read more…

Today’s links of interest:

• Jennifer Aniston Geeks Out, Let’s Revise Those Kindle Estimates Upward
  If you look closely, it appears that the Kindle got some free publicity and a celebrity endorsement.
• Is Bloomsbury Set?
  Will Bloomsbury US fold or will it rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old? Or will it remain the same? Or does it matter if you have an office in the US and the UK?
• Stimulating Reading
  FoBS Jessica Stockton Bagnulo (of Book Nerd) offers an exciting option for those who don’t want or don’t need some or all of their economic stimulus rebates: invest in the future of reading. Think a little bit public radio, a little bit retail. Plus…how can you resist a "Reading is Sexy" t-shirt?

The locked-in perception of the book as a unit or a product has also led to digital ‘strategies’ which largely consist of the digitisation of existing print texts in order to create eBooks. This in turn has led to an obsessive focus on the reading device and a perception that the emergence of a ‘killer device’ will be a key driver in unlocking a digital future for books in the way that the iPod was, say, for music. This is a flawed perspective in a number of ways, not least because it fails to recognise the enormous amount of online or digital ‘reading’ that already takes place on non-book-specific devices such as desktop PCs, laptops, PDAs and mobiles, but also because it fails to recognise that the very nature of books and reading is changing and will continue to change substantially. What is absolutely clear is that publishers need to become enablers for reading and its associated processes (discussion; research; note-taking; writing; reference following) to take place across a multitude of platforms and throughout all the varying modes of a readers’ activities and lifestyle.

• A book publisher’s manifesto for the 21st century - by Sara Lloyd of Pan Macmillan. A must read — finding just one great quote of the week was rough!

• Not A Formula For Success
  May 12th, 2008 · 24 Comments

  Once there was an author who wrote a book. He (though he could have been she) sent the book to his editor who cried at the beauty of the words and published the book and the people bought this book and declared it a thing of wonder and the book was deemed an American Classic [...]

• In Defense Of Women’s Fiction Book Covers
  May 5th, 2008 · 9 Comments

  As a long-time romance novel reader — yes, Mom, I know, but I never warmed to the serial killers — I know that many of the books will never qualify as “great”. Still, there are a lot of talented writers telling incredible stories with amazing voice and creativity in the genre. This is so for [...]

• On Publishing with A Small Press
  April 30th, 2008 · 4 Comments

  [BS: Yes, kids, another guest post. Must be the Internets way of celebrating Spring. This week, we are delighted to bring you Lucia Nevai, an award-winning author whose novel Salvation is due out from Tin House Books within weeks. Lucia, who delighted us with her line "when we all agreed that Salvation was the book [...]

• Piracy, Uh, What Is It Good For?
  April 28th, 2008 · 7 Comments

  What do you fear more: obscurity or piracy? Seems to me most people fear the latter because we’re told that piracy is bad and must be stopped. 400,000 books were published/distributed in the United States in 2007, according to Rachel Donadio’s recent New York Times article (”You’re an Author? Me Too!”). If you’re trying to [...]

• Mentoring: The Writer You Guide Might Be The Future
  April 23rd, 2008 · 3 Comments

  [BS: Yay! Another guest post. We're really excited to feature Tara Yellen, author of After Hours at the Almost Home, a look at community and family and what happens when one person disappears from the mix. Tara, however, is looking at community of another kind: the importance of mentoring relationships for writers. Just loved [...]

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