The Business of Publishing

How To Build A Better Pirate

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The creative community has an almost unnatural fear of piracy. Billions are being spent to protect works of art from “unlawful distribution”. Billions. Like millions, but bigger. Because it starts with a B. The belief is that each and every time someone grabs something off the Internet for free, a sale is lost. There isn’t much evidence to support this theory. If you treat your customers like potential lawbreakers, then, well, you know what a self-fulfilling prophecy is, right? There are, indeed, people who will go out of their way to acquire illegal merchandise. We would never be so precious […]

The Future of Publishing

See, It’s Because Women Can’t Review Military History…

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It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how the New York Times Book Review — or rather its editorial staff — keeps digging holes and then tripping headfirst into them. You’d think they’d absorb the knowledge that their male-to-female reviewer ratio is woeful, maybe take some conscious steps to correct the problem, and, well, move on. You wouldn’t, not for one moment, think that anyone associated with the publication would go out into the public sphere and stick his foot in his mouth. You’d be wrong. By failing to include a broad range of readers, dedicated book review sections are hurting

Reviewing Reviewing

A Brief Overview of Creative Commons

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As many of you are aware, we strongly advocate a little thing called “knowing what you’re doing”. This does not contradict our position when it comes to Making Stuff Up. Quite the contrary. We believe, among other things, that people who sign contracts should know what the contracts say. We also believe that people who utilize Creative Commons licenses should understand what they are keeping…and what they’re giving away. Creative Commons licenses are not licenses to steal This thought arose, oh, last week, when marketing guru Seth Godin complained that someone was selling unauthorized physical copies of his free e-book.

Our Continuing Fascination With Copyright

What, Exactly, Is A Sale, Anyway?

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Tell us, dear friends, are you as amused as we are by the coverage of the Clive Cussler versus Philip Anschutz debacle? You know the one — Mr. Anschutz is accusing Mr. Cussler of, gasp!, overstating his sales in order to receive a bigger paycheck. Somehow (and this has never really been made clear), this egregious (alleged) falsehood led to the failure of the fine motion picture picture Sahara to ignite at the box office. The question of what constitutes “books in print” or “books sold” or even “books shipped” is a bit fuzzy. That’s neither here nor there —

The Business of Publishing

Why Maureen Dowd Should Avoid Bookstores

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Recently, Maureen Dowd went to a bookstore. This shouldn’t be news, but one suspects this was a rare event in her life. One also suspects she’ll avoid the experience in the future. What she saw terrified her: nubile pink books snuggled up against aged gray novels. Surely she thought the sweet young things would take the gravitas right out of William Shakespeare. The thought that fake fiction had made its way into our home is alarming Dowd’s faux outrage was because the sea of chicklit that threatened to drown out the classics. Yeah, it’s not like most of those are

Reviewing Reviewing

Puzzling Over MySpace

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We woke today with grand plans to execute a post with brilliance and wit, but now we’re, well, thinking about the MySpace thing and, as always, remain puzzled by the media’s insistence that it’s going to save the world (when we all know that fate rests on the fragile shoulders of Peter Petrelli). While we’re all for going where the action is and whatnot, the truth of the matter is that MySpace is a train wreck disguised as a useful tool. On the surface, MySpace is the bee’s knees. It’s blogging, it’s tagging, it’s social networking. You have sound, words,

Marketing For Introverts

The Bad Harry Potter Decision

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It is all the rage to write about the upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. And there is, indeed, so much to write. The release date, the title, the potential for spoilers to ruin a perfectly nice. And then there’s the fact that the book won’t be released as an electronic edition. None of the Potter titles have been available as ebooks. The most commonly cited reason is a fear of piracy. Woe to the stupid pirate who tries to argue that he or she is selling a legitimate version of the book (as we vaguely recall happening a

Non-Traditional Publishing

Someone Else’s Money

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A long time ago in a job far away, we were schooled in the basics of distribution deals: at all times, you need to remember that it’s someone else’s money. You collect and report as if you are only passing the funds on to the real owner. For this, you get a percentage, a fee, a payment that recognizes your own work and effort. But you do not own the money. This has been foremost in our mind as we read of the decline of the Publisher’s Group West and the chaos it has created. Well over one hundred publishers

The Business of Publishing

The Great Paid Review Scandal, Follow-Up

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We were somewhat intrigued by Slate’s storyon self-published authors and Amazon’s BookSurge division. The fact that BookSurge offers paid reviews as part of the service didn’t make us blink. Sure, we wonder about the authors who believe this is a valuable service, but we’ll get to that in a moment. What gave us pause was the phrasing in an email from the company to an author (see page two of the story)– while Slate’s reading of the service was that the review would be written by a New York Times bestselling author (in this case, probably the extremely extended list),

Reviewing Reviewing

Form Versus Function

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Maybe it’s because we spent our childhood in a room lined with books. Truly, every wall, except for the ones that were really doorways, was filled with books. Eight feet of books, or maybe six feet*. Or maybe it’s because our schedule means that so much of our reading is done online. Really — there’s something tacky about pulling out a novel while you’re on a client’s clock. Or maybe it’s because, like all readers, it didn’t matter what form the reading material took — scraps of paper on the floor of a subway, cereal boxes, flashing signs over freeways

The Future of Publishing
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