News

A couple items of news that show with every new day there are major changes in publishing.

First, Dorchester switches to a print on demand model for its books.  Reported at Mick Rooney’s blog (with additional info here at Words of Advice for Dorchester Authors from an Indie Author):

Dorchester Publishing is to switch its entire business model to e-books and print on demand (for select titles). Dorchester was a publisher of mass market paperbacks, particularly romance and thriller novels. Dorchester will continue to publish and have books printed traditionally for its book club lines, but in essence, they

The big news today is literary agent Andrew Wylie starting a publishing imprint that will publish ebook editions of major authors.

Mr. Wylie said his new company would focus on older titles whose digital rights are not owned by traditional publishers. The books will be available exclusively at Amazon’s Kindle store for two years.

In making the announcement Mr. Wylie opened a new front, and a possible negotiating tool, in a debate over e-book rights for what are called backlist titles. Many traditional publishers have said they own the electronic rights to those books, but some authors and their estates

A few interesting developments in the changing landscape.

Marta Acosta Lands Print Deal After eBook Success

For Novelist Marta Acosta a free eBook was her way to print. After not getting a print deal, the novelist decided post her YA vampire title The Shadow Girl Of Birch Grove on Scribd. It became the #1 book on the site and got a bunch of reviews.

Galley Cat reports, “Novelist Marta Acosta posted her entire vampire novel for free on Scribd, earning 17,676 views and becoming the top ranked YA book on the site. Now she landed a deal with Tor

A couple of posts back I wrote how self-publishing may go the route of underground comics – once mocked, now part of the mainstream.  Today there’s news that underground comics pioneer and legend- and one of my favorite artists in any medium – Harvey Pekar has died at the age of seventy.  If you don’t know Harvey Pekar, he’s a first-person chronicler like Charles Bukowski or Jack Kerouac, and on par with both of them.

He’s also a self-publisher.  From Wikipedia on American Splendor:

Pekar produced seventeen issues of American Splendor from 1976 to 1993, which, except for

Interesting.  Former Lulu staffer starts up a digital publisher:

Anthony Policastro, a former business analyst at self-publishing vendor Lulu.com, has launched the Outer Banks Publishing Group, a new publishing venture that will focus on digital publishing and the use of social media to build an audience for POD print releases.

Outer Banks Publishing offers a different model than Lulu.com. Policastro said OBP is not a self-publishing vendor like Lulu, but a hybrid publishing model that combines selective editorial content with new media publishing and promoting platforms. Policastro said he solicits manuscripts like a traditional publisher and is selective about

The Apple iPad has now gone the Kindle dtp route and now users can upload a book directly to the iBooks store without having to use a third-party distributor, like Smashwords (which I still advocate because of all of the other places it distributes to).

Via MacLife:

Apple sent us an e-mail today with details on how someone could sign up to sell their own books in the iBookstore. Their books would have to adhere to these criteria: each one would need to have a 13-digit ISBN, be in ePub format, validate against epubcheck 1.0.5, and contain

This seems fairly inevitable, though perhaps not as inevitable as Barnes & Noble’s entrance into self-publishing.  Book manufacturer and distributor, Book Masters, is starting a self-publishing service called Auturo:

Auturo (o-tour-o)

• Fluent in many languages and media

• Covering all digital conversion and distribution needs.

• Consolidates reporting and remittance for digital sales.

• Cost-effective, hassle-free services reaching the global market.

• Combining print and digital products for distribution globally.

Auturo Proposal Request

Why us?

• You own your own files

• Automatically updates your distribution profile with any new opportunities

• Bundle digital and hard copy

An interesting development for JA Konrath which has implications for self-publishing and it also…doesn’t. Amazon Encore is going to release Konrath’s next novel digitally and in print. AmazonEncore is “a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate.”

Konrath doesn’t exactly fit that profile, as his novels are doing well, but this has the feel of the beginning of the future – once self-publishers are able to mimic what Konrath has done without a traditional publisher, the role of traditional […]