Authors in digital age: still underpaid

The new economics of the e-book make the author’s quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.

The e-book is good news for some. Big-name authors and novels that are considered commercial are increasingly in demand as e-book readers gravitate toward best sellers with big plots. Unlike traditional bookstores, where a browsing customer might discover an unknown book set out on a table, e-bookstores generally aren’t set up to allow readers to discover unknown authors, agents say. Brand-name authors with big marketing budgets behind them are having the greatest success thus far in the digital marketplace.

The key to selling translations = field trips?

Every agent and publisher knows how difficult it is to sell foreign rights these days. It’s hard enough to find readers in the domestic market, right? Chad Post, founder and editor-in-chief of Open Letter Press at the University of Rochester, thinks the key to selling more foreign rights is the radical, old-school notion that editors and agents from different countries should – gasp – meet each other in real life. In an essay on Publishing Perspectives he writes:

It’s cliché, but there’s nothing like face-to-face meetings, and as objective, bottom-line focused we can try and be, learning about another country — its literary history and cultural heritage — really works to get editors invested.

Post also offers a list of tips for successful editorial trips, including tip #5: explain different business models:

Although Americans love to tell people why things won’t work in our country, we are always curious about other models — especially considering how the publishing industry always seems to be perennially about to implode and eat itself. It’s fascinating to learn about fixed book price laws, different e-book distribution schemes, bookseller training systems, and the like. We’re all looking for new good ideas, and by learning about the way things function in other places, the more likely we are to come up with a useful innovation.

Macmillan U.K. admits to bribery

According to a report from Reuters, officials from the U.K. arm of Macmillan have admitted that they paid bribes to secure a potentially lucrative deal to print textbooks in southern Sudan.

Macmillan said it made “corrupt payments” in a bidding process for an education project supported by a World Bank-managed fund in the African region, the [World Bank] said in a statement.

“The World Bank Group has debarred Macmillan Limited … declaring the company ineligible to be awarded Bank-financed contracts for a period of six years in the wake of the company’s admission of bribery payments relating to a Trust Fund-supported education project in Southern Sudan,” read the statement.

As the article goes on to state, however, the six-year ineligibility period may be reduced to as little as three years in recognition of the fact that Macmillan has been quick to respond to the controversy.

Macmillan had agreed to roll out a “compliance monitoring program” and cooperate with the bank’s efforts to fight fraud and corruption, the World Bank statement read.

“Macmillan admitted engaging in bribes [...],” a World Bank official, who asked not to be named, told Reuters. “This happened during the bidding process and Macmillan did not get the contract.”

The official, based in Washington, said the payments were offered between 2008 and 2009.

Bookmarks: Small press iPhone apps, what Obama reads, and more

• Coach House Books? There’s an App for that
• The New York Times remembers celebrated American poet Lucille Clifton
• Apple may not be on our side after all
• Shocking White House library books!

Kindle self-publishing – now available in Canada

Amazon announced today that the Kindle Digital Text Platform is now available to writers all over the world who are writing in English, French, or German. The DTP is a Web platform that allows people to self-publish e-books and sell them via the Kindle store. The service was previously available only in the U.S.

Via Mediabistro:

And now that authors living all over can upload books, we have the potential to get heretofore unimagined texts, though most of them will likely be very bad, and all of them will be hard to find.

The book world in quotes

Quillblog was on the fritz on Friday, so here is what you missed:

“At the end of the day, people need to have the courage to speak out. The predatory pricing practice by Amazon has pulled the industry along, and the Federal Trade Commission should have paid attention. Ultimately the authors will pay out of their income. This is an attack on literature so Amazon can capture control of the industry. They think they will be the iTunes of literature. It’s a monopolistic play that has nothing to do with value for the consumer. It’s an interesting scam by a very large corporation and I think we should wake up. It hasn’t helped grow the market – it has concentrated the market in Amazon. It’s been 70 years since people got away with [such actions] because the anti-trust laws used to be enforced, but we didn’t have enforcement for eight years.” -   Bob Livolsi, founder of the ebookstore Books on Board, at a panel discussion at Mediabistro’s eBook Summit (via Mobylives)

“And don’t remind me of the conversation I once had with a prominent academic, who intended the phrase ‘But it’s so effortless …’ as an adverse comment on a novel. I simply couldn’t rant convincingly enough to ensure that particular book could win a small but useful prize. The narrative’s illusion of ease – and just you try creating an illusion of ease, matey – was too convincing. A parallel idiocy might involve refusing to applaud Derek Jacobi at the end of a performance, because he looked as if he wasn’t acting.” – A.L. Kennedy, on the Guardian’s blog

“My waitress tonight was a Trillium nominated novelist — what’s wrong with this picture?” – the OAC’s literature officer John Degen on Twitter

“As the debate progressed, it became clear that, although both poets know something of the current Canadian poetry landscape, both are conservative in conception and approach. Bok, who did not challenge the moderator’s depiction of him as an ‘experimental poet’ (in fact, he embraced it), is interested in equivalencies between poetic and scientific methodological composition, while the diffident Starnino prefers a poetry where emotion is to the garment what syntax is to the clothesline. Neither question the ideological construction of the structures they inhabit, and only barely did Starnino refer to Eunoia‘s ‘success’ as defined not by critique but by the market.” – Michael Turner on the Christian Bök/Carmine Starnino Cage Match of Canadian poetry

“I don’t for a second buy Bök/Starnino as the major critical dialectic in Canadian poetry. While one, generally, comes from a traditionalist mindset and the other is avant-garde, what matters is that both men are formalists at their core. The fact that Bök wants to write in genomic code and Starnino is into sonnets is secondary to the fact that the great professional theme for both is the use of constraint as a path to artistic freedom. A more representative conversation would be between the constrainers and the free-versers. But maybe the free-versers don’t have a spokesperson who’s talented or persuasive enough to hang with these two at an intellectual level.” – Jacob McArthur Mooney on his blog Vox Populism

Bookmarks: The Advent Book Blog helps you shop, The National Post picks a shadow Canada Reads list, and more

• Richard Lea at the Guardian blog: If you can’t get Roth, Palin, or Rowling on the Kindle, what can you get?
• David Suzuki’s garbage gets combed through for incriminating Kraft Dinner boxes, and now archeologists are looking at what the Bard may have tossed away
• The L.A. Times picks their 25 favourite books of the year and actually selects some – gasp – poetry! That provoked a hearty booyah from this cubicle
• Web 2.0 marketing guru and Bookmadam Julie Wilson has teamed up with Books on the Radio‘s Sean Cranbury to offer the Advent Book Blog: Great Books Recommended by Great People
• Those funny book blog dudes at the National Post noted this year’s Canada Reads pics and wondered, what should Canada also read? Get your answers in by 5:00 p.m. this afternoon and maybe you’ll be able to participate in the alterna-reads version of the popular CBC book debate show

Tamaki talks voice at the Written in Colour Symposium

On Nov 14th, the Toronto Women’s Bookstore will host the Written in Colour Writers’ Symposium, a full-day event geared toward emerging indigenous writers and writers of colour.

Workshops range from grant writing to getting your play produced to memoir and erotic writing. Facilitators include writers Tamai Kobayashi, Lee Maracle and Mariko Tamaki, as well as industry players like Cormorant Books publisher Marc Côté from Cormorant Books and John Degen from the Ontario Arts Council.

Tamaki, author of several books including the award-winning graphic novel Skim (with illustrator Jillian Tamaki), will be giving a workshop entitled You Are All Talk! about voice and writing.

“The idea is to get writers to think about writing and talk, what providing our characters with a voice means,” says Tamaki

Tamaki, who is Japanese-Canadian, thinks the symposium is relevant because culture and race are as important in the socio-political landscape as they are in the literary-arts landscape. “I think that representation is something everyone should be concerned about. People want to see themselves reflected back in the literary works that they love and so we should all have a vested interest in making sure that all different identities, readers and writers get supported.”

Tamaki notes that “colour” is a complex issue. “I write about Japanese people but I don’t like this idea that people feel beholden to put that element in their works. Like, if I don’t write about someone who’s Asian, have I messed up? Committed less of a service as an Asian feminist?”

The Written in Colour symposium will  be held at 918 Bathurst Street. Call 4-6.922-8744 to pre-register. Tickets are $15 to $30 sliding scale in advance and $30 to $50 sliding scale at the door.

Cormorant lands book by Toronto mayor David Miller

According to a press release sent out earlier this afternoon, the Toronto-based Cormorant Books has signed a deal with soon-to-be-ex-mayor David Miller. Witness to a City: David Miller’s Toronto, which Miller will write with the assistance of Douglas Arrowsmith (a producer and director of documentaries), will be, according to the release, a compilation of “powerful and inspirational” stories Miller has heard from his constituents, people who embody his vision of Toronto as a place where “different cultures can live, work, and dream together as one community.”

“Cormorant Books is honoured to publish Witness to a City,” said publisher Marc Côté. “It’s the first book, in my memory, by a sitting Toronto mayor and we’re very fortunate to have signed it up. What I like most about the book is that it’s quintessentially Toronto, but can be read across Canada and abroad because its message is universal.”

The book will feature original photographs by Toronto photographer Jeff Davidson and will be published in June 2010.

The sound of The Book of Negroes

If you’ve travelled on the subway in Toronto over the past few days, you may have noticed an odd new promotional campaign by HarperCollins Canada centred around Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes and three other titles. The campaign consists of four posters, each with a simple, striking image on it: a woman’s face, a shark, a fetus, or John Lennon and Yoko Ono. There’s no text whatsoever (save a tiny HarperCollins logo in the corner), and in the centre of each image is a tiny port for plugging headphones into.

According to HarperCollins marketing manager Cory Beatty, who spearheaded the campaign, when people plug in, they’ll hear a 30-second excerpt from one of four titles – Negroes, Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts, Michael Crichton’s Next, or Jerry Leviton’s I Met the Walrus. The excerpts are followed by descriptions of the corresponding title, which run about 10–20 seconds.

HarperCollins has been working on the campaign – one of its most expensive to date – since last June, and the hope was that it would be the first of its kind in Canada. Instead, it turned out to be the second such campaign, as Cadbury’s beat HarperCollins to the punch in August with a plug-in ad of its own. (You could argue, though, that the concept is much better suited to promoting books than to promoting chocolate bars.) The HarperCollins campaign runs until early November.

Here are the four posters: