When they conduct the post-mortem on the book publishing industry, the cause of death listed will be suicide: "Six years after the publication of her blockbuster best-selling novel, “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” Audrey Niffenegger has sold a new manuscript for close to $5 million, according to people with knowledge of the negotiations. It is an especially significant sum at a time of retrenchment and economic uncertainty in the publishing world." I'm sorry, that's just awesome: publishers are crying poor, bemoaning the state of the industry, and what do these guys decide to do? Shovel $5 million out the door (in a bidding war, no less). What's fascinating is the response from some observers of the industry: over at io9, they note that "everyone seems to agree she earned it"; Robert J. Sawyer thinks that Niffenegger "deserves it". Why? Because her previous novel was really good. Evidently the royalties she received for that first novel just weren't payment enough for how brilliant the work was. Here's a guess: this will turn out to be another Charles Frazier Thirteen Moons moment (following the success of his novel Cold Mountain, Frazier received an $8 million advance for his novel Thirteen Moons - it is estimated that the publisher lost more than $5 million dollars on the book). But even if that guess is wrong, maybe publishers shouldn't be putting themselves in a position where losses of that magnitude are even a possibility. How many other books have been foregone because $5 million dollars was spent on the next Niffenegger book (at $50,000 a pop, for example, that's 100 other books that could have been published)?
Digital delivery: The Star reports on the BookNet Canada Technology Forum, which discussed the future of digital book delivery.
Money: MastHead Online reports on salaries in the magazine industry.
The fact that this is a new development is a little disturbing: Excellent column at MastHead Online about something that should be standard across all news publishing media: fact-checking. The comments are also well-worth your time.
New business model still a little bit confusing: Richard Curtis tries to pull back the curtain on those bizarrely high e-book prices. The answer? Publishing industry sales reps earn commissions only on sales of printed books, not on e-books. (Curtis also attributes it to the fact that "The profit to be made on a successful 'book-book’ is at this time far greater than that made on an e-book", but it's difficult to discern what he could possibly mean by this. How can the sale of a physical copy of Book A reap more profit than the e-book copy of Book A when the e-book copy carries no printing costs, no shipping costs, no storage costs, (apparently) no commissions to sales reps, etc.?) Curtis also notes that progress on e-books was hindered for "almost ten years" by "[c]opyright issues, technical problems, muddled business models and a lack of standards". Recall what I said above about "suicide". Yeah.
Ain't got time to bleed: Sci-fi author and publisher Robert J. Sawyer laments the lack of professionalism among aspiring writers who engage in multiple submissions. I always find that a fascinating one. I can't think of another industry convention which is as divisive as a prohibition on multiple submissions - authors are held hostage by the slowest car in the caravan, and it provides no incentive to publishers to hurry up and read through submissions and make a decision, since they can (assuming everyone follows the rules) rest assured that they aren't competing against another editor considering the manuscript at the same time.
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