Odds, ends, good news, bad news, and the longest title in the short history of this blog.

I’d like to thank Amazon for dominating the last five days of my life as I spent just about every free moment keeping tabs on this POD debacle.  Yes, I could’ve been writing (and I did, but not as much I could have), but seeing as how the future of my novel’s distribution was hanging in the balance like so many other novels, I had to keep up with it.

So, the bad news:  Most of the major POD companies, including Lulu, caved and signed Amazon’s contract.  According to Angela Hoy, “the confidentiality in that contract is the tightest I’ve ever seen.” That removes the chance of learning what kind of negotiations these POD folks had to make.  It also means that BookSurge will become the de facto printer for all of these books, including lots of back catalogue titles for the traditional publishers, too.  Less choice is never good.  You can read more current news about this here.

The good news:  From where I am right now, I don’t think ALT’s distribution is going to be affected by this.  In fact, as of right this moment, you can still buy the book on Amazon.  You can still buy it from Barnes & Noble, too.  And, since it’s registered with Ingram, you can buy it just about anywhere, really, provided you give the details (like the ISBN number).  My only concern at this point is the quality of those copies printed by Amazon, as feedback about BookSurge has been less than favorable.

Bottom line:  It’s still too early to tell.  If things change, you’ll be the first to know (after I’ve done a good share of bitching and ranting out loud).  For now, it’s business as usual.

Speaking of which, I’m about half way through my story that is being altogether agreeable and remaining a short story since I feared it would not be.  I hope to finish it by this weekend.  As of Sunday, I will begin writing the second draft of imagiNATION.  I can’t wait, for several reasons:  to tell the story as it’s meant to be told, to erase the abortion that is its first draft, and to finally be done with it.  Just having something to send out to agents is vindicating enough.  Never mind the whole acceptance/rejection thing.

The Stories section is finally updated and formatted properly (for the most part).  From this point forward I will only be uploading stories that are published first elsewhere.  And, to kick things off, you can read my story Down the Tubes which was published over at 365tomorrows a couple of weeks ago.

I happened upon FictionScribe, another writing blog that you should check.  Also, if you happen to be working on a speculative fiction novella or piece of erotic fiction, they’ve got some info on two venues calling for submissions right now.

And finally, one of my favorite authors, Chuck Palahniuk, just announced the first string of tour dates in support of his forthcoming novel, Snuff:

  • Tuesday, May 20 – Ann Arbor, MI
  • Wednesday, May 21 – Minneapolis, MN
  • Thursday, May 22 – Denver, CO (no personalizing at this event)
  • Tuesday, May 27 – St. Louis, MO
  • Wednesday, May 28 – San Francisco, CA
  • Thursday, May 29 – Seattle, WA
  • Monday, June 2 – New York , NY (no personalizing at this event)
  • Tuesday, June 3 – Washington, DC
  • Wednesday, June 4 – Atlanta, GA
  • Thursday, June 5 – Austin, TX

Keep an eye on The Cult for details.

And so I’ll leave you for the evening, as I’m off to have a very late dinner and to type up the crap I wrote today.  Oh, and Happy April.

TK

tags: Amazon   Chuck Palahniuk   Down the Tubes   long titles   publishing  

April 2, 2008 | Filed Under Blog 

Comments

2 Responses to “Odds, ends, good news, bad news, and the longest title in the short history of this blog.”

  1. M.Lim on April 2nd, 2008 7:36 pm

    Damn, I still haven’t read Fight Club yet.

  2. Author on April 4th, 2008 4:03 pm

    Keep in mind what Amazon is trying to do, foist off on all of us BookSurge, a POD printery they own, whose bad service and poor printing quality ensured that LightningSource became the respected market leader. Getting clients by using Amazon’s market share isn’t going to change that. BookSurge will still be pitiful. Amazon’s ethics, such as they are, will remain dubious. We just need to make sure neither can do harm to our books or our relationship with our customers.

    The POD community needs to get together and create a list of demands Amazon must meet before we sign, demands that ensure that customers receive quality books quickly and that Amazon doesn’t distort the market so badly in the pursuit of their own profits, that they force book prices upward. Those demands would include:

    1. Since Amazon is handling every aspect of publishing from printing to shipping, Amazon must handle all defective returns. It must place a notice to that effect on the detail page of all BookSurge titles. It must make replacement easy with a widely publicized toll-free number. It must pay postage both ways. Replacements must ship within two weeks. Otherwise, as others have noted, authors and publishers will get blamed for BookSurge’s poor quality control. And we must be allowed to place a notice inside books noting that Amazon/BookSurge is responsible for a book’s print quality.

    2. Since Amazon is doing the printing and selling, there’s no way authors and publishers can know how many copies are actually being sold. Amazon could print and sell 1000 copies and only pay us for 800. To provide a way for us to check, Amazon must provide authors and publishers with weekly sales figures, listing the date and time a book is ordered and shipped as well as the city, state and zip where it is shipped. (No names required.) It must provide a legally binding agreement to allow us to examine their internal records any time a discrepancy appears. Then all we need do is have friends send us a copy of Amazon’s email every time they buy one of our books. We can look for it there and, if it isn’t, make Amazon’s life very miserable.

    3. Books created for BookSurge aren’t likely to be distributed many places outside Amazon, which has at most about 10% of the US market. It is grossly unfair to stick authors and publishers with the cost of creating two books just to increase Amazon’s profitability. BookSurge must change their front end to accept precisely the same files as LightningSource. Until it does so, Amazon will continue to carry all POD books from Lightning.

    4. BookSurge can print in fewer formats and sizes than Lightning, so books in all the other formats will be supplied through Lightning. That provision must never change.

    5. Only Amazon benefits from this change, so Amazon will cover all the costs of placing books into BookSurge’s system and commit in writing to never charge for this service.

    6. Amazon must allow authors and publishers the same freedom to set prices and discounts as Lightning permits. Amazon’s only right will be to set their selling price.

    7. Amazon will not attempt to force authors and publishers to sell them books at a greater discount than they offer other retail outlets. (Doing so is illegal anyway.) Authors and publishers will still be allowed complete freedom in the discount they offer in retail sales of their own titles. (This is to counter the strong-arm tactics Amazon has begun to use in the UK.)

    8. Amazon is reported to be requiring those who sign BookSurge contracts to agree to draconian non-disclosure conditions. That allows them to make one sort of deal with one publisher and a different deal with another. All the provisions of the contract must be open to the public. No non-disclosure agreement will be permitted.

    Other items need to be included, but you get the point. We don’t let Amazon run this show. We set down the conditions they must meet, conditions that ensure that the public is treated properly and we aren’t abused or cheated. Will Amazon be willing to agree to these quite reasonable conditions. Almost certainly not. But it means they’ll be fighting on our turf and not theirs.

    Legal action will take time, much as it did with Microsoft. This is something we can do now to rally everyone to the same flag and keep BookSurge’s salesmen from wearing us down one by one. And this ought to make it clear to everyone that Amazon’s goal is more control and more profits not customer satisfaction. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they agree to quickly replace any book they misprinted and sold? Why won’t they agree to give us the ability to make sure they aren’t cheating us? Why do they want their contracts to be secret?

    As Ben Franklin once put it, either we hang together in this are we will all hang separately. These demands give us a basis on which to hang together.

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