Publishing, Reports of Thy Demise Are Premature, Still

Garrison Keillor laments in a syndicated op-ed, no small old fashioned feat in its own right sans a major name made with the written word, and with it reveals his epic ignorance of just how bad the so-called new paradigm of publishing really is. What the master of homespun wisdom doesn't realize is that nearly all of it is crap, its authors incompetent boobs without a clue about anything Keillor learned before he would write for The New Yorker. Nor will they. Instant in. Instant out. Online publication is the road to nowhere and 14 readers who all had to pay you to get a copy of your overpriced print on demand book that shouldn't have been printed in the first place. We agree on that. Nothing has changed. Nor will it.

Amazon Breakthrough Contest Adds YA Category, Reduces Advances

For the third year, Penguin Group is joining Amazon in their Breakthrough Novel Award contest--which will now add a second prize for young adult fiction. The contest, which starts January 25, will also now be open to novels that have been previously self-published (to not penalize all those existing CreateSpace customers). Alas in a less heralded change the promised advance to the winners has gotten smaller: originally promising a $25,000 advance, this new contest's two winners are assured $15,000 advances each. (Sales of the three contest-related books published so far by Penguin imprints--Bill Loehfelm's FRESH KILLS; BAD THINGS HAPPEN by Harry Dolan; and THE WET NURSE'S TALE by Erica Eisdorfer; have been quite modest to date.

They will accept up to 5,000 entries each in the fiction and young adult categories. The "professional" judges evaluating the three finalists (selected by Penguin editors) are author Tana French, agent Julie Barer, and editor Molly Stern for general fiction, and authors Sarah Dessen and Nancy Werlin, agent Amy Berkower, and publisher Ben Schrank for young adult.

And the cheapening of publishing continues. Quite modest results indeed. Look for less this round.

The eHarlequin Thomas Nelson Affair

No, Steve McQueen isn't involved.

To a question posed by Michael Hyatt President of Thomas Nelson Publishers, rendered in typical vanity press rhetoric on his blog:

Sidebar: Take the imprint challenge. Go to a bookstore and ask one hundred shoppers—people who love books enough to make a special trip to a bookstore—to identify the publishers of the top ten New York Times Bestsellers. Report back with your results.

I offered:

"How about this for a test? Walk into any bookstore anywhere and pick up a book. What are the chances this volume was produced by a vanity press, under the wing of a traditional house or not? Congratulations. You've just proven why vanity presses aren't publishers or booksellers. Westbow sure isn't and you know it. So does Harlequin."

What they do know is the book has to be on a shelf somewhere to pick up or happens to be out of stock. End. of. story.

Online Celebrity

"On the Internet, however, it’s not one single subjectivity but a popular hive-mind that decides. The “big break” arrives when, with lightning speed and often to one’s own surprise, the inscrutable pack decides to start forwarding one’s content around."

I particularly like the "hive-mind" tag. In a role I played on the NBC show, Dark Skies I led Jerri Lee Ryan and Eric Close back to the hive; an alien pod. That's what so-called online success is based on: getting groups of friends to declare you the winner of whatever the online contest is. Real success though is even more scarce here than the traditional merit-based route, be it publishing fiction, talking about it, or journalism. On the contrary, it almost never happens at all, save in the minds of the entrants. Shoot for the real thing. It's still real after all these years.

The Bonfire is a Pyre

Not only were many of the 500 quarter-finalists in the ABNA contest hopelessly flawed by bad grammar, wordiness, editing problems and cliched scenarios such as "a writer finds his muse while reeling from rejection letters;" a plethora of prologues, which violated the rules, and now some of the poor rejected masses got a corrected email saying their pitch eliminated their entries after the first one declared they made it into the 2000 and would get reviews soon. Oh Brother, where art thou?

Amazon sent them a $5 gift card for the mistake. Talk about a sad comedy of errors. Pathetic.

Amazon's Bonfire of the Vanities

For the second year in a row Amazon.com sifted through some 10,000 entries for their Breakthough Novel "Award" contest. Amazon is a vanity press in addition to online only bookseller and hopeful these reams of losers will buy their vanity press product at Createspace that entrants were required to join in order to participate.

What slush contests like this do is illustrate that the goal of any novelist is a commercial contract. That's the carrot: $25K and a contract with Penguin. That's a bargain for Penguin. How they get there is another matter. Entrants write a 300-word pitch and an excerpt of 5000 words. Nebulous Amazon editors, whoever the hell they are, determine if the pitch works or not. If it does, those writers go into a group of 2000. Then Vine reviewers, a special group of amateur reader reviewers, randomly chosen, some who are also in the contest, are shipped 40 excerpts to read, also random. Yeah, that's bright. Talk about a crap shoot. So last night they announced the 500 winners and posted the excerpts on the Web site, including the two random reviews that helped determine the book's future in the contest. Final decisions came from the same unnamed group of Amazon employees. Later on an expert judging panel comes into play, but they have no hand in this phase. This is all about amateurs picking amateurs, many of which are perennial contestants with the same books.

As if by magic, many of the losers in last years' affair randomly made it through. Uh huh. Yeah, as if there was no memory of the same books. Consider this gent who made it all the way to the final three last year and then Penguin decided his bizarre entry wasn't fit to publish. It wasn't and still isn't, yet here it is.

Review
I'm confused after reading this excerpt, but since the writing is so clear I have faith that the author will pull this plot together and help it make sense later in the book. I just don't "get" how it all works - how a family gets to try a potential child out, and how the child gets to decide if they live or not. Regardless, it is a highly original concept and I'd be interested to read more.

Yeah. I was confused too when I read the same excerpt, which the author flogged for the last two months on the forums. Just think of all the possible decent manuscripts rejected while "glowing" reviews like this moved the author on? The number of other examples of this flawed decision process are the majority of the 500 winners from what I could tell surfing through. That and Vine reviewers also being dubbed by Vine reviewers. Ahem. Little conflict of interest scarecrow? I said this during the first Gather.com contest. In vanity world, crap floats.

The Ole Vanity/POD Shuffle

There's a statistical claim going around the net about the dismal performance, 70 percent, of new novels published every year by so-called traditional publishers not selling more than 500 copies. It's blatantly false.

First, there aren't 195,000 novels published every year as the statement claims.

According to Bowker.com for 2007, There were 50,071 new fiction titles introduced in the U.S. last year, up 17% from 2006, and the number of new titles in the category in 2007 was almost twice what it was as recently as 2002.

What is alarming is this: "While traditional book publishing was basically flat last year, there was a staggering rise in the reported number of “On Demand” and short-run books to 134,773, pushing the grand total for projected 2007 U.S. book output to 411,422 books. To maintain the continuity of statistics, Bowker is excluding this output from its traditional reporting and has begun tracking the On Demand industry segment separately."

Yeah Boy, Howdy. The claim made on these Web sites is bogus and seems to originate from a post by an author, sans source at this New Zealand Web siteHow many books do first-time authors sell? Over 195,000 new novels are published by traditional publishers in the U.S. every year. Of those, 70% sell fewer than 500 copies. Yikes..

Yikes indeed. Only 84 titles from iUniverse, now a part of Authorhouse sell 500 copies. This is a marriage of that pitiful and predictable fact and total books sold in 2005. Lies. Damned lies. And statistics.

Here We Go Again

The latest vanity press mega transition is making the news like some sort of new archeological discovery, since that's how rare these anomalies are.

By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5.

Yeah well, the real story is missing from this piece and lies between those few liking it...and wound up getting an agent and the half mil. I mean, really.

The best thing about about TIME is their archive is open and online. Come fish with Papa.