By Light Unseen Media
BLU~Media Blog

March 7, 2011

Reviewing the Situation

In the past three years, it has become a lot harder for By Light Unseen Media’s books to get reviewed–so much harder, in fact, that I’m starting to wonder whether the time and money I invest in trying to get reviews of finished books could be more fruitfully spent.

In 2007, when Mortal Touch was released, I researched reviewers carefully and only queried or sent copies to those who reviewed that genre of book. I was hopeful but realistic. By Light Unseen Media had no other titles in print at that time, and Mortal Touch got no pre-publication reviews. I queried 26 reviewers, sent out 17 review copies and wound up with 8 reviews, including one that was syndicated and appeared in the Boston Globe’s book blogs and the Midwest Book Review.

By 2010, I had refined my techniques considerably. I’d built a long list of book review and genre blogs, with various preferences and specializations, and I carefully matched titles to reviewers. I only queried blogs that were active and current and obviously taking new books. For each query I sent out, I read the review submission guidelines and followed them exactly. By now, By Light Unseen Media had released half a dozen titles by several different authors. We were getting pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. I sent books with a simple review packet that included information about the book, the author and the publisher, including distribution information. Since I reviewed books for Blogcritics, I saw publicist queries and review packets from the biggest publishers. I thought By Light Unseen Media’s review queries and packets were up to professional standards, certainly for a company of our size.

Our last title, Blood Justice, received a pre-publication review from Publishers Weekly. I queried a total of 45 bloggers and reviewers, most of them carefully selected from my long database (the author discovered several himself). In a few cases, the submission guidelines specified to just send a book, or I had sent books to the blogger previously. Most of them, however, asked for a query by email or webform. Of the 45, 6 replied saying they weren’t interested or were too backlogged with books. I sent out 10 review copies. 4 bloggers reviewed the book. The remaining 29 bloggers never responded to me at all, not even an auto-reply.

But that’s much better than my own second book did. The Longer the Fall got a pre-publication review from Publishers Weekly. I sent out 46 queries to book bloggers and reviewers. 5 of them replied saying they weren’t interested. I sent out 8 review copies. I got one review, from Harriet Klausner. From the remaining 33 reviewers I queried, I heard not a single word, not so much as a cricket chirping. Several bloggers who wrote favorably about Mortal Touch either ignored the query for The Longer the Fall or accepted a review copy and have never reviewed the book.

Our third 2010 release, Krymsin Nocturnes, fared similarly, after getting pre-publication reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. To date, I’ve queried 54 reviewers and book bloggers, received 8 refusals, sent out 9 copies, and Krymsin Nocturnes has gotten one review, from Harriet Klausner. (I’m in her debt. Seriously.) I admit that the San Francisco Chronicle was a long shot. It’s the author’s local newspaper and I figured it couldn’t hurt to see if they would be interested in a hometown author (I guess not). I sent The Longer the Fall to the Boston Globe in the same quixotic spirit. But 34 reviewers never responded to me in any way whatsoever, not even to say “buzz off” (although by now, I’m kind of getting the hint).

A couple of the bloggers who reviewed Blood Justice didn’t notify me they had done so, and I only found the reviews as I was checking on the copies I’d sent out. One of them was a joint write-up with a similar book that left me rather puzzled. The reviewer wrote, “Both of these trade paperbacks are by imprints I’ve never heard of and I suspect they’re both print on demand that you’d probably find most easily by ordering them through Amazon. For all I know, they’re self published although if so I’ve read professionally published work that wasn’t as well written.” Now, I’m delighted that Blood Justice got a mention, especially one that says it’s well written! But I’m not sure why the reviewer said “By Light Unseen,” as he called us, is an imprint he’d never heard of. I’d sent him books before. Blood Justice had a review packet accompanying it, and the copyright page has complete details including our Mission Statement. But most of all, I know this gentleman! We’re in the same regional writers’ group and I’ve met him!

Clearly, I didn’t make much of an impression on him.

I spend a lot of time looking at book review blogs. What I’m seeing now is that book bloggers–apparently–only want to review books from the big publishing companies. They’re all reviewing exactly the same few big release books–and nothing else. In a given week or month, I’ll see ten, twenty, fifty reviews of the exact same titles. When the blogger runs out of mainstream books, he or she blogs about random topics, or picks a favorite old classic published decades ago and does a fondly nostalgic write-up on that. I’ve also seen them review games like the Happy Wheels game, which is fine but if you are going to be a book blogger, stick to your subject. And retrospective articles about old books are becoming more and more common on book blogs.

The implicit message from the book bloggers seems to be, “Don’t call us–we’ll call you.” The only way to get reviewed these days, it seems, is to make your book conspicuous and important enough that it attracts the blogger’s attention and he or she wants to read it, and asks you for a copy (or buys one, as some do). I found a post from a young blogger explaining the right way to approach a publisher and request a complimentary review copy. It was a good post and sound advice, but I couldn’t help feeling a pang of irony when I read it.

I’m guessing that the bloggers have been so overwhelmed by “self-published” (i.e. published by the vanity/subsidy companies like AuthorHouse, XLibris and so on) authors that they’re refusing to look at anything that isn’t a recognizable big name imprint. So much of the “self-published” stuff is desperately, horribly bad–unreadable bilge–and the authors, spurred on by the companies and all the marketing gurus, are unprofessional, persistent and entitled. “Self-published” authors flood the Amazon forums with constant self-promotion and pester Barnes & Noble continuously (which is why Barnes & Noble was so incredibly rude to me). I’m sure they’re aggressively hounding all the book bloggers all of the time, and consequently the book bloggers, like oldtime speakeasies, only open their doors to celebrities and personal friends. I’m having to remove more and more bloggers from my list because their guidelines now say, not only “no self-published books” but “no POD books.” A lot of the “self-publishing companies” let their customers use an “imprint” name, so the bloggers can’t tell whether an unfamiliar imprint is a small press or a camouflaged book from PublishAmerica.

In the last few months, there have been several online uproars sparked by authors who took public exception to comments made in reviews, and either sniped at the reviewer or complained on their own blogs. There have even been rumors of an alleged “YA Mafia” of authors supposedly intimidating book bloggers to only give them glowing reviews, or be cut off from receiving future review copies. You can bet that I have less than no sympathy for these prima donna authors. They don’t know how lucky they are to be getting reviewed at all. They’re taking their privilege for granted and then complaining about it. Right now, I follow some twenty book bloggers and genre review websites on Twitter. Not one of them will review By Light Unseen Media’s books. A number of them have submission criteria that ban me from even sending a query.

Book bloggers have the absolute and unqualified right, of course, to review–or not review–whatever they choose. It’s their time and their blogs. I’m not trying to criticize them. After all, book bloggers do this for the love, no one pays them a dime for all their hard work, right?

Well…

That might be about to change. There’s a whole new review game in town and some of the biggest names in the industry are already on board.

“Self-published” authors (usually flattered with the label, “indie”) are now being aggressively solicited to pay for the privilege of being considered for a review. They’re not paying for the review, of course–that would be unethical! The descriptions of these services all very carefully explain that the author isn’t paying for a review. The fee is simply for submitting the book, and “to cover costs.”

Kirkus, one of the big pre-publication reviewers, has been running such a program for a number of years. It used to be “Kirkus Discoveries” and now is called “Kirkus Indie,” and costs $425 per title–$575 for “express service” (which I guess means the review comes out before the copyright expires). Irene Watson’s Reader Views has also been running for a while. With Reader Views, the review is “free” but the accompanying “publicity package” costs from $95 to $495. There are a few smaller pay-to-submit review websites. About a year ago, The Jenkins Group launched The Critics’ Bookshelf, in which “indie” authors can list their book, for $179 per title, in a sort of catalog that is mass-mailed to reviewers, media outlets and so on. The Critics’ Bookshelf is premised on the imaginative notion that book reviewers are desperately searching for more books to review.

Now two more of the big pre-publication reviewers have realized that there’s money to be made from all these hungry “self-published” authors. ForeWord has initiated ForeWord Digital Reviews: web-only reviews for which you can be considered, for a submission fee of $99 per title. Meanwhile, the granddaddy of them all, Publishers Weekly, offers PW Select, a special quarterly supplement for “self-published” books. Authors can submit their books for $149 per title. Subscribers get the fee waived, but how many “self-published” authors subscribe to Publishers Weekly? (You get a partial subscription with your book listing, which may be another motive for PW: to boost circulation.)

The catch to these fee-for-service programs by Kirkus, ForeWord and Publishers Weekly, of course, is that they firmly segregate all the “self-published” books into their own isolated and well-labeled section, rather than evaluating them in fair comparison with the mainstream books that get reviewed for free. I can guarantee you that the only people who will ever read these reviews will be other “indie” authors looking for their own review. No one else will waste their time. That big red “S” pasted on every book reviewed in these special sections doesn’t stand for “self-published,” and everyone knows it.

I can’t help wondering how long it will be before the book bloggers catch on to this gold mine. After all, a “self-published” author who’s already spent anywhere from $500 to $15,000 for a “publishing package” can hardly balk at a “submission fee” of $49 or $99 to have his or her book reviewed on a high-traffic blog alongside big-name bestsellers, right? Why shouldn’t successful book bloggers get some compensation for their considerable time and trouble? A fee would help select out the serious authors (or at least the well-funded ones) from the mere dilettantes. It’s a no-brainer! Some book blogs already take paid advertizing. Submission fees for “self-published” and other unsolicited titles is a logical next step.

Whether or not book bloggers will head down this road, I have no idea, but charging fees for services that once were free is certainly becoming universal, in all areas of life. More and more, it’s looking like the old standby of paid advertizing is the most effective marketing tool according to https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/6-ways-to-increase-your-website-traffic-get-ready-to-work-smart.740933/. At least it’s honest. Everyone knows what an advertizement is. But readers and consumers are already cynical and overwhelmed by “social networking” and “news articles” and “infomercials” that are nothing but marketing and promotional puffs in disguise. As fee-for-service reviews proliferate, readers will quickly stop trusting those, too. Even now, the two major reasons that readers will pick up a new book are familiarity with the author and recommendation from a personal (non-professional) friend. Publishers and authors can’t control those and they can’t buy them, and readers know that. It used to be that the impartial, professional book review almost qualified as a personal recommendation for readers, precisely because of the perception that a review was a gift, and not for sale. I’m very sorry to see that change.

Of course, I’ll continue to send out complimentary review copies of By Light Unseen Media’s books to any book blogger or reviewer who wants them, without hesitation. Paperbacks, ebooks and ARCs are all available and always will be. But the handwriting is on the wall, and it’s obvious that small press publishers have to find–or maybe invent–other creative ways of connecting their books and their potential readers.

March 3, 2011

Our Statement for World Book Day

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 7:08 pm

To everyone who buys or reads books from By Light Unseen Media,
and everyone who ever will.

Speaking as both an author and a publisher of other authors…

I don’t care whether you read our books in paperback, hardcover, or ebook, whether you love your Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, Kobo Reader, iPad, smartphone, or anything else that you read your books on.

I don’t care whether you buy your books from us, your local indie bookstore, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Wal*Mart, or anyplace else.

You’re our readers, and without you, we’d be nothing.

THANK YOU.

It’s World Book Day. Share a book. 🙂

February 12, 2011

Meet David Burton on February 13!

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 7:09 am

On Sunday, February 13, at 1:30 p.m., author David Burton (Blood Justice) will give a talk at the Vista Branch of the San Diego Public Library, as part of their Weekend Cultural Program Series. David will sign copies of his book and talk about vampires, writing, and other topics. Directions and more detailed information here.

October 18, 2010

Paper book lovers–put your money where your mouth is!

Filed under: bookselling,ebooks,ereaders,publishing,reading — Tags: , , , , — admin @ 8:11 pm

Two items in this mornings Shelf Awareness newsletter join a long and continuous list of proclamations from people who claim they love bound paper books:

National Book Award judge Sallie Tisdale, writing for The Oregonian, lyricizes on the tactile qualities (smell, weight, feel, and so on) of paper books as opposed to ereaders.

The Encino Patch reports that “hundreds of people” turned out to protest the closing of Encino’s Barnes & Noble and the installation of a new pharmacy in its building.

Every time I see another person proclaim the wonder of paper books, often saying something along the lines of, “you’ll pry my paper books out of my cold dead hands,” I have one response.

Admirable sentiments! Good for you! I love paper books, too! So…

Why aren’t you buying them????

According to the monthly sales reports released by the AAP, paper book sales are dropping steadily, while ebook sales are increasing at geometric rates. As a book award judge, Sallie Tisdale gets all the books she could possibly read free of charge. Would she be so enthusiastic if she had to pay for them all? And all those protesters in Encino: it’s a sure bet that none of them were visiting their beloved Barnes & Noble and buying things regularly. If every one of those protesters had gone in and bought a book every week, that Barnes & Noble would still be open. All you customers of struggling little independent stores who “boycott Amazon” and say you’ll never own a Kindle–how often do you go to your favorite bookstore and actually give them some money? Based on sales, the answer is obvious.

I see this effect at By Light Unseen Media. Two years ago, our paperback editions sold respectably on Amazon.com. Now, paper book sales on Amazon are pathetic, but our Kindle editions are selling like mad. Ebooks now form the bulk of our profits, and I’m not doing a thing to encourage that. I’m not marketing ebooks more heavily than print books. But paper books simply aren’t selling. Readers are buying ebooks–and just like I say here, it’s all about the readers.

It’s not rocket science, book lovers! If you don’t want paper books to disappear, you have to buy them. They’re getting more and more expensive to produce, and publishers have to pay their authors and eat occasionally. We’re going to respond to the readers who support us, as much as we may sympathize with the fervent lovers of paper books who never buy.

If you don’t buy paper books, they’re going to go away. That’s simple economics.

Remembering a passion for reading

Filed under: publishing,reading,writers,writing — Tags: , , , — admin @ 2:07 am

I have no conscious memory of a time when books, and reading, were not the reigning passions of my life.

I probably owe a lot to my parents for that. My mom read aloud to us from the earliest age that we could sit still and listen. I don’t recall my dad reading to us, but my dad loves books. In every house we lived in, he outfitted a complete library with walls of built-in bookcases, all of them packed with books. My dad’s “man caves” were full of dark varnished wood shelves lined with hundreds of mysterious, multicolored, enticing spines, from the tattered cardboard of the pulp “big little books” he collected, to gilt-embossed leather.

I was reading by the time I was four, without the benefit of preschool, Sesame Street or any coaching at all from my stunned parents. My folks didn’t buy their first TV until I was nearly three. Television never became more than a colorful, but ultimately boring novelty for me. The world inside of my own imagination was always infinitely more engaging.

Reading books not only improves literacy skills but also broadens a child’s knowledge and imagination, enhances critical thinking skills, and fosters empathy and understanding. The habit of reading can have a lifelong impact on their academic success, personal growth, and overall well-being. Therefore, parents should focus on encouraging and nurturing their love for reading and buying kids clothes online can be a positive incentive.

When I was in grade school, my reading was an intensely private activity. These were the days when being The Fat Kid made you a freak, not just one of the obese 30% of your class like now, and I was bullied relentlessly for that and other things. Books were my sanctuary, and I would read my favorites over and over. The Island of the Blue Dolphins. Black Beauty. Beautiful Joe. Every Black Stallion and Nancy Drew book I could get my hands on (I still have some vintage Nancy Drews that are probably collectibles now–not that I’m ever giving them up). Gone with the Wind. The Yearling. Lassie Come Home. The Borrowers books. The Wind in the Willows. The Two Jungle Books. A Wrinkle in Time (which my sixth grade teacher read aloud to us) and later, the rest of L’Engle’s series. Fantasy by Lloyd Alexander, Zilpha Keatley Snyder, Susan Cooper, Peter Dickinson, Alan Garner, Carol Kendall, J.R.R. Tolkien. As I got a little older, I inhaled whole new genres by the stack. Every Gothic romance paperback the local library branch owned; all of Zane Grey (not a word of which I can now remember). Horse stories by the dozen, and anything with a touch of fantasy, magic or science-fiction.

At the age of twelve, I plunged into vampires and the paranormal, beginning an obsession that has never once flagged. Besides reading Dracula in one sitting, this led to an interest in tracking down esoterica: obscure books, articles and information. In my spare time, I pored through The Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, card catalog Subject headings, the back page ads of dubious magazines, the footnotes and bibliographies of books…anything that could lead me to More Of What I Liked.

It wasn’t until high school that I realized there were other people as fiercely passionate about books and reading and the arcane as I was. I thought I was the only one! By then I was hoovering up fantasy and science-fiction, and I attended my first science-fiction convention in 1973, when I was sixteen. I discovered H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, Shirley Jackson, C.S. Lewis, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, John Bellairs (whom I met at a convention), and I joined The Mythopoeic Society.

But my family wasn’t affluent. I can vividly recall when my definition of unattainable wealth consisted of being able to spend an entire $100 on nothing but books–because when I was in high school, that was almost unimaginable for me. I found lots of sources for inexpensive books. A big one was the catalogs for Publishers Central Bureau, which I now know was a brokerage for remaindered titles, but which I saw then as a repository for rare and unusual gems just waiting for the patient (and keen-eyed–the catalogs were set in 4-point type). I could spend hours in used book stores. My avidity led, inevitably, to a few disillusioning rip-offs: some of you may recall an erstwhile little company named T.K. Graphics, a science fiction and fantasy mail order house that folded owing lots of people a lot of money for back-ordered books.

I found a number of equally book-devouring friends and we passed tips and leads and titles back and forth. “Bibliomaniacs,” we called ourselves. We thought we’d made the word up.

As I got older, I had less time to read–but, at least for a few years, more money to spend. There was a decade or so during which I could not walk into Barnes & Noble without dropping at least $80. Those days ended when I went back to graduate school, and now I read less than ever. But it’s not merely the time or money factors. I’ve heard other writers talk about this. As my creative talents evolved and deepened, they demanded more and more of my energy. Now, I’m far more invested in creating my own works of art and fiction than in passively consuming the work of others. I still enjoy reading immensely, but usually I find that it stimulates my muse more than relaxes me. I do most of my reading just before bedtime. But I can still spend hours immersed in a book–or a series of them!–when I’m in the right mood, and I still spend far more leisure time reading than I do watching movies or television.

But I recognize my younger self in the legions of book bloggers, and if I was a twenty-something now, I’d be one of them. There are still millions of people who live to read, who network and share recommendations and search–no, forage, hungrily, incessantly, for More Of What They Like. We can’t get enough of it, we readers. An author sweats and slaves and labors over a book for a year and we stay up all night to finish it in one long, dripping, literary chug-a-lug, wipe the foam off our noses and ask when the author’s next book will be released. We are insatiable.

Notice that I’m referring to “reading,” not “books” in any one form. Yes, I love bound, paper books–old, new, hardcover, paperback, large, small, any kind of books. But for me, the content of the book was the key to its appeal. A physical book was simply a vehicle for the thoughts and soul of an author, and what mattered to me was the communion, the meeting of minds, that the book facilitated. I find that same communion in ebooks and audiobooks, in books read on a website or serialized in a magazine, books read as typescript or galleys or mass market paperbacks or bound between boards so heavy the book has to rest on a table to be read.

Reading is a one-on-one transaction, and in our site you have accessibility for anyone, learn how to make your website accessible and ready for data. There’s the author, and there’s me. The rest is details.

This is why I became a publisher. This is why merely being “a writer” wasn’t enough. Writing, for me, is like breathing–I do it every day, I write compulsively and obsessively, when I stop writing, you can bury me, I’ll be dead. But it’s only one side of the bridge–the connecting miracle between the author and the reader. I wanted to build the whole bridge. I wanted to master the means by which two minds co-create a work of the imagination or intellect by sharing it. Publishing is the process of collecting the raw creative output, shaping it into a form that can be transferred, and making it available for others to experience. I wanted to understand and do all of that–not just for my own work, but for the work of others.

I wanted it because I remember so poignantly what it is to have a passion for reading, to be endlessly searching for just the right story, just the right book. I wanted to help many kinds of authors and readers find each other, not just the readers who would enjoy what I happen to write.

It seems to me that many of my fellow publishers have forgotten who is at the off-ramp end of their bridge. In all the interminable pontificating and punditry I read about “the future of publishing” and “changes in the industry” and “what new publishing models mean for authors,” very few publishers seem to understand their readers’ point of view. Do publishers nowadays remember what it was like to be a passionate reader? Were publishers actually readers, ever?

I think there was a time, before 1970 or so, when most publishing houses were owned and run by serious readers, people who had a genuine love of literature. If that didn’t describe the CEOs, it certainly applied to the editors, and the editors had real power and influence in their companies. But I don’t think that’s true now. The old publishing houses have all been bought up by media conglomerates, reduced to “divisions” and “imprints,” and their editorial staff are overworked, committee-fied, stripped of decision-making power and expected to focus entirely on fast profits. Even small publishers are intent on “marketing,” and “building networks” and “branding” and “creating tribes.” They don’t see themselves as having readers. They’re competing for “consumers” or even just “eyeballs.”

This, I think, is the biggest problem the publishing industry faces right now. Not digital media, not piracy, not a falling interest in reading–publishers have forgotten how important their readers are. They’ve forgotten the one and only reason that publishers exist at all. We exist for our readers. Not authors: readers. Our readers are everything to us. When publishers lose track of what readers want, they’re floundering around in a desperate world of half-baked experiments and hysterical speculations. It’s because publishers have lost touch with their readers that ebooks are obscenely overpriced and retailers like Amazon, who do know what readers want, are shaking the industry to its foundation.

Authors write to be read, and publishers publish so that authors can be read. Without readers, we are nothing. I will never, ever forget that. I’m afraid that a great many of my fellow publishers have forgotten it–if they ever knew in the first place.

April 14, 2010

Eating my iWords: BLUM meets the iPad

Filed under: Apple,digital media,e-book,e-book readers,iBookstore,iPad — admin @ 9:37 pm

Well, Steve Jobs made a liar out of me–and I’m very happy about it. By Light Unseen Media’s titles are available in the iBookstore for download onto the iPad, after all. We were in the iBookstore when it launched on April 3, and here’s the proof:

screenshot

On this blog back in February, I proclaimed my abandonment issues with Apple, Inc. I’m not the only old-timer to write at length in recent weeks about Apple’s corporate ideology ever since 1984 (an iconic year, to say the least, for Apple to switch from their former open box platform to a rigidly closed and controlled system). Cory Doctorow explained “Why I won’t buy an iPad (and think you shouldn’t, either)”, agreeing with me on just about every point, even our fond nostalgia for the pre-Macintosh Apple II series. (If I’d known I had so much in common with Cory, I’d have been less shy about talking to him when I met him at 3Pi-Con!) Tim Wu published an essay on Slate, “The Apple Two,” detailing the history of Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and how the company they founded came to be what it is today. All of this has huge relevance to publishers, authors and readers everywhere given where the publishing industry is headed, but that will be an ongoing topic.

Having gotten the grumbling out of my system, after I made that post, I sent an email off to the only contact I could derive from Apple’s website, their Developer department. I received a reply giving me the contact information for the iBookstore. I emailed them. After that, I didn’t hear anything further, and in the meantime, the whole “agency pricing model” wrangle with Amazon and Macmillan was going on, and the other Big Publishers (all but Random House, still holding out at this writing) were signing up with Apple, and I saw a rumor somewhere that Apple had posted a job opening for an iBookstore liaison for small publishers. But the April 3 launch date was approaching fast, and it didn’t appear that Apple was going to have infrastructure in place to add thousands of books from hundreds of small publishers by then, even if they planned to eventually do so.

On March 30, I got an email from Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords. He’d been playing things pretty close to the vest–and given the volatility around the whole launch of the iBookstore and the dust-up with Amazon, it’s no wonder–but he was announcing, initially just to his own clients, that Smashwords had just signed a deal with Apple to supply titles to the iBookstore. Apple had a package of firm guidelines, including pricing formulas, strict compliance with ePub standards and the requirement that every title have a unique ISBN. To meet those guidelines, Smashwords had become an ISBN reseller like Lulu and a few other companies, selling individual ISBN numbers to authors who needed and wanted them. We had about 48 hours to bring our titles up to Apple’s standards and make the first shipment to the iBookstore, which would happen in time for its launch.

Fortunately, BLUM’s titles were all ready to go, ISBNs and all–except for Apple’s rule that all prices must end in .99. I had decided to set “round” prices a while ago for several reasons and now I had to drop all the Smashwords editions by one cent. But when the 500-pound gorilla is being that friendly, I’m not going to balk at a little concession or two. On April 1, Smashwords announced that it had shipped BLUM’s titles in the first big batch to Apple.

But here I ran into a stumbling block: I had no way of verifying that our books were in the iBookstore, because I didn’t have an iPad. The iBookstore can’t be accessed online–you can’t even look up what’s in its catalog (as far as I’ve been able to figure out, anyway–and I have iTunes). You must have an iPad to see it. After I’d spent several days in suspense hoping to connect with an iPad early adopter, I finally realized that I could probably view the iBookstore on one of the demo iPads at the brand new Apple Store in Pheasant Lane mall in Nashua, New Hampshire. And so I went up there, on April 6, and found all of BLUM’s active catalog in the iBookstore. I’d like to publicly thank the very helpful Sales Assistant, Ashley, who not only helped me with the iPad but emailed me a screenshot of the bookstore, on the spot, right from that demo iPad. (Our newest title, Krymsin Nocturnes, shipped to the iBookstore on April 6.)

Since then, Apple has signed with a number of other ebook aggregators, including several that carry BLUM’s books. If you own an iPad and prefer to read the Kindle edition or the Kobo edition, you can get those on your iPad, too. Apple doesn’t seem to be choosy about big name publishers or mainstream books, either. Many of these aggregators carry thousands of self-published titles, with all the, shall we say, diversity of quality control standards those display. As long as they meet Apple’s specifications, Apple will offer them all.

So, Apple: I have to take back some of what I said. You are carrying independently published books and your customers can read them on their iPads. That’s great! Accept a virtual handshake from one of your new partners, By Light Unseen Media. The iPad is a nifty little device, and if I had hundreds of dollars of play money burning a hole in my pocket (alas, I don’t) I might buy one. (What is more likely is that I will pop for the “developer” license fee so I can get multi-media content onto Apple platforms. That’s a bit further down on the To Do List at the moment, though.) It will be interesting to see where things go from here.

March 9, 2010

Try The Vampires of New England Series FREE during Read an Ebook Week!

March 7 through 13 is Read An Ebook Week, seven days devoted to the hottest and fastest-growing trend in publishing. If you’ve never tried out an ebook before, now you can do so risk-free! If you’re already an ebook reader, grab this opportunity to add a popular ebook edition to your digital library with our compliments.

By Light Unseen Media is offering full ebook editions of Mortal Touch by Inanna Arthen, the first in the Vampires of New England Series, absolutely free through March 13, in a variety of formats.

For editions in various formats compatible with ebook readers, go to the detail page for Mortal Touch on Smashwords. Select your preferred format and use the coupon code RFREE as directed in the box on the page.

For a DRM-free, Adobe PDF edition, go to By Light Unseen Media’s online ebook annex and download a copy. If you need to install the free Adobe Reader, you’ll find a link to do that on the Mortal Touch detail page on By Light Unseen Media’s website.

And that’s not all!

This week only, read the first 100 pages of The Longer the Fall, Book 2 of The Vampires of New England Series, absolutely free! Visit the detail page on By Light Unseen Media’s website and right-click the link to download a free pdf. The Longer the Fall will be released in paperback, hardcover and ebook editions on June 1, 2010.

The Story Behind ‘Read an eBook Week’

February 5, 2010

Why I’m not getting excited about the Apple iPad

Filed under: Apple,e-book,e-book readers,iBookstore,iPad — admin @ 1:53 am

Apple “unveiled” the iPad on January 27. It has been greeted with highly variable reactions from the customer base. Many devoted fans of the Apple Macintosh family of computers have been waiting eagerly for a “netbook” solution of their very own. The iPad doesn’t seem to be that solution. I won’t summarize the criticisms, but you can read one techie review here. There are people who can’t wait to get their hands on the iPad, and hey–more power to them. But they seem to be less numerous than Apple hoped.

However, much is being said about the supposed impact of the iPad on publishing. The iPad is intended to be far more than “an e-reader,” but it can be used as one. Apple is creating an iBookstore, like the iTunes store, through which iPad users can buy and download books. In advance of the iPad announcement, Apple negotiated deals with five of the “Big Six” publishing conglomerates to make e-books available in the iBookstore. Only Random House has held out so far. iBookstore e-books will generally be higher-priced than e-books sold through other venues, including Amazon’s Kindle Store.

Apple’s so-called “agency model” for acquiring e-books has contributed to some recent high-profile inter-corporate wrangling among Amazon and Big Publishers. But that’s a topic for another post.

As a small publisher, I can’t get interested in the Apple iPad for a very simple reason: Apple won’t let me in. As far as I can see, Apple only wants Big Name Books from Big Name Publishers. We small press people can go blow. No information whatsoever has been made available to small publishers as to how we can become a part of Apple’s new program. (Scouring Apple’s website for clues gives a poignant new meaning to their corporate street address: “1 Infinite Loop.”) With Apple, the message is clearly, “don’t call us, we’ll call you–if you’re important enough for us to bother with.”

This corporate attitude doesn’t surprise me. I’ve had a beef with Apple since they first released the Macintosh in 1984. Until then, I rather liked them. I developed software for the Apple II series (IIe and IIc) in the early 80s. They were fun little machines–and they were open machines. You could pop off the cover and install cards in expansion slots–even cards from third party vendors, I seem to recall. You could get documentation from Apple and program away, without paying a big annual fee for “developer” privileges like you do now. Indeed, you kind of had to, because there wasn’t much commercially packaged software available for the Apple II series.

The Macintosh changed all that. It was released as a closed system (leading to a fruitless “open the Mac movement”) and the first model didn’t have enough memory for its own operating system (leading to the release of the “fat Mac” with the minimal memory the Mac should have had in the first place). You can read a detailed history of the Macintosh here.

But along with the Macintosh, Apple adopted its permanent new corporate policy. Apple became, and still is, one of the most proprietary, territorial, homogenous, dedicated-singular-platform corporations around. Apple’s attitude is: “we do it all for you, we do it better than anyone else, you don’t need anyone else, and if you want our products and services, you can’t use anyone else’s.” Apple, like Disney, has created its own xenophobic universe. Apple isn’t interested in cross-platform compatibility. Your iPod will play MP3s but you can’t play iTunes music on anything but an Apple product (either hardware or software.) Apple practically wrote the book on DRM. When it comes to technology, Apple doesn’t believe in polluting the genome. In addition to this, Apple’s pricing structure, across the board, is comparatively high, and you have no choice but to pay it, because there are no generic equivalents.

That’s Apple’s prerogative, of course. No one has to buy Apple products. And unlike other companies who took that approach in the 1980s–Digital Equipment Corporation, once the biggest employer in my area and now extinct, comes to mind–Apple made it work, spectacularly well. But what offends me about Apple is that they’re such flaming hypocrites about their business model. They maintain this exclusionary, proprietory, superior stance, but at the same time, they put up this faux-populist pretense of being the free-spirited hipsters, the cool guys who are all about creativity and art and music. In fact, they’re all about Big Corporate Interests, profit and the bottom line–even more than their much-maligned competitor, Microsoft. (Apple is also among the most litigation-happy corporations.)

That’s why as a small independent publisher, I’m just following the news about the iPad for reference. Apple won’t sell By Light Unseen Media’s books, and iPad users won’t be reading them–at least not on their iPads. In any event, Apple is not stressing the iBookstore in its iPad promo–it’s buried halfway down the iPad Features page on Apple’s website and Steve Jobs brushed over it when he gave his big presentation on January 27, even though that presentation was made at Digital Book World. I expect that the iPad has far more potential to radically change the periodicals industry–magazines and newspapers, things that people subscribe to, read, and discard–than book publishing.

I’m definitely not “boycotting” Apple. I have an iTunes account and Quicktime Pro, I buy iTunes and iPod products for my niece and nephew. My business model is to work with every vendor and distribution channel for By Light Unseen Media’s titles that exists, without prejudice–if they’ll let me. Apple isn’t the only e-book vendor to cold-shoulder small publishers. After multiple queries, Sony finally replied to me about the Sony Reader Store…by telling me to sign up with Smashwords and quit bothering them. By then, I already had set up with Smashwords, a couple of months earlier, but By Light Unseen Media’s titles still don’t show up in Sony’s store. Barnes & Noble’s e-book store also will only take small press books via Smashwords, but they, at least, list our titles.

Aaron Pressman makes a good case for his thesis that Big Publishers really want to kill e-books altogether. It’s a safe bet that bookstores, both indie and Big Box, would love to send every e-book to a shallow grave. What do readers really want? It doesn’t look like anyone connected with Apple, Sony, or the Big Six publishing conglomerates could care less.

January 31, 2010

A small publisher’s thoughts about Amazon and Macmillan’s standoff

Filed under: Amazon.com,e-book,Kindle,Macmillan,small publishing — admin @ 7:03 am

Like everyone else who is seriously invested in the current publishing industry (as publisher, author or both), I’m following the latest skirmish in the e-book revolution. Although none of us rubes on the outside know anything more than we’re being told, apparently Macmillan has been demanding that Amazon raise its Kindle prices, and apparently Amazon has responded by removing the “Buy” buttons for every edition (not just Kindles) of every title of every imprint that Macmillan publishes. This includes a lot of genre fiction, since Macmillan owns Tor Books. This naturally hurts authors and readers more than Amazon and Macmillan, and the shock waves are just starting to reverberate.

The e-book price controversy has been boiling for a while now, and I have to admit something: I just don’t get it. I absolutely cannot follow the logic behind the arguments of the MegaConglomerate Publishers when they claim “low priced” e-books are hurting their profits. I am baffled when MegaConglomerate Publishers call $9.99 Kindles “loss leaders” for Amazon. The protests from these dinosaurs make no sense to me whatsoever.

By Light Unseen Media is a small press. We release every title simultaneously in hardcover (with dust jacket), trade paperback, and multiple e-book versions, preferably with no DRM if I can control that. We were among the first publishers to make all our titles available for the Kindle, back in 2008. Our books are available for the Sony Reader and the Nook via Smashwords and we published there as soon as Smashwords opened its publishers’ portal for managing multiple authors. If Apple contacted me tonight we’d be signed up for the iBookstore tomorrow (I am not, however, holding my breath on that one). When I see a new way of reaching potential readers, I go for it.

I love bound books–love them with fervent passion. But I also love computers and do a lot of reading online and onscreen. I want to meet, not fight against, the expectations of the new generations of readers. I have no reason to feel threatened. So far, e-book publishing has been the most cost-effective, efficient, and profitable way to distribute our books–and I just don’t believe that By Light Unseen Media’s production costs are that different from MegaConglomerate, Inc. In fact, By Light Unseen Media risks far less money on print books than the unsustainable “traditional” model, and that’s why people try to keep the rights of the books registered since books are really popular and they even use legal resources from sites as https://fieldinglaw.com to work in copyright cases.

But don’t take vague generalities for it. Let’s crunch some numbers. Here are the expenses that go into releasing a By Light Unseen Media title.

Advance to author–$100
ISBN number–averages to $10 per number
Editing, book design, and cover design handled in-house, by me, cash outlay negligible. It’s all built-in costs of labor and computer equipment, chiefly.
Print and order Advance Reading Copies–roughly $150 including proof copy and shipping
Ship Advance Reading Copies to reviewers–$25-$50 postage
Set up fees for hardcover and paperback editions–currently about $210
Proof copies of hardcover and paperback editions–currently $65, assuming I don’t need to order more than one proof
Order short runs of hardcover and paperback editions for reviews, promo and direct sales–this is my biggest single expense, usually around $800 for the initial print run. As inventory gets low, I order more, but the whole idea is to minimize waste by printing small numbers at a time.
Mail out review copies and comp copies to author, advance readers, copyright office, etc–variable, but averages around $150 in postage.
Register copyright for author–$35
Expenses of promotion, marketing, advertising–variable because so much of it is free, aside from what my time and labor is worth. I’ll spend maybe $50-$100 on ads

Now, after the above has been taken care of for the print books, what is the additional cost of producing the e-book editions?

Well, a couple of them get an ISBN number of their own, so that’s $10. Kindle editions don’t, because Amazon assigns Kindle books a unique ASIN. Kindle editions are proprietary and can’t be sold anywhere else.

And that is all. It costs me nothing to produce an e-book edition. Oh, there’s some labor on my part. I need to edit the book block slightly differently for each e-book, and create copies with certain specifications to be converted to the different e-book formats. Having done my internship for an expert IT consultancy in London has made me very computer-savvy, so there’s nothing to that, from my point of view. And it’s a very small amount of work compared to the number of hours that go into editing the manuscript, laying out the print book interior and designing the cover. There’s nothing new to produce: everything for an e-book is just being recycled.

Once the e-books are created and uploaded, what does it cost to reproduce and distribute them to readers?

Nothing. Nothing at all! If I sell an e-book through Amazon, or Smashwords, or By Light Unseen Media’s Lulu storefront, or if a reader sends me money and I e-mail him or her a PDF, it costs me absolutely nothing. Whatever I make, whether it’s the full price or some percentage, is pure profit.

I can’t say that for print books. In order for By Light Unseen Media’s titles to be available wholesale to bookstores and libraries–which they are–I have to give wholesalers industry-standard terms. That means a 55% discount on the cover price plus making the books fully returnable. The down side to digital printing (in another post, I’ll explain why I never use the term “POD” and you shouldn’t, either) is that it costs more per book. After I set a cover price that is within the average range, give Ingram its discount and pay the printing costs, my profit margin per bound book is less than $2.00, and I split that with the author.

The big difference between me and MegaConglomerate, Inc. lies in the expense of producing the print books. MegaConglomerate, Inc. is enslaved to the “traditional” publishing model, which is incredibly wasteful and rigged against the publisher at every point. MegaConglomerate, Inc. prints a large batch of books up front and sends them out to bookstores, which have carte blanche to return all unsold books for full credit at any time, regardless of their condition. MegaConglomerate, Inc. hedges against this by withholding author royalties against returns, sometimes for as long as two years.

MegaConglomerate, Inc. usually doesn’t give a wholesale discount of 55%; no, the Big Boys have to give distribution companies and big box stores discounts of 65% and 70% off the cover price. (That’s why those retailers can turn around and sell the books to you for such heavy discounts.) So, MegaConglomerate, Inc.’s profit margin per book is even smaller than By Light Unseen Media’s, with the added burden of hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands of copies “remaindered” and sold off at a loss when the book goes out of print, which it may do in as little as three months after the release date. Over 90% of MegaConglomerate, Inc.’s titles never make enough profit to offset the advance paid to the author, let alone the costs of producing and printing the book.

How can MegaConglomerate, Inc. make any money this way? It can’t! The entire “traditional” publishing industry depends on that tiny handful of blockbuster best sellers whose sheer volume of sales subsidizes the other 90% of the company’s catalog, all its expenses, all its overhead, all its author advances, everything.

And this may be the reason that big publishers like Macmillan are fighting so hard to set a high price on the e-book editions of their biggest potential sellers. They’re terrified of crippling those few golden geese on which their financial survival depends. If that tiny little upper echelon of blockbusters doesn’t rake in enough money, fast enough, the whole house of cards collapses.

Which, I think, is very obviously in the process of happening.

What Macmillan and the other Big Publishers can’t see is that e-books and print books have completely different markets. E-books don’t cut into hardcover book sales because e-book buyers wouldn’t buy a hardcover book to begin with. Unlike us small publishers, MegaConglomerate, Inc. is paralyzed by its own business model. It can’t afford to change its methods and creatively target new markets individually. It treats every new market as another liability, another dependant to be subsidized by those blockbuster best-sellers.

MegaConglomerate, Inc. has no “wiggle room” in its game plan. If it takes one bad risk, it’s out of business. By Light Unseen Media has no such problems because diversification is the foundation of our business plan. I’m in the business of delivering content by any means that people will pay for, and when I make money, so do my authors. That’s why I have to stay as nimble as possible. When a new delivery method becomes available, I have to be ready to adopt it immediately. The Big Publishers can’t do that, so their response is to do everything they can to block and monkeywrench innovations. “Class action lawsuits” are a favorite ploy in this war, but in case of criminal cases is better to get the right resources for this, check this content to get more info about this.

But aside from the fiscal insanity of the “traditional publishing” model as a whole, I absolutely refuse to believe that the Big Publishers lose money on $9.99 e-books (or $7.99 or $5.99 e-books) in an absolute sense. It’s not possible to lose money on a product that has no overhead costs whatsoever unless you’re doing something very wrong. The Big Publishers are trying to protect their status quo by ignoring their readers and screwing their authors. They forget that there are thousands of us small publishers who aren’t afraid of change and know what readers and authors mean to our bottom line (everything).

Come to think of it, maybe I should just let the Big Publishers continue on their current suicidal path–it can only benefit me, after all! I guess I just care too much about all the readers and writers who will be caught in the implosion.

October 19, 2009

New review for Gideon Redoak

Filed under: gideon redoak,reviews — admin @ 5:21 am

Check out the great review of Gideon Redoak at ParaNormalRomance!

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