Archive's Writers' News

UK based Collca, a company that publishes eBooks across all major formats are looking for non-fiction proposals of around 20,000 - 25,000 words for their series which takes in history, religion and biography. Proposals should consist of a 250/400 word outline of the book, a list of the likely sections and the first 2000 words.


Random House are soon to launch three new eBook imprints and are looking for submissions. The imprints will be Alibi for crime and mystery, Hydra for science fiction and fantasy and finally, Flirt for young adult romances. The editorial team are looking for works between15,000 and 60,000 words. In the first instance  a query should be made via the website HERE


The Ty Newydd Writer's Centre have announced their range of courses for 2013 and details can be found HERE


Egmont Publishing have named Sarah Hughes, formally of Puffin, as their new director for their fiction lists.

Ladylit Publishing is celebrating its first anniversary with a sizzling collection of lesbian tales called “Anything She Wants.” The editors are  looking for  erotica  (fiction only).According to editor Harper Bliss: “It doesn’t matter how many characters end up in bed (or anywhere else) together, as long as they are all female. "

Amazon.com is adding two new imprints for children’s books to its publishing empire. Two Lions will be devoted to children’s picture books and Skyscape will focus on YA and New Adult titles.


And some personal news - next month will see the publication of the second book in my popular Granny Smith crime series. Granny Smith and the Deadly Frogs will hit digital print on March 31st 2013. The first book in the series, Granny Smith Investigates is available now - if you've not read it then go grab yourself a copy before the second book hits the virtual store.

Archive book biz news

BOREDRS STILL TROUBLED - Today AnnArbor.com broke the news that Borders Group had cut more employees at the bookseller's corporate headquarters in Michigan. A spokesperson declined to say how many people were laid off.
"we have made changes to our staffing levels so that the right people are in the right positions and that those positions are aligned with our strategic objectives." Borders commented.



DIGITAL SUPPLIER SMASHWORDS HUGE DEAL - Digital publishing platform Smashwords has partnered with independent retailer Diesel eBook Store.
The agreement includes two components. First, Smashwords will distribute its more than 11,000 Smashwords eBooks through the Diesel eBook Store beginning August 25th.
For the second part of the agreement, Smashwords will power the new Diesel Publishing Portal, where indie authors, and publishers with less than 100 published titles, can self publish their books to Diesel.
Books published through the new Diesel Publishing Platform are sold in Diesel, as well as other Smashwords retailer partners.



HOTEL CHAIN ARE OFFERING GUESTS FREE E-BOOK -
Book publishers and e-reader manufacturers continue to aggressively push out e-books over a variety of platforms and through stores and wireless channels.
Today, Toronto-based Kobo announced that Kobo eReaders loaded with some new and bestselling Random House books will be available free of charge to guests staying at 10 Fairmont hotels in the U.S. and Canada.
In a promotion geared to appeal people who don't want to carry heavy books on vacation, Kobo will provide e-readers to Fairmont hotels and the hotels will make the devices available to loan to people who stay in their exclusive Fairmont Gold sections.

WIRED ARE REPORTING ON THE DORCHESTER E-BOOK MOVE -
E-books are becoming more popular by the minute thanks to devices like the Kindle, Nook, and iPad, but major dead tree publishers have been hesitant to go all in—until now. Dorchester Publishing, which describes itself as the “oldest independent mass market publisher in America,” has decided to ditch its mass printing business to go digital- and print-on-demand only.
Unsurprisingly, Dorchester had a little nudge in that direction: the publisher said that sales of its books had declined a whopping 25 percent in just the last year, while its e-book sales are expected to double in 2011. The company specializes in romance, thriller, sci-fi, and fantasy novels and sells directly to major retailers like Wal-Mart.
“It wasn’t a long, drawn out decision, because we’ve been putting in the effort but not getting the results,” Dorchester CEO John Prebich told the Wall Street Journal.
Amazon recently said that Kindle book sales had surpassed the company’s sales of hardcover books in the last three months—a trend that many expect to continue now that the Kindle is even cheaper than before. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos even made the bold prediction that Kindle book sales might eclipse paperbacks within the next year.

 NEW YORK TIMES - Readers have gone from skipping small bookstores to wondering if they need bookstores at all. More people are ordering books online or plucking them from the best-seller bin at Wal-Mart.
But the threat that has the industry and some readers the most rattled is the growth of e-books. In the first five months of 2009, e-books made up 2.9 percent of trade book sales. In the same period in 2010, sales of e-books, which generally cost less than hardcover books, grew to 8.5 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers, spurred by sales of the Amazon Kindle and the new Apple iPad. For Barnes & Noble, long the largest and most powerful bookstore chain in the country, the new competition has led to declining profits and store traffic. After the company announced last week that it was putting itself up for sale, Leonard Riggio, Barnes & Noble’s chairman and largest shareholder, who has declared his confidence in the company’s future, hinted that he might make a play to buy the company himself and take it private.

THE TOTAL NUMBER OF BOOKS IN THE WORLD IS ....

Wait for it - How many books have ever been published in all of modern history? According to Google’s advanced algorithms, the answer is nearly 130 million books, or 129,864,880, to be exact.
We’ll admit it’s practically impossible to count every book that has ever been written, but in order for Google Books to successfully catalogue the world’s supply of printed knowledge, the company needs an estimate of the amount of books it needs to scan. That’s why Google set out on the task to do just that.

well I own a few hundred of those 129,864,880 books

Google admits their definition is imperfect, but it’s workable and similar to what ISBNs are supposed to represent. ISBN, or International Standard Book Numbers, are designed to be unique identifiers for books. Because they’ve only been around for 30-40 years and are used in mostly Western countries, they can’t be used by themselves. That’s why Google took data from the Library of Congress and others to find as many books as possible — one billion raw records by the company’s count.


Here’s where Google’s engineering talent comes into play. The company used countless algorithms to determine and discard duplicates in an effort that required more than 150 pieces of metadata related to the world’s books to evaluate whether each book record was unique or a duplicate of another. Analyzing this data resulted in 210 million unique books.
Next, Google subtracted the millions of microforms, audio recordings, maps, t-shirts, turkey probles (yes, turkey probes) and videos with IBSNs, arriving at a much more reasonable number of 146 million. Finally, the company removed 16 million government document volumes from their estimate, getting to the 129.8 million count they announced today. Of course, publishers are issuing new books even as this post is being typed, so the company is constantly recalculating the book count. CHECK OUT THE DETAILED GOOGLE BOOKS BLOG POST HERE

Archive Book biz news

* For most writers it is a long road to publication - they work on their idea, often for years, and then try and pitch it to publisher after publisher. However, in these shallow times, celebrities can sign book deals without having yet written the book and without any clear idea of what kind of book they will deliver - Demi Moore has been meeting with book publishers about the possibility of writing something. But the actress’ rep insists that any Moore-penned title will not be a memoir but some kind of novel.




* Amazon are to launch their own imprint to publish translated foreign language books -

The first book from the new AmazonCrossing imprint will be "The King of Kahel," 2008 winner of the prix Renaudot French literary prize. Its author, Tierno Monenembo, was born in Guinea and now lives in France. The book is due out in paperback and in an electronic Kindle version on Nov. 2.

Amazon said it will use customer reviews and other data from its websites around the world to choose AmazonCrossing titles.

* Author's Guild have stated that they are worried about eBook piracy. Author Scott Turow has recently taken over the Authors Guild, and has decided that ebook "piracy" is a "big problem" that has to be the focus. Perhaps next time the Authors Guild wants to show itself to be forward-looking and able to change with the times, it shouldn't put a 60+ year old lawyer in charge. Just a suggestion... Rather than saying that unauthorized file sharing is such a big problem, perhaps Turow should take a look at the music industry more closely. He seems to only be superficially aware of what's happening in that industry. Instead of recognizing that the industry wasted over a decade fighting what fans wanted, he seems to think that he can magically fight what every other industry has failed to fight. That doesn't seem like a strategy that has a high likelihood of success.

ARCHIVE BOOK BIZ NEWS

Google have just apologized to Chinese book authors for scanning their literary works without permission. This marks the search giant's latest miscalculation .

Modern Health and Safety issues are now affecting old DIY books -One of the most trusted names in DIY, Menlo Park-based Sunset Publishing, was forced to recall six of its titles after the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission said consumers who followed some of the wiring instructions in the books risked electrical shocks or could start a fire.

ARCHIVE BOOK BIZ NEWS

In yet another movie to protect their business two more publishers have decided to hold back eBook editions of lead titles. "The right place for the e-book is after the hardcover but before the paperback," said Carolyn Reidy, CEO of Simon & Schuster, which is owned by CBS Corp. "We believe some people will be disappointed. But with new [electronic] readers coming and sales booming, we need to do this now, before the installed base of e-book reading devices gets to a size where doing it would be impossible."



Tiger Woods' recent car crash have benefited the author of Get a Grip of Physics after the book was pictured in Woods' crashed car. The book is out of print but secondhand copies have been going on Amazon for £45. And the book is now to go back into print for the first time in five years. By the way did I ever tellyou that The Archive had an affair with Tiger Woods?

The Kindle eBook reader is to be geared up to help readers with weak eyesight and those that are totally blind - On Monday, December 7, 2009, Amazon announced that it has decided to add the new features, a series of voice commands to engage the audible features and increase font size of Kindle, and the ability to increase font size. Authors and publishers have still protested and Amazon continues to give them the ability to disable the features. The Authors’ Guild is concerned that this feature will diminish sales of audio books.

eBook readers have been likened to Nazi's by a group of top authors -There is a discussion to be had about whether or not ebooks are bad for writing, reading, and bookselling. There is also, apparently, a discussion to be had about whether or not ebook proponents are just like the Nazis. Let’s start with Sherman Alexie, author of a fair number of popular books, including Reservation Blues and Flight. He’s known for his sense of humour, but he’s dead serious about eBooks—specifically, about how they will destroy literature, forever, or something:

His points are - 1. Ebook readers are a threat to privacy
2. Jeff Bezos makes cryptic comments about “changing how people read,” which are somehow sinister (?)
3. The music industry was crippled by piracy; therefore the book industry will be crippled by piracy
4. Once books are digitized by publishers, they will be stolen
5. The “open source” culture destroys the concept of ownership

FULL STORY HERE

ARCHIVE BOOK BIZ NEWS

THE DIGITAL TAKEOVER:Will digital books catch fire this holiday? According to an online survey, 1 in 5 shoppers said they planned to buy an electronic book reader such as a Sony Reader or Amazon Kindle this year. When asked what they would like to get as a gift this year, about 1 in 10 cited a digital book reader. Portable music players, once the hot holiday ticket, got just 3.4% of the vote, while game consoles came in at 6%. Likely buyers tend to be men, under 35 years old, living in the Northeast where more people use public transportation, and with an average annual household income of more than $100,000, according to the survey of 771 respondents.

Of those who said they planned to spring for an electronic book reader, 62% said they would buy Amazon's Kindle 2 or Kindle DX, while 32% favored the Sony Reader. Although Amazon and Sony dominate the business today, more devices are scheduled to hit the U.S. market within the next year, including the $399 IREX expected later this winter and Plastic Logic due out in 2010.

The wonderfully scatty Sarah Palin: Only announced a few months ago but it has now been confirmed that Sarah Palin's autobiography will be in stores by Christmas.

EVEN THE US ARE FOLLOWING THE UK WITH THIS NONSENSE: For a country that venerates its First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech, the United States tries to ban books with alarming frequency.

Stick a pin in each place where there's been a challenge to a school or library book, and you'll have a map of the United States that looks like a hedgehog in need of a haircut.

This year already, challenges have been reported from Montana to Indiana to Texas, in high schools and libraries, and from classics like Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, to newer books like Brent Hartinger's The Geography Club and Chris Crutcher's Chinese Handcuffs.

This February in West Bend, Wisconsin, a local couple filed a petition calling for the Library Advisory Board to remove or label several Young Adult titles, including Francesca Lia Block's Baby Be Bop and Stephen Chobsky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, because they felt that all the books in the young-adult section that dealt with homosexuality were "gay-affirming." The couple also requested that the library build a collection of books by "ex-gays" in order to achieve an ideological balance.

GOOGLE BOOK SETTLEMENT DEAD IN THE WATER: The Settlement, however, has received an exceptional amount of objections from a variety of sources, including countries, states, nonprofit organizations, and prominent authors and law professors. Indeed, objections to the settlement are too numerous to discuss fully here, but include concerns regarding orphan works, potential antitrust violation, and privacy concerns. This has resulted in the parties renegotiating many aspects of the agreement. Just yesterday, Judge Chin of the Southern District of New York, granted a motion to delay an October 7 hearing on the settlement given the fact that the parties are renegotiating the agreement. In light of all this, it remains to be seen to what extent the settlement can survive in any form…

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joan-e-bertin/banned-books-week-still-n_b_302248.html

ARCHIVE BOOKS BIZ NEWS

SONY WARNS OVER EBOOK PRICING - Sony are to lunch two new ebooks readers through Waterstones stores but the company has warned about ebook pricing, saying they must come down severely. Richard Palk, Sony's general manager for development said:

'The public are confused about why e-book pricing is being set based on hardback prices. And the dropping when the paperback is released. The difference is price between digital and physical books will have to widen but at the moment the industry is in an evolutionary stage regarding digital books.'

This week Sony unveiled a wireless device that will go on sale by Christmas in order to challenge Amazons dominance.


WATERSTONES ON TRACK TO SELL ITS MILLIONTH EBOOK - Waterstones have called for simultaneous release of ebooks and the printed version. They also announced that they would include a free e-copy of Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol with every purchase of the new Sony reading devices. The company then went onto say that it expected to sell its millionth ebook during the next 12 month.


TED KENNEDY AUTOBIOGRAPHY FROM LITTLE BROWN - Little Brown is to publish True Compass, the autobiography of Ted Kennedy who died last week. The book is due on 14th September at a price of £20.

BORDERS STILL IN THE SWAMP - Borders saw its sales slump by 17% for the second quarter of this year - this is a drop of almost half since the same period last year. However the recent closures of stores has managed to reduce its overall debt by 42%.

EVERY LITTLE HELPS - Tesco have appointed a senior buyer for books, creating a new role within the supermarket giant. David Blackman joined the supermarket in his new position on the 1st September. He had previously worked with Oakwood Distribution. It's good to see Tesco taking books more seriously but many believe supermarkets, with their heavy discounting are damaging to the overall book business - Watch out for a report on supermarkets and books on the Archive this weekend.