Publishing

Return of the Paper Fanzine?

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

At P-Con over the weekend we spent two whole panels discussing small press issues. One of the panels was mainly about books, the other mainly about magazines, but both covered much of the same ground. Part of that discussion involved the rapidly changing nature of printing and distribution. Print-on-Demand no longer means badly printed books made at vast cost for people who can’t get published any other way. These days it means well printed books that make economic sense for people with short print runs (that is, not in the thousands). Perhaps crucially it also means avoiding international shipping.

In the short fiction magazines panel someone said that it would not be long before there would be services around the world that you could just send a PDF to and they’d print and ship your magazine to local customers. “Not long” in this case turned out to be around 48 hours. Or indeed rather less than that, because the service must have been available for some time for the NYT to find out about it.

MagCloud is a service provided by Hewlett Packard that bills itself as the YouTube of magazines. You send them a PDF, they list your magazine as in stock. It costs you nothing. Anyone can then order a copy of the magazine from MagCloud. Right now the base cost of 20c/page plus shipping is a little steep, and I suspect (the details are not clear if you don’t sign up) that publishers have to charge more than that to make a profit. But you know the cost will come down as the service becomes more popular.

I joked in the title that it could mean the return of paper fanzines. I don’t actually think the service is cheap enough for that yet, though someone like Bruce Gillespie may find it attractive. Where I do think that there is a potential business case is with small press magazines. The sales pitch would go something like this: yes, you can read it for free on the web; yes, you can download a PDF and print it yourself, but if you really want something glossy and physical then order it from MagCloud. And it doesn’t matter if the magazine is produced in Ireland, or Australia, if the customer is near a MagCloud print shop in the USA.

Did I say glossy? This is what the MagCloud web site has to say about production quality:

MagCloud uses HP Indigo technology, so every issue is custom-printed when it’s ordered. Printing on demand means no big print runs, which means no pre-publishing expense. Magazines are brilliant full color on 80lb paper with saddle-stitched covers. They look awesome.

You know, it is almost tempting to go back end produce illustrated and nicely laid out PDFs of every issue of Emerald City just because I can.

Thanks to Anne Harris for the tip.

Small Business is Booming – #pcon

~ Cheryl

Today’s panels were all about small press publishing – one specifically on the subject and another about fiction magazines, which are mostly small press these days. It was all very interesting, and indeed encouraging. But one thing was very clear – small press companies need good business plans and good publicity. In particular, if no one knows you exist, no one is going to buy your magazine.

So actually thanks of a sort are due to Mr. Yalow and his supporters for providing us with a very good excuse to talk about small press fiction magazines.

Dinosaurs Speak at Mammal Conference

~ Cheryl

I’ve found another conference I’d really like to go to. It is called South by Southwest (SXSW for short) and it does a whole lot of cool stuff about online media. The blog, Booksquare, has been reporting on it. Their Kassia Krozser was incensed by a panel called “New Think for Old Publishers”. Here are a couple of excerpts from the post:

Let me be clear. Absolutely clear. Not one word spoken in that session, either from the panelists or from the audience, was new or innovative.

and:

At the after-party, one panelist told me that “this is all new to us”. Give. Me. A. Break. It’s only new for those of you who’ve been pretending change is something you get from a dollar bill.

Read the whole thing, it is well worth it.

Update: In other news, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer is the latest major US newspaper to announce that it is going online-only.

Update 2: GalleyCat picks up the story.

Doom And Gloom Bad for Us, Allegedly

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Something rather odd is going on over at IROSF. In the new issue Kristine Kathryn Rusch wrote an article asking people not to be too gloomy about the state of the economy, and publishing in particular, because you know the world isn’t ending and people often read more during a recession. It didn’t seem particularly controversial, but as is the way of these things it attracted a few people who are more pessimistic. Lois Tilton wrote:

I see print fiction disappearing, except for the few Bestselling Names, while the internet becomes a sort of small press ghetto of the unpaid and underpaid. If there is a lesson from the last couple of decades, it’s that people aren’t going to pay for internet content.

That seemed to me rather over the top, but more silly than controversial. However, very quickly things got heated. And here comes the bit that stunned me. Kristine wrote:

When this column appeared, I e-mailed a bunch of industry pros who blog, asking them to link to it. Today, I received 6 e-mails about why they can’t link. All six cited your post as potentially harmful.

Wow. Really? I know Lois can be a bit gloomy at times, but do we really need to be protected from her in this way? I am boggled.

And for the record, I think Kristine is basically right. There will be bad times, but the world won’t end, despite the earnest predictions of people who love to feel unhappy. I’m always far more depressed about the willingness of human beings to predict disaster at the slightest excuse than I am about the actual state of the world.

Solaris – It’s Official

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Jacques Barcia has received a press release from Solaris confirming that the imprint is up for sale. Details here. (BTW, I know I shouldn’t make fun of mis-spellings by people whose first language is not English, but the idea of Solaris sailing off into the future, presumably on a solar wind, is too beautiful not to mention.)

Anyway, there it is. Commiserations to Jules, Chris, David and any other authors I know who are caught up in this. George, Mark: if I can be of any help, please get in touch.

Update: Jacques tells me he is covered in embarrassment and has edited his post. It is all Apple’s fault. Mr. Jobs apparently doesn’t recognize the word “sale”.

Authors Guild 1 – 0 Amazon

~ Cheryl ~ 11 Comments

Well, despite stirring support from the likes of Cory Doctorow and Neil Gaiman, it seems like Amazon has lost its battle with the Authors’ Guild. As The Guardian reports, publishers and authors will now be able to ask for the Text-to-Speech feature of the Kindle 2 to be disabled for their works. I guess we now know who has the bigger lawyers.

The English Tide

~ Cheryl

In today’s edition of The Economist their European correspondent, “Charlemagne”, speculates that a tide of English writing is about to overcome Europe. The reason is simple: publishers in countries such as Germany, Italy and Spain are keen to expand into markets elsewhere in Europe. The quickest way to do so is to publish in English as well as in their local language, because English is the second language of almost every European country.

Right now this is mainly affecting online editions of newspapers. However, in the longer term it may well affect fiction too. That’s good for us readers, as it will provide us with many more fine writers to choose from. It may be not so good for authors, as competition will get even more fierce.

Cory on the Kindle

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Hey, it is a copyright debate! Does Cory Doctorow have something to say? Of course he does. Here he is talking to GalleyCat about how he doesn’t want readers to think that authors are out to rip them off the way they the music industry is.

Update: And Neil Gaiman gives his view on the issue here. Neil’s point is very similar to one I saw made by, I think, Ron Hogan in his tweets from TOC. If publishers were like the music industry they’d want to make it illegal to read a book to your kid because that would infringe their audiobook copyright. On the other hand, Neil’s agent is only trying to safeguard his income, which is her job.

Kindle Breaches Copyright?

~ Cheryl ~ 10 Comments

There’s a fascinating post up on the Small Beer Press web site about the new Kindle. The machine has text-to-voice capability, allowing it to “read” a book to you (presumably in a robotic voice). But audiobooks are a separate market with separate rights, and Kindle editions don’t have those rights? So isn’t the Kindle illegally infringing on the audiobook market? Not so, says Amazon:

The ability to read text aloud is very different from producing an audio version of a written work, so audio distribution rights are not required for any titles currently available as eBooks in the Kindle store.

Oh, I can see a few lawyers making a pretty penny out of that.

Japanese Novels

~ Cheryl ~ 5 Comments

A piece of good news on the translation front. Manga experts, VIZ Media, will be publishing a line of translated Japanese SF&F novels in the US. The line will be called “Haikasoru”, which is apparently Japanese for “High Castle”. Well, VIZ are based in the San Francisco Bay Area. They know a bit about SF as well, because the editor of the Haikasoru line is a fellow called Nick Mamatas, whom you might have heard of before. Here he is being interviewed.

A Story of Publishing

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Via the BFS I found this angry tale of a writer apparently left high and dry by a small press publisher who took on a collection and then allegedly couldn’t be bothered to actually sell it. I know nothing of the actual circumstances, and I imagine that Sean Wright will have his side to the story as well, but from a publishing economics standpoint the following seems clear.

Limited edition print runs should be for beautifully produced books such as the high-end products produced by Subterranean, PS Publishing and Payseur & Schmidt. Print-on-demand should be for books that you hope to sell in larger numbers, and which need never go out of print because if someone wants to buy one you can just print another.

I’m sure it is not quite that simple. Even PoD will have some sort of minimum economic print run. But that should be pretty small and in an ideal world it will be 1.

The Web as an Agent?

~ Cheryl

The purpose of agents in the great publishing scheme of things is to read lots of books (or at least book ideas) and filter out the really good ones, which they then hawk around publishers. Because editors really don’t have time to read everything that comes in.

But what if you could post your shiny new novel to a web site, have loads of people read it, and get them to vote on whether it was worth editors looking at it? Well, that’s what authonomy.com does. And according to GalleyCat HarperCollins editors are reading the top-ranked books and even buying some of them.

I had a quick flick through the books looking for SF&F and I have to say that on the basis of the tag lines I wouldn’t read any of them. But then maybe the whole point is to find books that actually match the sort of idiot blubs publishers put on them.

The Realities of Publishing

~ Cheryl

President Obama is already good news for one small press, because the poet, Elizabeth Alexander, whose work was read at the inauguration, is published by them. The Chronicle has done an article about Graywolf Press, and what struck me from it was this:

“The business model of big houses relies on publishing a lot more books than they can pay attention to,” said Scibona, whose novel “The End,” a story of Italian immigrants in 1950s Cleveland, scored the National Book Award nomination. “They’ll drop 50 literary books into the open ocean and throw a party if one of them floats.”

I have been a big fan of small presses for a long time, and I’m only getting more so as time goes on. The problem is not getting good books published, it is getting those books into the hands of readers.