Eoin Purcell's Blog

From the the horse’s mouth

Declan Burke has gotten a US deal for his excellent The Big O:

it has come to pass that the lovely people at Harcourt have in their infinite wisdom decided that THE BIG O is as good a tax deductible as any, and will be putting it between covers in the very near future.

I have been enjoying Declan’s blog for some time now and I am confident that this is just one step in an exceptionally bright future. Crime really does Always Pay.

Pleased to see it
Eoin

*No Minstrels were harmed in the writing of this post. It would pain me muchly to think people don’t get this reference but just in case here.

Eoin Purcell

UPDATE: ANOTHER 5,198 COPIES IN THE WEEK TO 27th OCTOBER!!!

Well Done Anne
Here is an interesting one. Despite the negative vibes that have been put out about the Booker not driving sales and how the Booker chooses bad books, Anne Enright sold 5,481 copies in Ireland in the week to October 20th according to Bookscan* (including 4 days after she won the prize!).

You can see from the figures below two very interesting things. Firstly the bounce was huge (744% or thereabouts if my maths work out) but also, even before she won the prize, her numbers were very good. In fact she sold some 7,000 copies in the weeks to October 13th. Even if she sells not a single book more, she will be one of Ireland’s top selling authors.

Oh there is a kick off into really good territory around about the time of the Long List announcement, but even by then she had cleared the bones of 2000, a not inconsiderable feat.

So not only is The Booker good for sales in Ireland (driving them from 2000-12000 is impressive) but the notion that the book itself was obscure and unknown is a little forced I think!

Isn’t that interesting?
Eoin

* There are some bigger numbers thrown about in the Irish Independent this week too that are worth looking at, especially this line which makes me smile:

The book is certain to top bestseller lists this week as Eason’s reported sales of 12,000 copies from its store, with the vast majority sold since the prize was announced.

This is in contrast to sales of just 7,340 copies here [my emphasis, how little does this journalist know about Irish book sales if he can write that line] before the Irish author’s win.

RIGHT NOW HERE
For the Annual Amnesty Ireland Lecture.

Eoin Purcell

credit where it is due
Easons have upgraded their website in time for Christmas. The search function is better (though still not great) and browsing is a lot better. They even offer a review feature which makes a very nice change to the static sites of the past (even if Amazon have had such features for years.

It still has a way to go to match my favourite website for book sales, but it is a vast improvement on their previous site.

Having a tech focussed day,
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

I may have mentioned some time ago
That I was at the launch of Bibeanna: Memories from a Corner of Ireland pretty soon after I joined Mercier.

Well, now we have just heard some absolutely great news. Brenda Ní Shúilleabháin has been nominated for the Glen Dimplex New Writers Award in the Irish-language category. Yippee!

Congratulations to Brenda and all involved. It is a wonderful book and one we are enormously proud of. It is also selling very well (selling through a reprint very rapidly) which just goes to show that dual language titles with quality design and good content can make a big impact.

Pleased as pie,
Eoin

Oh and here are some pictures from that launch (It was an amazing day in the Kingdom!)

PRESS RELEASE BELOW JUMP WITH ALL NOMINATIONS

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted this morning over at the Bookseller:

A New Business Model?

Please comment, it looks all lonely there.
Eoin

PS: Speaking of Business Models, check out Hags Head Press and their model. Oh and while you are at it, read the blog of their author Declan Burke which I called Crime Always Pays!

Eoin Purcell

Bookshops and booksales
I spent a lot of time over the weekend and the early part of the week in bookshops. They are crazy. It feels like christmas has started early. There is no evidence to support this really. Maybe it will show in the bookscan figures next week but overall Bookscan doesn’t seem too hectic:

But all the same the piles are high, the big books seem to be released already. Walking around the bookstores I was struck by the incredible array of titles, the strength of everyones books and the feeling that the January sales would be truly excellent next year. Because there just cannot be as many winners as there are books. There are some great titles that will fail. This year is going to see a very competitive struggle I suspect.

I can only hope that Mercier do well, though with its great Christmas list I suspect it will. Here’s my favourite:

Enjoying a rush (the thrill of the game perhaps)
Eoin

Eoin Purcell

The Bookseller reports:

DailyLit, the service that delivers daily installments of books via email or RSS feeds, has launched its Pay-Per-Read program. Thanks to agreements with publishers including Perseus Books Group, the University of Michigan Press, The Globe Pequot Press, E-Reads and Baen Books, readers can get installments of new and bestselling titles in addition to public domain books.

DailyLit has more detail here like the full list of books available and confirms the price scale too:

The Pay-Per-Read titles will add 30+ books to DailyLit�s current listing of 500+ titles. Each complete book is priced from $4.95 to $9.95, with the majority of books available for under $5.00.

A better model
To me this seems a much better long term bet than the dramatic but (to my mind) ultimately ineffective effort by Radiohead which has drawn so much comment in recent weeks (more here). For one thing Radiohead’s model will work for Radiohead and maybe a couple of dozen other acts leaving everyone else to soak up the dregs.

There is promise in this one.

Impressed by this book
Eoin
PS You can read the DailyLit blog here
PSS: Interesting piece on the workplace of the future here (features Malcom Gladwell riffing on stuff NineShift said years ago [hat tip to 37Signals])

Eoin Purcell

Three month old deals re-emerge
PODdy Mouth – Daily Dirt on POD and Self-Publishing has an interesting piece advising AuthorServices who to buy next following their acquisition of iUniverse.

Of course, not missing a trick, Poddy also points out that this is genius re-selling of old PR! Reading the Bookseller you might not know that!

For my money, given the demand for services such as this it almost seems a mistake to broadcast the fact that you are rolling up the capacity of this sector. With Amazon launching CreatSpace and no guarantee that the larger publishers won’t make similar moves, you would think AuthorServices would move and keep quiet!

Eoin

Eoin Purcell

What is it?
The bookseller news item has the full breakdown (see below) but you can read some more here on MSN and a bit of analysis here:

Authonomy, at www.authonomy.com, will initially be rolled out by HCUK in early 2008, with the intention of it becoming a global programme in the future. The site will connect unpublished authors with readers, and will allow anyone to participate. Readers will be able to support their favourite manuscripts, with HC guaranteeing to consider the most popular for publication. HC anticipates that many of the readers will be industry professionals looking for new talent.

What is going on?
Seems to me that HC are quite cleverly using the web at its best to do the same job that usually gets dumped on the junior editor (not at Mercier I should add. I review nearly very script that comes in). But will it work in their favour? It is a hard call, it may be that the site will become a destination for good writers with talent (it s difficult to tell without seeing how exactly they intend to execute the task they have set themselves) but if, as HC suggest themselves, the site is also a magnet for publishing professionals from beyond HC there is no guarantee that they will take the cream. In fact they could well forced the price of the cream up and simply improve the scrum for talent while costing themselves quite a bit in hosting and marketing.

But what do I know
Eoin