Posted this morning over at the Bookseller:
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!
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
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])
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
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
