litfarm

The NYTimes reports that The Atlantic, formerly The Atlantic Monthly, will publish short stories on the Kindle at $3.99 a pop.

This is potentially really exciting news for short fiction, a form that used to be hugely popular (F. Scott Fitzgerald was considered to have squandered his talent writing short fiction for ready cash). Personally, I think the price tag is wrong–it should be $0.99, like an iPhone app.

It could be a great little money-maker for magazines who have enough reputation to give the experiment their editorial imprimatur, not to mention market it to their subscribers. It’s a good thing for authors too, as one author points out:

had she sold it to a small academic journal, it would have had “limited distribution anyway.”

It’s unlikely that unknown authors will be able to break into the Kindle on their own… for now. But if this is the first step towards an iTunes-like distribution model for fiction, then it could be.

In any event, it’s another market for short fiction and that ain’t bad.

(From bookninja.)

In an era of declining sales, declining readership and shrinking marketing budgets, publishers are looking for authors with a “profile”. Or better still, a small following. Podcasts are yet another way of getting the word out about your book, without spending a penny on editing, printing or design.

Ask Scott Sigler. He offered his first novel, Earthcore, as a free, serialized podcast on iTunes and his personal site. By the time he’d released his second and third novels, he had 30,000 listeners and publishers lining up to take his books.

Sigler, 38, likens his distribution method to that of public broadcasting, adding that giving away content pays off even if fewer than 10 percent of the samplers ultimately make a pledge.

To me, this is very exciting. Not only can you have a hand in pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, it’s a remarkable chance to connect with your readers. Once I was involved with a highly successful, albeit niche, video game and I can tell you: we didn’t get rich, but there was a tremendous amount of satisfaction meeting our rabidly devoted fans.

Check it out.

(apparently, bookninja!)

Here’s another article I’ve had bookmarked for a while, about how while Americans are reading less, we’re also writing more. Writing and self-publishing, that is. Last year saw a boom in the growing self-publishing industry to the tune of 400,000 titles–up from 300,000 the year before:

“As publishing has become less expensive, the urge to write my own self has become the opportunity to publish my own self,” said Gabriel Zaid, a Mexican critic and the author of “So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance,” a meditation on literary life in an over-booked world. Today, he added, “Everyone now can afford to preach in the desert.”

What gives? University writing programs, writing conferences and wide-spread blogging has made writing more accessible than ever before, and most importantly, an explosion of inexpensive self-publishing outfits, courtesy of everyone’s favorite online time-waster, the internet.

The good news: there are more books, and a greater variety, than ever before in our history. The bad news: most of them you don’t want to read.

The article examines the relationship between self-publising companies and mainstream booksellers, including online and brick-and-mortar operations. Home-made books are finding their way to the shelves, albeit slowly. It’s worth a read.

(thx, NYT Books)

Another Sky Press is an example of how print-on-demand, internet distribution and alternative payment models might be changing the face of publishing. First, all their books are free for download online. Sure, you’re thinking, but according to litfarm, that’s practically mainstream. Well, they also sell hard-copies of their books at cost, plus an optional “contribution”, and that contribution goes to paying the author. From their site:

We want people to read our books, even if they read them for free. This isn’t anything revolutionary – unless your local librarian is a subversive of the highest order.

To best accomplish this goal we release all of our books online for free. Because we know how good ‘real’ books feel in your hands, we also price our trade-paperbacks via a sliding scale system in which the base price is the cost for us to ship you a book (we don’t make a penny) and you set the final price by choosing what you’d like to contribute (if anything) to the creative team behind it (most of which goes to the author). You can’t ever be ripped off. We call this pro-artist, pro-audience system neo-patronage.

There are a whole bunch of reasons we are doing this. Some of them are idealistic (we trust people!). Some of them are economic (we want everyone to be able to afford our books!). Some of them are philosophical (we believe it is a better system!). Some of them are technological (flow with technology, don’t fight it!).

You can read more on their philosophy of publishing at their site, but in effect, they’re happy enough if someone downloads and reads their books. They’re even happier if someone orders a book at cost and they make nothing, since again someone is reading their books. If the person wants to pay more, it goes directly to the creative team behind the book–which they mention means mostly the author, but presumably includes the designer, editor, etc.

The whole thing reminds me of the 1,000 True Fans idea I blogged a while back, and could be a great way to establish a following that could take you into the mainstream. Or who knows, could support you outright.

I’m currently listening to a podcast of the first chapter of Ash Dogs by Justin Nicholes, a novel about a recently discharged marine, looking to get back the parts of himself that he lost in Iraq. Check it out.

(Thanks, Groundswell Collective.)

Ack! I’ve been neglecting the litfarm lately–things are crazy at my day job–and I apologize for that. I’ve got over a dozen posts in the queue, but they all need some attention first. In the meantime, to hold you over, The Guardian has an article about the boom in the self-publishing industry.

While definitive figures on sales generated by self-published books are hard to come by, there are estimates that they could be well into the billions of dollars. A report, Under the Radar by the Book Industry Study Group estimated that non-calculated sales by smaller publishers and self-publish companies could be as high as $14.2bn (£7.3bn) in 2005, the last year statistics were available.

A quick look at Lulu’s list of best-selling fiction has an author who turned his self-published novel into a book deal with St Martin’s. Admittedly, he writes somewhat Christian fiction, which is a market that’s been under served by traditional publishing houses, but even so it’s encouraging.

Another interesting site mentioned in the article is Wowio.com, an online store that sells nothing but ebooks.

So go read that. When you’re done, there ought to be some more posts here.

Keith Thompson’s latest book, Gus Openshaw’s Whale-Killing Journal, started out as a couple of blogs (one on tripod and one on mindsay) and turned into a real-life dead-tree book. It’s a cool idea–drumming up readers for your project by releasing excerpts and supporting material and parlaying that into publisher interest (very possible, considering that your server logs record the number of unique visitors). It also mimics what’s been done for other popular media with ARGs (Cloverfield and Halo to name a couple) and similar ideas.

Loads of possibilities for self-promotion beyond the venerable chapbook.

So says Paulo Coehlo, who when his publisher was none too keen about distributing digital versions of his work, set up a blog, Pirate Coelho, to help fans find P2P downloads. What was the effect? Sales. In a speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of The Alchemist made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more. Here’s a link to a blog post with video of the speech on torrentfreak.com.

Why does it work? From the Guardian book blog:

… giving away free digital copies of books makes a lot more sense that giving away free digital copies of music. Downloading a couple of chapters allows you to see how much you might like an author unknown to you. The point being that most of us who like what we read are then likely to go on and purchase the physical copy of the book, because so few of us have the stamina to read an entire book from a screen.

Coelho is one of the biggest names I’ve heard of adopting the strategy espoused by Cory Doctorow, et al. My guess is that we’ll see free sample chapters as a mainstream marketing strategy in a year or two, if not complete works. Good news for writers just starting out: setting up a torrent of your novel could emerge as a viable (and cheap) way of bootstrapping yourself into a publishing contract.

To celebrate the seventh anniversary of his blog, Neil Gaiman and HarperCollins have decided to release one of his books as a free download. Which one is up to you. Gaiman is conducting a vote on his blog. The winning book will be posted online for free by the publisher, who will also track sales following the download. If the experiment sparks sales, presumably HC will do the same with other titles.

Exciting!

If you’re like me a few minutes ago, you’re wondering who Steven Poole is. He’s a blogger and the author of Trigger Happy, a non-fiction book on the aesthetics of video games. Anyway. He blogged about the Kindle and after the subsequent fooferaw, has decided to experiment with ebooks by giving his book away as a free PDF for a while.

I haven’t read the book, but here on the litfarm we’re intrigued by authors giving away free, electronic versions of their books, in the hopes it’ll translate into dead-tree sales. Or at least a little bit more glory.

So check it out. If you like it, why not pick up a copy? Or not. That’s ebooks for you.