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| Seth Godin |
Google’s new tablet is in the same class as Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet and the Kindle Fire. The difference for the Nexus 7 is that it’s a full-featured tablet and not just a low-priced reader designed primarily for content consumption. The Fire and Nook, on the other hand, are all about consuming content since they come up short on standard tablet specs such as cameras, Bluetooth, and GPS. The Nexus 7 is also missing a few features such as a rear-facing camera and a wireless broadband option. Nevertheless, spec-for-spec Google’s 7-inch tablet blows away the Fire and Nook Tablet.Good reading!
Not only does the Nexus 7 offer better specs, but at launch Google’s tablet was priced the same as the Nook Tablet: $199 for the 8GB version and $259 for the 16GB model. Also, around the time of the Nexus 7 release, debut of a Kindle Fire 2 is expected -- so it’s no surprise that Barnes & Noble decided to cut its tablet prices.
The world's highest-paid authors, according to Forbes:I could live with being number 16! :p
1. James Patterson: $94 million
2. Stephen King: $39 million
3. Janet Evanovich: $33 million
4. John Grisham: $26 million
5. Jeff Kinney, $25 million
6. Bill O'Reilly: $24 million
7. Nora Roberts: $23 million
8. Danielle Steel: $23 million
9. Suzanne Collins: $20 million
10. Dean Koontz: $19 million
11. JK Rowling: $17 million
12. George RR Martin: $15 million
13. Stephenie Meyer: $14 million
14. Ken Follett: $14 million
15. Rick Riordan: $13 million
"I get up around 7:00 in the evening," she explained. "I eat something and then I'm on the computer answering emails and doing business for a while. I start writing later in the evening and write between six and twelve hours." (Amanda Hocking in town for LeakyCon)Perhaps I should try being nocturnal. In the summer it would probably be much less distracting!
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| Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library |
A specialist New York bookshop [Singularity & Co] is aiming to rescue out-of-print books and provide them for free online.Read the rest here: Save the Sci-Fi campaign bids to convert rare novels to ebooks.
. . . .The Save the Sci-Fi campaign aims to bring back in to print one cult SF novel each month and provide it online for free. And if anyone needed proof this is a popular idea, over $52,000 raised through crowdfunding goes some way to providing it.
Save the Sci-Fi isn't the only project attempting to preserve the heritage of science fiction. The excellent SF Gateway, founded by Gollancz books, Britain's oldest and most influential publisher of SF, brings some of the genre's classic texts back in to circulation as ebooks – the covers of which will be familiar to thousands of readers who remember the original Gollancz yellow-jackets.
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| Rod Serling |
Early this year the unpublished manuscript of my novel, Tell a Thousand Lies, was shortlisted for the 2012 Tibor Jones South Asia prize. I was ecstatic when I was offered a publishing contract soon after, by one of India’s largest publishing houses. Yet, I declined the offer.Rasana enrolled her book in Amazon's KDP Select program and, while it was free, 17,000 people downloaded it in one weekend! Since then Amazon has changed its ranking algorithm and she has decided to try out Barnes & Noble as well as Smashwords.com. She writes:
Let me explain.
I would have been happy enough to have my paperback published. What I wanted were the rights to my ebook (the electronically downloadable form of a book). I’d been following the career paths of Amanda Hocking and Joe Konrath, the two authors leading the self-publishing charge, and I wanted a chance to apply their marketing methods to my ebooks. The publisher wasn’t agreeable though, so we parted ways, no hard feelings.
If you decide to self-publish, investigate your options carefully. It is easy to get scammed on the Internet. To confuse the issue, a lot of companies are calling themselves self-publishers. Self-publishing is when you upload the book, you set the price, you track the sales, you run the promotions. When someone else does it for you, they are the publisher of record. Horror stories abound about these so-called self-publishers; from manuscripts being stolen, to sales data being fudged, I’ve heard them all.If this seems too intimidating, reputable sites like bookbaby.com can help for a one-time fee. If someone is charging you fees upfront and keeping a cut of your royalties, beware. Reputable publishers will never charge you for publication, which is why they take a cut in your royalties. A quick and dirty way to check if the publisher is legitimate is to look at their website. The focus of a legitimate publisher will be the reader. Their website will be in the business of selling books. A subsidy or vanity publisher’s focus will be you — the gullible writer — and how many unneeded services they can sell to you.I used CreateSpace to publish the paperback in the US (LighteningSource and Lulu are the other options). I’m pleased to report my novel has started to catch the attention of book buyers for public libraries there. My novel shows up on flipkart.com etc. because I had it listed on Ingram’s catalogue, but the international edition is too expensive for India. The time is ripe in India for someone to replicate CreateSpace’s business model, offering printed copies of books for sale, perhaps even distribution to physical and online bookstores.Does this mean I would rule out traditional publishers for my next book? Not at all. I am always open to new experiences.
"The Bourne Legacy" is a work of fiction, but the scientific, political and corporate partnerships it depicts are very real.Click here to read the interview with Tony Gilroy: Fictional 'Bourne Legacy' not so far-fetched, says writer-director.
Tony Gilroy, a writer on the first three "Bourne" films, based on the Robert Ludlum series, and writer-director of this latest installment, spent countless hours immersed in military and intelligence research to tell the story of CIA assassin Jason Bourne.
When tasked with expanding Bourne's universe for "Legacy," Gilroy again looked to reality: Hundreds — if not thousands — of secret government and quasi-government programs funded by millions and millions of dollars with little oversight, all designed to build better weapons and better soldiers.
Such advancements are at the heart of "The Bourne Legacy." Jeremy Renner plays Aaron Cross, a super agent who has benefited from the government's top-secret medical research; Rachel Weisz is the doctor who helped develop the science; Edward Norton acts as the kingpin, a sort of corporate-military-intelligence hybrid, who tries to control it all.
Gilroy talked about his inspiration for the story and why truth can be stranger than fiction:
Your own interests, as a reader: What do you naturally lean toward when writing or reading? Which genre? What do you think you’d most enjoy writing? We have to spend a long time with a book—we need to enjoy the process and pour that love of writing into the book. Which story would you enjoy telling the most?2. Let's say you have ideas, lots of ideas! How do you decide which one to work on?
Analytics of the genre: In that genre, what are some of the factors that make it a good read? Humor, action, strong characters, magical powers, three murder victims, etc.? As a reader, what do you enjoy most about the genre?
Market saturation: Is there an area or subgenre that is currently saturated? Or does it seem like the readers are avidly buying the books as fast as they are written, even if it IS saturated? (Vampires and zombies come to mind.)
Book length: What is the length of most of these books? Have you got an idea that you can develop into that length? Is your idea too broad and can’t fit into one book? Book length, of course, is also going through a change with the digital trend—but you still want to shoot for the right ballpark. Editing a trilogy out of a single book can be a bear.
What are publishers of this genre looking for currently? If you’re going traditional, who represents and publishes this genre? Go online and see what kinds of things they might be asking for on their submissions page.
Protagonist: Which protagonist can carry my story better? Which is better-developed? Does one have more opportunity for internal conflict? Does one have ample growth potential?Elizabeth concludes:
Characters: Which project has secondary characters that are more appealing? Which create depth for my protagonist by interacting with him/her? Which may be a villain that readers will love to hate?
Plot: Which storyline can I easily picture? Which one has more conflict and more depth?
Time: Is there a story that requires more research than another? How much time do I have for the project? How long would I, ideally, prefer to spend on a single project?
Market: Which story will appeal to a greater number of readers? Which has more of a hook to sell to a publisher? Or…which has the better hook for a direct-to-reader/self pubbed book?
Series potential: This may be genre-book specific---but is there a story that lends itself to more than one novel?
Again, y’all, this is all in the for-what-it’s-worth category. And…another important thing to remember is that we shouldn’t have our whole writing career riding on one book. The fear of failure has got to be a huge factor in this writer hesitation when choosing an idea. The important thing about failure is dusting ourselves off, learning what it was that we did poorly, and writing another—better—book. Better because we failed or didn’t meet our own expectations. It’s killed me when a couple of great writers that I know have completely given up writing when their books didn’t do as well as they hoped. We’ve got to keep on going.Elizabeth's entire article can be read here: Writing for an Audience/ the Marketplace. A list of her books is here.
The product is the story. Not the book, not the eBook, not the audio book. The Story.Read Bob's entire (very short!) piece here: A Simple Concept for Publishing.
The consumer is the reader. Not the bookstores, the platform, the distributor, the sales force. The Reader.
