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A couple of weeks ago we talked about the phenominal success Amanda Hocking has had e-publishing her books.  Here is an update:

St. Martin’s Pays a Reported $2M For Four Books By Amanda Hocking, Self-Publishing’s Reluctant Heroine.  This year every week in publishing could be considered eventful, but this week in particular had a special kind of symmetry, as the very publishing house Barry Eisler walked away from to publish on his own brought Amanda Hocking into the fold. Despite sources indicating otherwise a few days ago, St. Martin’s emerged the victor of the auction for Hocking’s new Watersong YA paranormal series, reportedly paying more than $2 million for World English rights (which, of course, includes digital rights, too.)

“I’ve done as much with self-publishing as any person can do,” Hocking told the NYT Thursday. “People have bad things to say about publishers, but I think they still have services, and I want to see what they are. And if they end up not being any good, I don’t have to keep using them. But I do think they have something to offer.”

Her comments echoed a blog post Tuesday where she addressed and explained the then-ongoing auction: “I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.” But in a follow-up post, Hocking reiterated that the deal doesn’t mean she will stop self-publishing: “I have a few titles lined up this year [to self-publish] and I’ll have more in the future.”

SMP publisher Matthew Shear evidently wanted to win the auction “pretty badly,” having first heard of Hocking six months before from her eventual acquiring editor, Rose Hilliard. Shear looks at self-publishing as a way for authors “to perhaps make a certain amount of money sooner rather than later” but a publisher “provides an extraordinary amount of knowledge into the whole publishing process. We have the editors, we have the marketers, we have the art directors, we have the publicists, we have the sales force. And they can go out and get Amanda’s books to a much, much bigger readership than she had been able to get to before.”

The first Watersong book won’t be out until Fall 2012, by which time it may become apparent whether Hocking can continue to sell her self-published books at the same rapid clip of the last few months (monthly sales reports she provided to the AP showed more than 333,000 copies sold of her nine titles available, with another 300,000 sales in February, which roughly dovetail with her claimed total earnings of between $1.4m and $2m.) Her current readership may also use that time to adjust to the eventual price increase from the 99 cents to $2.99 her e-published titles cost to whatever higher agency price Macmillan decides upon.

And Hocking, while obviously excited by her new and parallel career direction, is bemused by the reaction: “It is crazy that we live in a time that I have to justify taking a seven-figure a publishing deal with St. Martin’s,” she wrote. “Ten years ago, nobody would question this. Now everybody is.”

Times they are a changing. 

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

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By Dennis Baron

“It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”     –Barack Obama

The bumper sticker on the back of a construction worker’s pickup truck caught my eye: “If you can read this, thank a teacher.”

This homage to education wasn’t what I expected from someone whose bitterness typically manifests itself in vehicle art celebrating guns and religion, but there was more: “If you can read this in English, thank a soldier.”

It was a “support our troops” bumper sticker that takes language and literacy out of the classroom and puts them squarely in the hands of the military.

It’s one thing to say that we owe our national security and the survival of the free world to military might. It’s something else again to be told that we need soldiers to protect the English language.

But according to this bumper sticker, any chink in our armor, any relaxation of our constant vigilance, any momentary lowering of the gun barrel, and we’ll all be speaking Russian, Iraqi, or even Mexican.

Supporters of official English argue that it’s the language of democracy — the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not to mention the “Star-Spangled Banner,” “American Idol” and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” (it doesn’t matter that Millionaire was a British show first, since Americans were British once themselves). English, goes the claim, is the “social glue” cementing the many cultures that underlie American culture. As Teddy Roosevelt said back in 1918, “This is a nation, not a polyglot boarding house.”

But apparently even the official language laws that states, cities, schools and businesses have put in place aren’t doing the job, so what we really need is to put a gun to people’s heads to make them use English.

Only that won’t work. The large number of translators killed in Iraq, or drummed out of the army for being gay, are two of the many indicators that our armies aren’t keeping the world safe for English.

The linguist Max Weinreich is credited with quipping that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. But guns can’t literally keep a language safe at home any more than they can effectively seal a border to keep other languages out.

In a bold act of regime change and a glaring breach of homeland security, French streamed across the English borders in the 11th century along with the Norman armies, but French soldiers were unable to convert most of the Brits they encountered to the parlez-vous, at least not in the long term.

And while the Royal Navy helped spread English around the globe as part and parcel of the British Empire, what really undergirds English today as an international language isn’t military might, but the appeal of global capitalism, science, computer technology, t-shirts, and good old rock ‘n

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Dear Mr. Gates:

You have, by dint of your intelligence and sincerity, become a major spokesman for wealthy Americans calling for higher taxes. Since the nation’s budgetary problems will only be solved by combining spending reductions with tax increases, this is a compelling claim.

However, the devil, as they say, is in the details. Allow me to call three details to your attention:

1) Microsoft’s tax avoidance. Microsoft has become increasingly adept at parking its profits in low tax foreign jurisdictions, rather than paying U.S. taxes. After analyzing Microsoft’s financial statements, Tax Analysts’ Martin A. Sullivan recently concluded that Microsoft “has dramatically stepped up its efforts to take advantage of lax U.S. transfer pricing rules.” In lay terms, Microsoft is avoiding U.S. taxes by accounting maneuvers which shift its profits to low tax havens.

Of course, Microsoft is not alone in this behavior. However, Microsoft is the source of your family’s wealth and influence. I suggest that you start a campaign to press U.S. corporations to pay U.S. taxes and that you lead with Microsoft as the campaign’s first target.

2) Millionaires and billionaires are different. You are the leading proponent of the plan to establish an income tax in Washington State. The tax will be levied at a rate of 5% on annual incomes over $200,000 ($400,000 for couples). The rate will increase to 9% on annual incomes over $500,000 ($1,000,000 for couples).

Individuals earning these kinds of incomes are undoubtedly affluent. But few of them are software billionaires. Unfortunately, the Washington State levy will tax millionaires and billionaires at the same rates.

Many individuals triggering the first tier of the Washington income tax will be professionals like me. Many of the individuals triggering the higher tax level will be small businessmen and businesswomen. As to this latter group, the Washington tax will be among the nation’s highest. For these people, the tax will impose a noticeable burden and could lead to economic distortions such as a decision to leave Washington for a state with a low or no income tax.

It is neither fair nor efficient for the billionaires of Microsoft to pay the same marginal tax rates as these other taxpayers.

I suggest that you call for a third, substantially higher rate for the Washington State tax to apply to individuals such as you. The resulting revenues would permit a reduction of the rates applying to other, less affluent Washington State taxpayers.

3) The Gates Foundation is a tax shelter. The Gates Foundation does great work of which you and your family can be justifiably proud. But there is one thing the Gates Foundation doesn’t do: pay taxes.

You and your son have both been outspoken proponents of federal estate taxation. However, the resources you and he contribute to the Gates Foundation avoid such taxation. Moreover, the foundation, as a tax-exempt entity, pays no federal income tax.

I understand and applaud the charitable impulse which animates the Gates Foundation. My wife and I have established a private foundation in memory of our son though this fund is, needless to say, much smaller than the Gates Foundation.

It is, nevertheless, problematic to call for others to pay higher estate and income taxes while the Gates Foundation, one of the country’s largest, effectively shelters your and your son’s incomes and estates from the federal fisc.

I urge that the Gates Foundation annually and voluntarily