How to use this Page

The International Thriller Writers (ITW) have unveiled the winners of the 2014 ITW Thriller Awards. Check out the full list of winners below. Follow this link to view photos from the banquet celebration.

(more…)

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Here is illustrator Joanne Friar’s painting of a rainy day done in acrylic gouache on HP watercolor paper and based on a poem from Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses”. Joanne was featured on March 10th on Illustrator Saturday. You can use this link to see the whole post: http://wp.me/pss2W-4j3

Thought you would be interested in an interesting article written by Jeremy Greenfield for Forbes the other day, titled, How the Authors Guild Is Kind of Like the NRA and Why Scott Turow Is Wrong About Authors which rebutted an op-ed for the New York Times, written by Authors Guild president Scott Turow (who is also a lawyer and the best-selling author of legal thrillers like The Burden of Proof and Presumed Innocent). In this weeks article Turow, lamented that authors are under siege in the ebook era.

Turow’s angst all came about when last month, the Supreme Court decided to allow the importation and resale of foreign editions of American works, which are often cheaper than domestic editions. Until now, courts have forbidden such activity as a violation of copyright. Not only does this ruling open the gates to a surge in cheap imports, but since they will be sold in a secondary market, authors won’t get royalties.

Jeremy Greenfeld pointed out in his Forbes article that the vast majority of authors in the U.S. are not best-selling authors. Many of them have greatly benefited from the massive changes that have swept across the literary landscape in the U.S. Before the rise of ebooks, only a small fraction of them would have been able to live out their lifelong dream of becoming a published author. Now tens of thousands of them do it every month.

Below are a few excerpts from Jeremy’s article. The full article is worth reading, since you will not get the comparison of the NRA and the Authors Guild if you don’t read Jeremy’s whole piece.

(According to a recent survey of nearly 5,000 authors by Digital Book World — that Jeremy Greenfield authored — the top three reasons authors want to publish books are:

To build their careers as writers;

To satisfy a lifelong ambition; and

To write something that people are willing to buy.

To make money is fourth. The full study is available here.)

Some small percentage of those dreamers (an incredibly small percentage) go on to become Hugh Howey and Amanda Hocking. So, to the many of you out there who enjoyed Wool or My Blood Approves, thank some of the changes in book publishing.

The system that vaulted a talented (and lucky) few to the top is still thriving. Publishers are making just as much if not more money than ever before and the mega best-seller is alive and well. Check out the ebook best-seller list every week and you’ll see that big publishers dominate. Time and again, they are able to market and sell titles that spend months on the list. Want to sell millions of copies of a book? The same path that has always existed is probably your best bet.

But what if you’re not that talented (or lucky)? What if you don’t know the right people or nobody sees in your work what you see in it? Well, self publishing is now a viable option and a legitimate path to big sales numbers.

For some authors, the new publishing paradigm now offers them a choice between established publishers and publishing their own work themselves.

There are authors, such as narrative non-fiction and picture book writers, who are having trouble finding footing in the new era — and some of them write the most vital literature we have. Take Robert Caro, the author of several valuable and critically acclaimed tomes on Lyndon B. Johnson. Each of his books takes years to complete and probably can’t be done any other way. That kind of work takes investment and an appetite for risk; in the future, we may see fewer investments on Caro-like work. That would be a tragedy for American letters.

At this year’s Writer’s Digest conference in New York, there were nearly 500 attendees, enthusiastic writers who are interested in working on their craft and learning the business of publishing (disclosure: Writer’s Digest is a sister company to Digital Book World, my employer.) From what I heard, writers at the conference echoed the sentiment that now is the best time ever to be a writer.

“The vibe at the conference was incredibly upbeat,” Writer’s Digest community leader Phil Sexton told me. “Regardless of what challenges exist, most writers that we spoke to seemed to agree that we have far more publishing options and opportunities than we did even a few years ago.”

While there are things that the Authors Guild should oppose in defense of its constituents’ interests, it should not be done on a platform of “authors under attack” because that’s clearly not the case for the vast majority of authors. For most, this is the best time in history to be an author.

Talk tomorrow,

Kathy

In a long and angry op-ed, Authors Guild president and bestselling novelist Scott Turow bemoaned “The Slow Death of the American Author.”

He blamed low foreign resales of used books, eBook royalties, digital piracy, academics and rumors about a used marketplace to illustrate “how the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams.” The long essay had a section arguing that libraries no longer have the best interests of authors at heart. What do you think?

Now many public libraries want to lend e-books, not simply to patrons who come in to download, but to anybody with a reading device, a library card and an Internet connection. In this new reality, the only incentive to buy, rather than borrow, an e-book is the fact that the lent copy vanishes after a couple of weeks. As a result, many publishers currently refuse to sell e-books to public libraries.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Authors Guild called Amazon’s purchase of Goodreads ”a truly devastating act of vertical integration” in an online dispatch. Guild president Scott Turow had this statement:

Amazon’s acquisition of Goodreads is a textbook example of how modern Internet monopolies can be built … The key is to eliminate or absorb competitors before they pose a serious threat. With its 16 million subscribers, Goodreads could easily have become a competing on-line bookseller, or played a role in directing buyers to a site other than Amazon. Instead, Amazon has scuttled that potential and also squelched what was fast becoming the go-to venue for on-line reviews, attracting far more attention than Amazon for those seeking independent assessment and discussion of books. As those in advertising have long known, the key to driving sales is controlling information.

What do you think? The Guild cited Animals Make Us Human by Temple Grandin and Catherine Johnson as an example. The book has 123 customer reviews at Amazon, but 469 reviews on Goodreads.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Authors Guild has responded to the news of the upcoming Penguin Random House merger, calling for “close scrutiny from antitrust officials at the Justice Department or the FTC” before the publishers combine forces.

The Guild feels that the super-publisher will control more than 35 percent of the “fiction and narrative non-fiction market,” a worrisome development for the group.  Authors Guild president Scott Turow had this comment:

Survival of the largest appears to be the message here … Penguin Random House, our first mega-publisher, would have additional negotiating leverage with the bookselling giants, but that leverage would come at a high cost for the literary market and therefore for readers. There are already far too few publishers willing to invest in nonfiction authors, who may require years to research and write histories, biographies, and other works, and in novelists, who may need the help of a substantial publisher to effectively market their books to readers.

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Department of Justice sued five major publishers and Apple this week, alleging that they colluded to fix eBook prices.

The decision generated responses around the industry. Authors Guild president Scott Turow wrote:

The settlement provides a gigantic obstacle to Amazon’s competitors in the e-book business by allowing Amazon to function without making a profit, something that leaves that market forbidding to anyone else who might think of entering, and a bad business for those already there. Today’s low Kindle book prices will last only as long as it takes Amazon to re-establish its monopoly.  It is hard to believe that the Justice Department has somehow persuaded itself that this solution fosters competition or is good for readers in the long run.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

The Department of Justice sued five major publishers and Apple this week, alleging that they colluded to fix eBook prices.

The decision generated responses around the industry. Authors Guild president Scott Turow wrote:

The settlement provides a gigantic obstacle to Amazon’s competitors in the e-book business by allowing Amazon to function without making a profit, something that leaves that market forbidding to anyone else who might think of entering, and a bad business for those already there. Today’s low Kindle book prices will last only as long as it takes Amazon to re-establish its monopoly.  It is hard to believe that the Justice Department has somehow persuaded itself that this solution fosters competition or is good for readers in the long run.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Authors Guild president and novelist Scott Turow sent a blunt letter to members this afternoon, calling the possibility of a Department of Justice lawsuit against Apple and five major publishers “grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture.”

We’ve reprinted the entire letter below, but here is an excerpt: “Amazon was using e-book discounting to destroy bookselling, making it uneconomic for physical bookstores to keep their doors open … The irony bites hard: our government may be on the verge of killing real competition in order to save the appearance of competition.”

The news broke yesterday that the DOJ may sue Apple, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, Penguin Group (USA), Macmillan and HarperCollins for allegedly colluding to fix eBook prices when they established the agency model for eBook pricing.

continued…

New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.