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A flurry of reports since yesterday ( originating with Angela Hoy at WritersWeekly, picked up by numerous blogs and several newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal ) have broken the news that Amazon is apparently seeking to force independent POD-based publishers to use its BookSurge POD service. According to Hoy, Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the "buy" button on their Amazon.com book pages will be "turned off." Hoy found this so hard to believe that she called a BookSurge representative who'd recently been trying to contact her. She says that he confirmed i...

If you've recently seen a call for submissions from Kissed Publications for its three-part After You've Done All You Can anthology of Christian short stories--such as this one , or this one --you may have been tempted to try your luck. You might want to think again. There's a $100 (that's right, two zeros) submission fee per story, which you don't find out about until you've sent away for the guidelines. According to the guidelines, the fee will be refunded if your work is chosen for the anthology (though see below). If not...sayonara, one hundred bucks. While legitimate contests often charge small reading fees to fund prizes and cover administrative costs, reputable publishers don't. A reading fee that's not associated with a contest is a strong warning sign of a publisher that, at best, is not terribly professional. Author compensation for the anthology is equally peculiar. Contributing authors receive 100 copies of the finished book (customized with ...

If you're a writer, you probably have a website. If you have a website, you may recently have been emailed an official-looking WEBSITE COPYRIGHT LICENSING NOTICE from the US Copyright Registry , informing you that your website "has not been protected and is now available for copyright registration." Reading on, alarmed website owners discover the following (all grammatical and other errors faithfully reproduced): IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE UNITED STATES COPYRIGHT LAW, TITLE 92, Sec. 106 to 122, the owner of copyright under this title has the exclusive rights to do and to authorize any of the following: Rights of attribution and integrity: the author shall have the right to claim authorship of that work, and prevent the use of his or her name as the author of any work which he or she did not create. Be advised: Protecting a website is the responsibility of the owner of the website and must be registered through the United States Patent and Trademark office to legally prevent o...

Today I got yet another email promoting a book whose author or publisher has signed up with mass email marketer (read spammer) Media E-blast . I get these on a semi-regular basis, probably because I'm a book reviewer. "E-marketing has been a long term goal for many companies, whether it be a religious organization, record companies, artists, national and independent, and small, medium or large businesses in the world today," says Media E-blast's About Us page. "Media E-blast LLC E-MARKETING solutions will not only help you make money but it will also get your name out there to a specific target market." Costs aren't listed on the site--presumably, they are tailored to the campaign--but perhaps the author on whose behalf I was blasted today took advantage of the "March Madness" sale--Reach 500,000 subscribers! Only $125 per blast!! Limit 3 per customer!!! If I'm any indication (and I can't be unique), many of those subscribers are invo...

There's no question that online retailing has radically changed the way books are bought and sold. A recent Neilsen Online survey, quoted by BBC News , reveals that more books are sold on the Internet than any other product. As of early 2008, a full 41% of Internet users had bought books online--and those numbers are expected to continue to rise. That sounds impressive. But what does it mean in terms of actual sales? When you slice the bookselling pie into its component parts--chain stores, independent stores, book clubs, the Internet--how big a slice belongs to the Internet? This is an important question, because "the power of the Internet" is something that is often invoked in discussions of bookselling, without the nature of that power ever really being defined. Micropresses with limited distribution, for instance, may encourage writers to believe that their books' lack of brick-and-mortar bookstore presence isn't a significant handicap, because "so many b...

There's been some online chatter recently about Creative Byline , a manuscript submission service that promises to streamline the process for writers seeking to approach publishers. With Creative Byline, now in beta, writers can easily and affordably get their work in front of the editors who are interested. Editors can bypass manuscript overload to spend more time on those that match what they’re looking for. A new method is long overdue. We think we have a revolutionary idea; we hope you’ll agree. A shortcut past the slushpile? Even better, a shortcut past the "agented submissions only" policy that's so common nowadays with the big publishing houses? As someone who has seen manuscript display websites --most of which made similar promises to transform an outdated submissions system--come and go since the late 1990's, it doesn't seem so revolutionary to me. But let's take a closer look at how it works . For a fee of $19 per adult book manuscript, and $9 p...

I go to a fair amount of writing conferences, science fiction conventions, and teach writing workshops. When aspiring authors ask me "what kinds of novels are editors looking for now?" or "what kinds of fiction are the hottest sellers on today's market?" I respond that there's not much point in trying to jump on the bandwagon of what is selling like hotcakes RIGHT NOW. That's because trends can come and go quickly. Let's suppose I decided to try and get in on the "paranormal romance" boom. (I think it's still booming...?) I sit down and come up with an idea. Young divorcee with a child meets sexy werewolf, discovers she has the ability to tell who will die within the next 24 hours. Mix that up with an evil cabal of sorcerers who are kidnapping elderly folks out of nursing homes to use as human sacrifices. Then one morning she wakes up to find the "death aura" surrounding her little girl. I get busy thinking, plotting, and...