Tenebris

Long tail for movies on the net

Those following the flurry of commentary taking place around Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" thesis will appreciate a column in today's Wall Street Journal titled "Web Allows Fans to See  Wide Variety of Movies  That Were Hard to Get" (subscription required).  The article notes in passing the obstacles being encoutered in clearing the rights for much of the unavailable content, in this case films. Google has encountered similar obstacles in its implementation of what was once known as Project Ocean, now more broadly as  Google Print.

On a related note, I had a good conversation the other day with Tom Abate, a financial reporter with the San Francisco Chronicle, who has taken a personal interest in the changes being wrought by technology on media. His calls his blog, which promises to be quite interesting, Minimediaguy. One early post mentioned Lulu, but Tom called me because he was mistakenly contacted by a member of Lulu's PR team in connection with a recent press release (about JPG Magazine, the most recent project of Derek Powazek and Heather Champ). Because he covers finance, the story wasn't really up his alley, but he wondered if we contacted him because we had run across his blog. While that was not the case, I'm glad to have had a chance to chat.

Derek Powazek, by the way, is up for a Webby [2/01 correction: up for a bloggy this year, apparently, for lifetime achievement (he is all of 31 years old, but he's got my vote). I know his site fray.com won last year for best art site (or something along those lines). I'm still hoping a newspaper or magazine picks up the JPG Magazine story. Here's a guy who has created a number of  web communities with incredible traffic and participation that most companies would kill for and he's done so solely out of his own artistic impulses. But he's never been able to earn a penny from these successes. JPG Magazine is certainly not going to make anyone rich, but at least Derek and Heather are making back a bit of money for all the effort that went into it.

Atlanta Nights--novel of the moment

The Atlanta Nights juggernaut continues to roll, although people seem more inclined (as they will with bad books) to read it for free on the Internet than to buy a hard copy. The most detail I've run across so far on the creation of the book is an account on Cold Ground, by sci-fi writer Derryl Murphy.

It's not really clear from the string of comments on Metafilter that people are making what I consider to be the important distinction here: that while "self publishing" can be a pot of fool's gold--as it is in the false promise of success by companies that prey on the hopes of writers--it can also be something one goes about with one's eyes open using a straightforward tool--Lulu, for example--that serves a useful purpose.

The whole thing reminds me of the incident of  Robert Burrows, author of a satire that had the good fortune to be dubbed "the worst novel in the English language" by Gene Weingarten of the Washington Post. Bloggers loved that one, too.

Science Fiction Writers Hoax Vanity Press

         

PublishAmerica is having a rough month. After being sued by 150 authors who felt they were deceived by the company, and taking a beating a couple of days ago at the hands of the Washington Post, PublishAmerica has become the object of an elaborate hoax perpetrated by a group of science fiction writers.

The funniest bit -- seen in the pranksters' press release below -- is that the company, which regularly describes itself as a "traditional publisher," tried to backpeddle once it got wind of the prank. So now the 'editors' at PublishAmerica have respectfully "declined" to publish Atlanta Nights, which has happily found a new home on Lulu, the anti-vanity-press press. Sales are as brisk as the prose is questionable. (Be sure to read the customer reviews.)

Science Fiction Authors Hoax Vanity Publisher

Atlanta Nights, by "Travis Tea," was offered a publishing contract by PublishAmerica of Frederick, Maryland.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

[Hugesville, Maryland] Over a holiday weekend last year, some thirty-odd science fiction writers banged out a chapter or two apiece of ATLANTA NIGHTS, a novel about hot times in Atlanta high society. Their objective: to write a deeply awful novel to submit to PublishAmerica, a self-described "traditional publisher" located in Frederick, Maryland.

The project began after PublishAmerica posted an attack on science fiction authors at one of its websites (http://www.authorsmarket.net/). PublishAmerica claimed "As a rule of thumb, the quality bar for sci-fi and fantasy is a lot lower than for all other fiction.... [Science fiction authors] have no clue about what it is to write real-life stories, and how to find them a home."  It described them as "writers who erroneously believe that SciFi, because it is set in a distant future, does not require believable storylines, or that Fantasy, because it is set in conditions that have never existed, does not need believable every-day characters."

The writers wanted to see where PublishAmerica puts its own quality bar; if the publisher really is selective, as the company claims, or if it is a vanity press that will accept almost anything, as publishing professionals assert.

Atlanta Nights was completed, any sign of literary competence was blue-penciled, and the resulting manuscript was submitted. PublishAmerica accepted it.

From: PublishAmerica Aquisitions [meg@publishamerica.com]
Sent: Tuesday, December 07, 2004
Subject: Atlanta Nights

As this is an important piece of email regarding your book, please read it completely from start to finish. I am happy to inform you that PublishAmerica has decided to give "Atlanta Nights" the chance it deserves....
    ...
Welcome to PublishAmerica, and congratulations on what promises to be an exciting time ahead.

Sincerely,
Meg Phillips
Acquisitions Editor
PublishAmerica
   
The hoax was publicly revealed on January 23, 2005. PublishAmerica withdrew their offer shortly afterward:
   
From: "PublishAmerica Acquisitions"
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005
Subject: Your Submission to PublishAmerica        

We must withdraw our offer to publish Atlanta Nights. Upon further review it appears that your work is not ready to be published. There are portions of nonsensical text in the manuscript that were caught by our editing staff as they previewed the text for editing time assessment pending your acceptance of our offer. On the positive side, maybe you want to consider contracting the book with a vanity publisher such as iUniverse or Author House. They will certainly publish your book at a fee.

Thank you.
PublishAmerica Acquisitions Department

Those who wish to see the novel, ATLANTA NIGHTS by "Travis Tea," for themselves can find it at  http://www.lulu.com/travis-tea    

Publication at Lulu.com is free.
   
For more information about PublishAmerica and vanity presses, see:
    http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA481863.html
    http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05022/446283.stm
    http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A25187-2005Jan20.html
    http://www.wnbc.com/askasa/4124957/detail.html
    http://www.sfwa.org/beware/
    http://www.anotherealm.com/prededitors/

The Long Tail Gets Longer

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and author of the essay "The Long Tail," now has a blog dedicated to bringing together some of the thinking provoked by his long tail thesis.  At the moment, he is apparently traveling in India and taking in the collision of hi-tech and developing economy. I keep hoping Anderson will turn his attention to Lulu at some point, but right now some of the most interesting pieces of his blog are in the "long tail comment elsewhere" section.  As I noted here when the original essay was published, Lulu is most similar to Anderson's example of MP3.com, which he described as "all-tail." I am convinced that there are ways that Lulu can get around this, but not without much better filtering technology and an ability to attach independently published content to content with an existing brand, like a John Grisham novel.

By the way, NPR ran a good story this morning on the growing popularity of audio books.

Open Markets for Textbooks

Via Publishers Lunch comes this tidbit from The Roanoke Times: "Students lobby for more open textbook market ." Coincidentally, today is the day we sent out a press release on a new book written by St. Petersburg Community College professor Matt Basham, who became famous by giving away a book he wrote on Cisco certification for network administrators. Another article was posted by the Stanford Daily.

Network Security Using Linux

Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday January 26, 2005: Packet Press, publisher of Network Security Using Linux, by Michael Sweeney. Sweeney is also the owner of PacketAttack.com.

Washington Post Trashes PublishAmerica

An intelligent journalist, Paula Span writing for the Washington Post, dissects the false promises of PublishAmerica, one of the larger POD publishers, in "Making Books: Self-publishing companies are in the business of selling dreams. But what if the dream becomes a nightmare?" (registration, sadly, required)

What I like very much about this article is that Span makes a pretty clear distinction between POD as a technology that allows books to be produced with great economy and subsidy publishing as a sometimes questionable business model . She also accurately notes that "The phrase 'traditional publisher' has no particular definition." All in all, it's a balanced piece of writing, albeit from someone looking at the industry through the eyes of a novice.

What I felt was missing from the piece was that it neglected the larger picture, which includes a publishing world unraveling beneath the relentless flood of new content and diffusing markets. Span also makes mistakes in assuming that editing and marketing are not services that can be obtained  discretely by authors on their own, and in assuming that brick and mortar stores are even a logical option for authors writing for niche markets. The Internet is, of course, the ideal distribution tool for products of any sort with niche markets, or for independent publishers with limited resources. The existing distribution and retail system for books is monstrously inefficient from the standpoint of delivering royalties to authors.

And, of course, the article neglects the emergence of Lulu on the scene over the last year and a half, with its transparency and vision. But you would expect me to be disappointed by that, no? Lulu continues to grow faster than iUniverse, xLibris, or anyone else, from all I can tell. What the journalist nails, however, is the fallacy of the promise implied,  even when not explicitly offered, by companies like PublishAmerica and its ilk--fame and fortune and immortality, not to mention editing.

The Sum of Memory

Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, January 21, 2005: The Sum of Memory, short stories by Daniel Verastiqui. This author has put together a simple, but effective, site to market his book.

Blog for children's science fiction novels

Courtesy of a Neil Gaiman post, I was pleased to discover The Inter-Galactic Playground, a very smart blog "dedicated to children's literature and particularly children's science fiction."

LiveModel Books

Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, January 18, 2005: LiveModel Books, providing "over 170 high quality, accurate, detailed photographs of male and female nudes in full color- presented in interesting poses from a variety of angles suitable for drawing, painting, sculpture and other arts."

Managing Engineering

Lulu storefront of the day for Monday, January 17, 2005: Patrick O'Conner's The New Management of Engineering.

Missing the point: the ALA on digitizing libraries

I missed this the other day when it came out, but David Rothman at Teleread provides a first class summary of the fuss and response over the LA Times editorial against the Google Print program.

Typographica blog

In the straight-to-the-writers'-resources-sidebar category, today I ran across this terrific blog on typography completely by accident: Typographica. I am convinced that the importance of typography in design will reemerge, although obviously to a more limited extent than before due to the amateur nature of most design in the digital age.

Introducing JPG Magazine

     

After waiting a couple of extra months for the inaugural issue, it gives me great pleasure to introduce JPG Magazine as the Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, January 13, 2005. I have seen the first hard copy of this full-color photo magazine and it is the finest application of Lulu's on demand color publishing that I have seen. Really lovely photography and layout--edited by Heather Champ and Derek Powazek, a talented duo in San Francisco. The economics of publishing an on-demand color magazine will be difficult, but I am pleased as I can be to have them using Lulu for the time being.

Rumored to Exist: the books of John Konrath

Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday, January 12, 2005: Rumored.com, home of the novels of John Konrath.

Publishing Your Family Cookbook

Today brings a story from the Christian Science Monitor on the family cookbook publishing market, which is a nice subgenre of independent publishing: "A recipe for preserving family history," by Elizabeth Lund. While Lulu has also approached this market (see Brian Cummings and Magdalena Sinkovec for examples), the story mentions a site specifically for this, called HeritageCookbooks.com, that offers templates to make it easy.

Le Spirale Fantastique, a blognovel

Rohit Gupta, a writer who lives in Bombay, is engaged in an interesting experiment in the blognovel: Le Spirale Fantastique. He's also concocted a scheme for promoting his book through link exchanges. You can choose a sentence from his book and link to it from your own page, and he in turn will link that sentence to your blog.

The sentence I chose was this:

As he sat sipping the gin he’d bought on the way up, she wandered the innards of her cavernous apartment, like a ghost, casting no shadow on the tiled floor.

Given the importance of external links in order for organic search engine marketing, this strikes me as a pretty good scheme. I ran across this, by the way, on eBook culture, a blog that appears to be defunct.

Forum discussion of the disadvantages of POD

Over in the NaNoWriMo forums, I've been engaged in a pretty interesting back and forth on the advantages v. disadvantages of POD publishing. It comes across as a bit of an argument, but I don't actually disagree with the points being made. I do think some of  the authors suffer from a severe overestimation of the powers and virtues of conventional publishers. Publishing still sits on a pedestal for most people, and ample evidence of its fallibility is brushed aside. There is a strong argument, to be sure, for going with a conventional publisher. But there is also an argument to be made for going the independent route. Tucker Max is one author who has struggled to get the best of both worlds.

Cancun User's Guide

           

Lulu storefront of the day for Tuesday, January 11, 2005: Cancun User's Guide, by Jules Siegal (and family). Interesting author and it looks like a terrific travel book.

The Writing and Publishing Life

Courtesy of Publishers Lunch, a lugubrious essay on the economics of the modern publishing business appeared in the UK Telegraph. "Book publishing really lies somewhere between art and commerce," asserts author Luke Johnson, "in some aspects it is a barely rational industry." And, from the same source, a Washington Post essay on "The Writing Life," by Meg Wolitzer.

Lulu storefront of the day for Friday, January 7, 2004: oRo Press

       

Early Georgia Gold - Dahlonega by oRo Press

Essential Reading: Wired interview with Bezos

The January issue of Wired magazine features an interview with Jeff Bezos that is interesting for a number of reasons, among them the fact that he skirts two hot topics.

The online movie rental business is one--interesting because Netflix stock dropped recently on rumors that Amazon.com was about to move into the business. They also lowered their prices to compete with a potential Amazon move, and to compete with Wal-Mart. (I am, for anyone who cares, a big fan of Netflix.)

The other topic of interest is print on demand, a topic curiously close to the heart of Mr. Bezos, as well as to Chris Anderson, Wired's editor, who published the persuasive and thoughtful essay "The Long Tail" in October. Bezos, asked about the viability of putting print on demand into bookstores:

That's a possibility, but I think that's a pretty small part of what would happen there. Print-on-demand actually plays more to the strengths of the online world. We already have many in our catalog, but it's invisible to you, the customer. We use a number of companies that do the actual printing, but we mail them like regular books. They look like regular trade paperbacks.

Couple that with the statistics quoted in Anderson's essay about the percentage of Amazon's revenue generated from "obscure" book titles as well as with Bezos' oft-stated principle of offering the greatest possible selection of products on Amazon's infinitely large retail shelves, and you get a sense of where Amazon's real strategy lies.

Chugworth Academy

           

Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, January 6, 2005: Chugworth Academy, publisher of Chugworth Academy: All Aboard the Mentalist Train . In related news, the comic site Newsorama recently published a story comparing Lulu and another publishing outlet called ComixPress as vehicles for self-publishing comics.

CBS on Porn and Publishing

Ok, so the crossover between porn and publishing is the topic du jour in this CBS 60 Minutes article--"Raw Profit On The Printed Page," and apart from Jenna Jameson's bestseller, there is ample evidence of what Judith Regan refers to awkwardly as "the porn-ization of America."  Of course savvy publishers are catching on.

Not to digress too much, but what's puzzling to me is that the pundits on the right--who have railed against the, er, penetration of mainstream culture by porn for years--used to blame this trend on the Clinton presidency. Well, ok. So let's say there was an environment of hedonism--a lack of moral discipline--during the nineties. What is there now?

We are entering a fifth year under an evangelical president who won the most recent election by a healthy majority on the shoulders of a religious community that can't seem to stop talking about how empowered it feels. Nevermind the success of Desperate Housewives, why is it that porn gets bigger and bigger? [insert joke here] And how does this relate, if at all, to the continuously dropping teen pregnancy and sexual activity rates in the U.S.? Are we becoming a nation of sluttily dressed, but morally upright, women and Viagra-popping, godly men? What is going on?

The Long Bet: books printed on demand

This article by publishing veteran Joseph Epstein (in Technology Review) is well worth reading for its own sake, the accuracy of its predictions about the future of publishing aside. It is tied to a stunt on a site new to me called LongBets.org, where a related wager between Epstein and Vint Cerf, a vice president at World Com, can be voted on and discussed. The wager revolves around whether or not the sales and consumption of information will increasingly center on print on demand or whether it will be delivered on electronic screens in some version of the format we know as e-books. Interesting stuff.

I remember reading another article by Epstein on why sales of books over the Internet could never be profitable, an argument he summarizes in the piece in TechReview:

In 1986, with this problem in mind, I conceived the Readers Catalog, a directory of some 40,000 backlist titles that could be ordered through an 800 number (the Internet had not yet been commercialized). The idea was to re-­create a medium-sized independent bookstore in the form of a printed catalogue the size of a big-city telephone directory. Sales were brisk—but my business plan was flawed. The average revenue per order was about $35, plus shipping and handling, but the cost of handling small orders was more than could be recouped. By the time the Internet was flourishing, I had decided not to put the Readers Catalog online but instead auctioned it off to Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble—warning them that their margins would not cover the cost of handling small orders for individual customers. (They have since lost millions of dollars while performing an invaluable service to publishers, writers, and readers.)

Epstein's vision of a cost-effective system for distributing digital books resembles the network of ATMs that allow the system of paper money to continue to exist (note that parallel arguments wage regarding paper money v. electronic money, paper ballots v. electronic ballots). But he tosses in an aside at the end of his article that may be prove to be important:

The next year, one of my lectures appeared in the New York Review of Books, where it was read by my friend Michael Smolens, an entrepreneur also interested in print-on-demand technology. He told me that such a machine was even at that moment making books in a small workshop in Missouri. Its inventor, Jeff Marsh, would welcome a visit from us. (Disclosure: Smolens, I, and a few others are now in business together: our company hopes to build a print-on-demand machine for less than $100,000.)

A month or so ago, I posted about a a note in John Battelle's Searchblog on the Google print program in which he wrote that he was aware of one company preparing to launch a print on demand mechanism that could make all Google texts purchasable. Perhaps he was referring to Marsh Technologies. Looking solely at their web site, they somehow  seem considerably less threatening. I think these folks have been hard at work on this for a while without much progress.

More discussion of the issue can be found here:

Pandagon

Instabook is a company that has successfully stirred up a fair amount of publicity recently with book-printing kiosks, but they seem oddly low-tech to me (judging from their web site)

Discussion on the LongBet site

 

Xlibris Spams Authors: Shame!

The subsidy publisher Xlibris has been spamming Lulu authors using the unethical practice known as "screen-scraping," in which they collect the emails of unsuspecting authors from random sites (in this case, www.lulu.com) on the Internet and use those addresses to send unsolicited sales messages.

They have been panned for this practice before (see "When Good Companies Use Spam: Xlibris"), but for some reason they persist. They persist despite the fact that screen-scraping is univerally frowned on by legitimate Internet companies, despite the fact that stealing Lulu users' email addresses is expressly prohibited in the terms of use of Lulu.com. In fact, it's even a violation of the terms of use of the Xlibris site! From Xlibris:

Any use by you of any other subscriber's information, personal or otherwise, for any commercial purpose or to obtain direct financial gain (e.g., mass marketing) is prohibited. Any such use shall be deemed to be a violation of these Terms of Service. Xlibris is to be used by you for your personal use only. Commercial uses of Xlibris are strictly prohibited unless prior written consent from Xlibris has been granted. You agree that you will not use Xlibris for chain letters, junk mail, 'spamming,' solicitations (commercial or non-commercial) or bulk communications of any kind including but not limited to distribution lists to any person who has not given specific permission to be included in such a list.

Based on what I have been able to determine, Xlibris appears to steal users' email addresses from every writing site they can find, including NaNoWriMo, StoryCircle, and AuthorsDen, to name a few. An example of Xlibris spam appears below:

Dear [author's name],

My name is Mercedes and I work for Xlibris, a leader in the self-publishing industry.  If you don’t mind, I wanted to take this opportunity to tell you a little bit about how we can help you achieve publishing success.

Xlibris is partially owned by Random House Ventures, LLC, a subsidiary of Random House, the world's largest trade book publisher.  We distinguish ourselves from other self-publishing companies by offering both trade and full-color publishing programs, a wide array of marketing services and a superior copy-editing service.

To date, we have published over 10,000 titles, paid our authors more than $1,000,000 in royalties, and paved the way for many of them to win contracts with traditional publishers such as St. Martin’s Press, Kensington, and Bantam Books.

Writers choose Xlibris because we are known for excellence. We are so confident you’ll be thrilled with our services that we back them up with a 100% money-back guarantee.

To learn more about how we can help you achieve publishing success, please click the following link and we will send you a guide to our Publishing Services.

[URL]

You can also call us toll free at (888) 795-4274 x278 and ask to speak with a Publishing Consultant to learn more. Each month, we run special offers for new submissions.  So contact us today!

Sincerely,

Mercedes Bournias
Xlibris Publishing

PS - I'm sorry if I've disturbed you. If you don't want to receive any more messages from Xlibris, please let me know by clicking the link below.

[URL]

I don't make a habit of speaking ill of any specific print on demand company, but this is the second time Xlibris has come up in these pages in a negative context. The last time was when they chose to outsource a number of editing jobs to the Philippines: "XLibris lays off workers; outsources customer service."

You would think that a company partly owned by Random House would have more sense. I'm not going to comment, by the way, on the business model (10,000 titles published at a minimum of $500 per book from each author, $1 million in royalties paid out...hmmm). There's another (truly loathsome) company out there that employs ruthless and unethical spamming called Bookman Publishing. Most authors probably know enough to steer clear of these folks, but Xlibris is in other respects an apparently reputable company. Shame.

I will content myself to point out that there are very good spam reporting services out there, among them SpamCop.net. When you get unsolicited spam, report it. We're all in this together.

Porn-no-more

After an absence of several weeks, I'd like to reintroduce the Lulu storefront of the day.

Lulu storefront of the day for Monday, January 3, 2005: Pornnomore.com, source for of Clean of Heart: Overcoming Habitual Sins against Purity by  Rosemarie Scott.

Happy new year, by the way.

The Man In the Flying Lawn Chair

Adding this to my wish list: "The Man In the Flying Lawn Chair," a posthumously published collection of essays by George Plimpton, a "democrat of the first order," in the words of the New York Times.