I have just received a press release from a newly set up ebook publishing and distributing company, aimed at authors whose backlist books aren’t available as e-books yet and publisher’s back lists, which I thought might interest you.

BookCyclone is an imprint of Signal 8 Press, a Hong Kong based publishing house and it is basically aiming at the whole world, apart from the USA and the UK, which as they correctly point out is already well and truly seeded with all manner of online ebook publishers, ebook sellers and so on.  So this one is more for the Pacific Asia area, and Africa and South America – Having said this, they are actually working with a few authors in both the USA and UK.

Marshall Moore, the owner of BookCyclone describes what it is they are attempting to get off the ground quite clearly:-

We are working directly with writers and publishers to make backlist but still viable titles available as e-books. We’re also partnering with independent and university presses around the world in order to make their books (reprints as well as new releases) available. This isn’t exactly new but our approach is. BookCyclone is an imprint of a publishing house, not just a file conversion service with a single website… and we act as a distributor as well. You’ll find our books on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Editions, Apple, and many other e-retail sites around the world.

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I have been researching and pondering about this latest scheme of Amazon’s this last period with a view to writing an analysis of it for my blog, when I saw what Rich Adin had written on his blog (An American Editor), and felt that he had managed to encapsulate it all very well, and that I probably wouldn’t be able to come up with a clearer idea about the merits or otherwise of this idea.

Whilst I am not as anti-Amazon as Rich, I share most of his thoughts on this one to a great extent, so I thought, well, why reinvent the wheel?

So, with his full permission, here are his contemplation on this one.

The word is with Rich:

Ebook Exclusivity – A good or bad idea?

The answer really is “it depends.” It depends on who you are and where you are in the ebook world.

Recently, Amazon started a program for its Prime members: they can borrow 1 ebook for free each month, choosing from a list of more than 30,000 titles (and the list is growing). The source of these ebooks appears to be the Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) program. Amazon is encouraging self-publishing authors to participate in KDP. KDP will “lend” books in its program to Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, which is part of the Prime membership.

Amazon hasn’t ignored compensation, either. It has set up a pool of money ($500,000), which is the pool for the first month (Amazon plans to set aside $6 million for the 2012 pool). Every indie-author-participant whose book is borrowed will receive a share of the pool based on the number of times the book is borrowed as a share of total borrowings of all particpating ebooks. Presumably, if your book is borrowed 100 times and the total number of borrowings is 500,000, you would receive $1 for each borrowing (hopefully my math is correct). If, on the other hand, your book is lost in the ever-growing list and not borrowed at all, you will receive nothing except for whatever royalty you are due in the normal course of business with Amazon as a result of sales.

So far, so good — or so it would appear.

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Post written by Guest Writer Lizzy Ford:

From Rejection to Sales: This Guerrilla Writer’s Tale

Like many indie writers, I tried on and off for about ten years to gain the attention and interest of an agent or publisher.  I had a few false starts and a whole lot of ignored query letters after years of grueling work.  Thoroughly depressed, I almost gave up on writing and began to doubt I ever had an ounce of talent in me.  My husband is the I.T. brawn of the family who had been following technological development in the book arena, and suggested I try e-publishing this past December.  Going in, I wasn’t really sure how things would turn out, because I’d been programmed to believe that writers forced to invest in themselves are writers who weren’t good enough for a publisher to invest in them.

We studied what most successful writers have in common, identified two common themes (multiple titles and an extensive fan base) and used those to tailor a marketing plan that I’ve been told multiple times was nothing short of madness.  The plan had two goals:

1.  Focus on exposure – not sales – for 2011.
2.  Make December 2011 the month when it all comes together.

I’m a fanatic writer, and I can write 30-60,000 words a month.  I also had a list of about 65 projects I wanted to write, of which about 3 were completed and about 30 were in various stages of writing.  So we decided to do what no one else had done yet: write as many books as I could this year and release them all for free in order to build a back list and fan base in the shortest amount of time possible.  By the end of December, we’ll have released 10 books this year.  We’ve been operating under the assumption that any sales we get before December are luck – they’re not part of the plan!  In December, we monetize our operations.

My December target: sell 10,000 books.

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Rich Adin mulls over my post on the dangers for authors in a world dominated by ebooks.

Rich Adin who runs an interesting blog (An American Editor) read my post about the problems that the advent of ebooks have brought to authors who want to make a living writing and left a comment there, which finished with these words:

“Hmmm. I think I will stop here and use this comment as a basis for a post at my blog. Writing for you has freely inspired me to write for me; the consequent cost to you is that the balance of my thoughts are not currently available. Sounds like the publishing industry in decline, doesn’t it?”

Well, he has now written that post for his blog, and it seemed to me that I should repost it here as it is a reaction to things I wrote in that post on my blog.  And in passing make those thoughts he referred to available to us all here as well as on his blog!  Ha!

So, here is that post for your interest and enjoyment:

Clashing Perspectives: Coming Home to Roost

Ewan Morrison wrote about the future of publishing from the publisher’s and author’s perspectives. I somewhat share his bleak, perhaps apocalyptic, outlook for the future of the publishing industry (see “Are Books Dead, and Can Authors Survive?“; for “outsider’s” perspective, see Tony Cole’s discussion of Morrison’s article, ”Can Authors Survive in the Age of eReaders and eBooks?“).

The mistake being made in publishing is, I think, one of clashing perspectives. People in the industry look at a book, regardless of its form, as simultaneously a commodity and something unique. The mistake is that it has to be one or the other; it cannot be both. It cannot be both because each perspective demands a different approach to the book and the two approaches are incompatible.

As a result of this clash, each step in the production of the book is degraded. The result is that, for too many authors, the only thing that matters is getting “published,” with the consequence of “free” being the optimal way to get noticed. With the growth of free, there has to be a decline in “not free.” Misbalance of free and not free is, in the end, the death knell of “traditional” publishing.

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Don’t give up, justfight the good fight to  get your ebook published.

Alana cash, a successful filmmaker has written a long article for (http://www.insearchofdesign.com/) in which she describes the considerable problems she has experienced as she attempted to get her book TOM’S WIFE published as an ebook, and she has agreed to let me share some of her experiences with you guys, in a spirit of “I fell into the holes in the road, here are some warning signposts to help you avoid doing the same”.

When she decided to publish her ebook herself, she had a look at the various online outfits who offer what is called Publish on Demand (POD), such as Smashwords, Lightening and CreateSpace (the last being the outfit who distribute her films for her) and that is when her problems began.

Contract….  Oh yeah?

The first problem she ran into was one that has probably not really occurred to most of you hopeful authors out there, and that is the form of contracts that these POD’s offer authors who publish via them.

Basically when she looked a these contracts it quickly became obvious to her that they are actually in no way really contracts, or as she puts it:

In a standard publishing situation, once a book has been accepted for publication, the publisher and author negotiate a contract setting out the percentage of sales the author will receive as royalties, which rights (movie rights, international rights, paperback rights, etc.) the author transfers and which are retained by the author to be negotiated later and other matters.

OK, this all makes perfect sense, and is a real agreement between two parties, and is real protection for both of them, but in the world of POD things are not like that:

In the world of self-publishing/print-on-demand (POD), there are only implied agreements.  By going through the process of uploading a PDF to the POD company site, the author is agreeing to have the book printed and marketed by that company.  Meaning, an author can’t claim later any sort of infringement of copyright because they’ve implied an agreement to print the book, but the author retains all rights to the material. Read full story »

XinXii launch a HTML5 based ereader App for Smart Phones and Tablets:

XinXii, a German online site that offers self publishing and purchasing of ebooks in German (and about 6 other languages) have just announced that they will be  launching an HTML5 based app for people who want to use Smart Phones or Tablets for buying or selling all sorts of digital texts while on the move, thus removing the need for  a computer for this.

As they put it in their Press release:

With the web application, the Internet platform XinXii is once again demonstrating its pioneering spirit and its market leadership in digital self-publishing: The XinXii web app now makes it possible for any authors to publish and sell their works also via their iPad, Android-based tablet or smartphone – in real time. On XinXii, readers have mobile access quickly and simply to more than 12,000 eBooks – anywhere and anytime, online and offline.

XinXii, the online market place for indie authors and self-publishers develops a mobile version for HTML5-compatible devices: The web app means that the eBook shop can also be accessed by mobile users. The browser-based application scores with a host of useful functions for rapid and simple upload or download whilst on the move: Authors can now also manage their publications on their mobile end device after a simple log-in or upload new ones and offer downloads for a fee. All processes are done as usual in real time. In the same way, readers gain access to the overall catalogue of more than 12,000 titles that are displayed with the information that is standard on XinXii.com such as category, product description, length, author profile and useful rating information. The purchased eBook, document or audio book is downloaded and is available for direct or later reading/listening – even without a network connection. “Authors who want to publish, for example, their seminar documents while they are on the move no longer need a laptop  – just their iPad, their tablet or their smartphone,” says Dr Andrea Schober, CEO of XinXii.com. “Readers can read the purchased text as required either directly or transfer them into iBooks or native reader apps and access them for as long as they like.” Read full story »