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After publishing 10 suspense novels, two of them bestsellers turned into Hollywood movies, Joseph Finder had what most writers would sell their souls for: brand-name author status; a seven-figure, multibook deal with a major publisher; a list of his previous works aggressively marketed by his publisher; and a loyal readership for virtually anything he wrote.

Then, two years ago, in a plot twist befitting one of Finder’s didn’t-see-that-coming thrillers, he made an abrupt change. After his last novel, “Buried Secrets,” failed to make the bestseller list, the Boston-based author bought out his contract with a seven-figure check, left his longtime publisher and agent, and wrote his next novel without a signed deal in place.

. . . .

“It was the bravest thing I ever did, and I’m not a brave person,” Finder, 55, said about cutting ties with St. Martins, then writing his next novel on spec.

Finder’s new novel, “Suspicion,” debuted this week, and all signs are that his gamble paid off. “Suspicion” was eventually bought by Dutton, with whom he signed a lucrative three-book contract last year.

He makes it clear that he bears no ill will toward St. Martins, and that any disagreement between the two parties was not over money.

“If not for them, I would not be a New York Times best-seller, period,” Finder said at his Back Bay office. “We just disagreed. They wanted me to be the CEO of Suspense. And I felt that was too constricting.”

. . . .

According to his own market research, female readers represent about 70 percent of the book-buying public interested in fiction of any kind. Many have commented to Finder personally, he says, that while they might buy a novel marketed as a “corporate thriller” for their husband, they would not pick one up themselves.

“Branding is a two-edged sword, a way of creating trust in a product,” he said. ‘The ‘CEO of the corporate thriller,’ though, does not describe what I do. I do ordinary-guy thrillers, regular people in extraordinary circumstances. There’s nothing corporate about ‘Suspicion.’”

According to Little Brown publisher and industry veteran Reagan Arthur, it’s not unheard of for an author of Finder’s stature to change publishers in an effort to be marketed differently. Romance novelists and thriller writers are the most likely to do so, she added.

“Changing your agent and publisher is a more dramatic approach, though,” Arthur said. It’s also unusual for an author to buy out such a lucrative contract before it’s completed, she noted.

Link to the rest at The Boston Globe and thanks to Andrew for the tip.

“Paris Hilton meets Pride and Prejudice.”

. . . .

 

“I see that there is an apple on the front so I think —- cookbook!….Then no apples or recipes. Only things that are not true about the world around us.”

Link to the rest at One-Star Book Reviews and thanks to Tina for the tip.

I’ve got an Amazon habit. Like many of my other habits – coffee drinking, newspaper reading, excessive profanity – it’s one that I’ve cultivated and refined over the years, ever since I made my first purchase on June 24, 1996, for a new copy of Dan Wakefield’s “New York in the Fifties.”

In the beginning, I used Amazon primarily as a gift-delivery service. Later, I became the primary recipient of my purchases. Later still, I started “subscribing” to stuff my family regularly consumed, and after that I purchased an Amazon Prime membership, that amalgam of “free” movie streaming, speedy and cheap delivery of purchases, and more, including many purchases of audio books from the company’s Audible subsidiary.

. . . .

One would think with that many hooks into me, I’d be more an Amazon slave than a customer. But that’s not so. Thanks to the company’s recent non-response to criticism that it’s abusing its market power – a silence that’s consistent with Amazon’s we’ll only-talk-if-we-want-to-promote-something media policy – I’ve made the easy decision to turn my back on the world’s biggest store.

The dispute appears to be over pricing, with big-five publisher Hachette refusing to accept Amazon’s terms on e-books, although nobody can be sure because Hachette has been evasive about the exact cause of the dispute, and Amazon has so far refused to discuss it with the press or anybody else.

. . . .

If Amazon thinks I don’t care about its silence, it’s wrong. I take it personally that the company doesn’t think it owes me even a half-baked explanation for why I can’t buy some books from it.

. . . .

But while Amazon may have captured my wallet, its recent behavior has convinced me to take my business elsewhere. As long as the company’s high-pressured negotiating tactics served my interests – lower prices, expansive selection, superb service – I was on board. But the company has erred in this dispute. It would have been okay with me if it had hard-balled the publisher by refusing to discount its books or even insisted on selling them at a premium. In that case, I could do what I usually do – make individual decisions about where to buy stuff based on price and availability.

. . . .

Until Amazon addresses the currently unpleasantness, I’m deleting my “Wish List” and canceling my food subscription. (I paid in advance for Prime. You won’t hold it against me if I still stream free programs until my account comes up for renewal later this year and I bail, will you?)

Link to the rest at Reuters and thanks to Patricia for the tip.

PG says this guy will last no more than three weeks before he starts hitting the yellow Add to Cart button again.

Incidentally, if you use the link toward the top of the right column before you hit the yellow button, PG receives a small commission on your Amazon purchase.

PG hasn’t checked to be certain, but he thinks he earns the same commission whether you feel guilty when you hit the button or not. PG is just like Jeff that way.

Amazon has finally ended its deafening silence in the matter of its protracted negotiation with Hachette.

The company has put out a statement explaining to customers what’s happening and why and even encourages affected customers who need to buy certain books and are unable to wait for them to be in stock at Amazon to “purchase a new or used version from one of our third-party sellers or from one of our competitors.”

. . . .

Over the past several months, Amazon has been in a contract negotiation with Hachette, one of the world’s largest publishing companies, and has used increasingly noticeable tactics to get the publisher to agree to contract terms that would give Amazon more control over book discounting and make Hachette pay a higher “co-op” fee (marketing dollars publishers spend with retailers for in-store placements) — at least that’s the rumor. Until this statement, Amazon was completely silent on the matter and Hachette had only released a few written statements.

Link to the rest at Digital Book World

PG hadn’t previously focused on Amazon’s mention of purchasing used Hachette books from third-party sellers on Amazon.

Of course, Hachette doesn’t make any money on such used book sales, but Amazon does.

Maya Angelou, the memoirist and poet whose landmark book of 1969, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” — which describes in lyrical, unsparing prose her childhood in the Jim Crow South — was among the first autobiographies by a 20th-century black woman to reach a wide general readership, died on Wednesday in her home. She was 86 and lived in Winston-Salem, N.C.

Link to the rest at The New York Times and thanks to Julia for the tip.

Since about 2010, the electronic book, or ebook, has rapidly increased its market share in the publishing business, and in 2013 it accounted for 27 percent of adult trade-book sales. Academic audiences have been somewhat slower to adopt this format, but as the general market for ebooks has begun to plateau, the academic market has been picking up. Now—and probably not coincidentally—academic libraries find themselves facing sharply increased pricing for commercially published electronic books.

. . . .

In the BLC program, publishers charge libraries for ebooks based on a model that combines payment for short-term use of a title by a student or researcher with the purchase of the title after a few short-term uses. In this way, libraries pay full price for an ebook that meets the needs of multiple readers, and pay a fractional price for ebooks that are of use to only one or two people. This month the BLC was surprised to learn that a number of the publishers in this program planned immediate, significant, and unexplained increases in price. Even worse, the new pricing goes into effect at a time when library budgets are already committed for the 2015 fiscal year.

These newly announced price increases, amounting to several hundred percent in some cases, are levied on short-term uses, and this regressive pricing model is being adopted by the publishers whose ebooks are already among the most expensive in the scholarly market.

. . . .

[T]his move looks like an experiment in predatory pricing, designed to make the most of rising demand, but without justification in terms of either production cost or use value. Academic libraries and the universities they serve have already seen the results of this kind of experiment, in the pricing of scientific journals, which sky-rocketed as publishers transitioned from print to electronic delivery. And although electronic publications have some new costs not attached to print, it is abundantly clear that a small number of commercial publishers, who control over 40 percent of the scientific journals, have reaped major profits in this transition. Price inflation in scientific journals (which has been four times the general rate of inflation since 1986) has taken a major toll on academic-library budgets for books, including ebooks. This shift in resource allocation is not discipline-neutral, either: science and technical disciplines publish primarily in the form of the journal article, but the book remains central to the humanities and the social sciences. These new ebook price increases (by some of the same publishers who have hiked the price of science journals) are unjustified and therefore ethically unacceptable, and they are economically insupportable.

Link to the rest at The Chronicle of Higher Education and thanks to Mary Lou for the tip.

Thanks to Patricia for the tip.

A lot of ink is being spilled over the ongoing negotiations between Amazon and Hachette.

. . . .

At AuthorEarnings.com, we find ourselves in the rather unique position of having taken two data sets of e-book sales from the time period of these negotiations, so we thought it might be interesting to look at what effect the standoff has had on Hachette e-book sales. It’s worth noting that this dispute between Amazon and Hachette goes back at least to November, so we may only be capturing a portion of the overall drop in sales.

. . . .

Our data set on the 85,000 best-selling Kindle e-books includes 1,363 titles from Hachette. A comparison of our February and April data bears out what these authors are reporting: Hachette-published e-books are on average slipping in Amazon sales rank and falling off the charts much faster than works published by the other Big-5 publishers.

Hachette’s total estimated unit sales dropped from 47,000 in the February dataset (5.9% of the total pie) to 38,000 in the April dataset (4.4% of the total pie), despite the latter dataset capturing more books overall (85,000 vs 54,000).

Between February and April, Hachette’s Kindle e-book unit sales have fallen 20% – 25%, depending on whether we are looking at relative market share or at absolute numbers.

. . . .

Between February 8th and April 24th, the average price of a Hachette e-book on Amazon went up 5.5% (versus an average of 2.8% for the rest of the Big-5). That’s twice the increase, which must be partly due to Amazon no longer discounting Hachette’s e-books as steeply as before.

. . . .

Our focus on Amazon Kindle sales prevents us from seeing any possible corresponding increase of Hachette sales at other digital retailers to offset these declines, but we can say that the increase in the average price of Hachette’s e-books is having an effect on sales. It could also be that various Amazon algorithms and recommendation tweaks are contributing to the decreased sales. The big lesson is this: Across the Big-5 publishers, lowering average e-book prices correlated with higher per-title revenue. Increasing e-book prices correlated with lower per-title revenue.

This bears repeating, and it’s a lesson publishers could take from self-published authors: Lower prices means earning more money. We understand that this is counter-intuitive, but our data bears this out. And it’s a truth that many authors have seen for themselves as they experiment with prices. Which raises the question of whether or not publishers would even benefit from control over e-book prices. It could be that the worst thing for Hachette’s bottom line would be to get what they’re asking for in these negotiations.

. . . .

Side Note: Why are newer Macmillan authors faring so poorly, relative to their Big-5 peers?

As we looked at these churn charts for “New” authors versus “Old” authors, we were primarily focused on Hachette. But one other peculiarity jumped out at us from the chart and begged for a deeper examination.

When we compare the churn of bestselling titles from all Macmillan authors to those from other Big-5 publishers, on average the Macmillan’s titles perform in the middle of the Big-5 pack — better than Hachette & HC, but slightly worse than PRH and S&S. However, looking at only “New” authors, with Kindle debuts after 2009, reveals a very different story.

. . . .

On average, titles by Macmillan’s more recent authors are churning down and off the Kindle bestseller charts significantly faster than those of their Big-5 peers.

Link to the rest at Author Earnings

We are currently buying less (print) inventory and “safety stock” on titles from the publisher, Hachette, than we ordinarily do, and are no longer taking pre-orders on titles whose publication dates are in the future. Instead, customers can order new titles when their publication date arrives. For titles with no stock on hand, customers can still place an order at which time we order the inventory from Hachette — availability on those titles is dependent on how long it takes Hachette to fill the orders we place. Once the inventory arrives, we ship it to the customer promptly. These changes are related to the contract and terms between Hachette and Amazon.

At Amazon, we do business with more than 70,000 suppliers, including thousands of publishers. One of our important suppliers is Hachette, which is part of a $10 billion media conglomerate. Unfortunately, despite much work from both sides, we have been unable to reach mutually-acceptable agreement on terms. Hachette has operated in good faith and we admire the company and its executives. Nevertheless, the two companies have so far failed to find a solution. Even more unfortunate, though we remain hopeful and are working hard to come to a resolution as soon as possible, we are not optimistic that this will be resolved soon.

Negotiating with suppliers for equitable terms and making stocking and assortment decisions based on those terms is one of a bookseller’s, or any retailer’s, most important jobs. Suppliers get to decide the terms under which they are willing to sell to a retailer. It’s reciprocally the right of a retailer to determine whether the terms on offer are acceptable and to stock items accordingly. A retailer can feature a supplier’s items in its advertising and promotional circulars, “stack it high” in the front of the store, keep small quantities on hand in the back aisle, or not carry the item at all, and bookstores and other retailers do these every day. When we negotiate with suppliers, we are doing so on behalf of customers. Negotiating for acceptable terms is an essential business practice that is critical to keeping service and value high for customers in the medium and long term.

A word about proportion: this business interruption affects a small percentage of Amazon’s demand-weighted units. If you order 1,000 items from Amazon, 989 will be unaffected by this interruption. If you do need one of the affected titles quickly, we regret the inconvenience and encourage you to purchase a new or used version from one of our third-party sellers or from one of our competitors.

We also take seriously the impact it has when, however infrequently, such a business interruption affects authors. We’ve offered to Hachette to fund 50% of an author pool – to be allocated by Hachette – to mitigate the impact of this dispute on author royalties, if Hachette funds the other 50%. We did this with the publisher Macmillan some years ago. We hope Hachette takes us up on it.

This topic has generated a variety of coverage, presumably in part because the negotiation is with a book publisher instead of a supplier of a different type of product. Some of the coverage has expressed a relatively narrow point of view. Here is one post that offers a wider perspective. 

http://www.thecockeyedpessimist.blogspot.com/2014/05/whos-afraid-of-amazoncom.html

Link to the rest at Kindle Forum