Digital Self-Publishing Forging Powerful New Book Niche

Excerpt from article below: "Once derided as 'vanity' titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment."

The above statement is the essence of the post today. Many writers are experiencing success after having the door slammed shut in their faces by traditional publishing and are empowered by the new publishing avenues opened to them...AND this is how it should be! The people who produce the actual work upon which all in the publishing and associated businesses are making their money should be calling more of the shots!

The personal success stories detailed below in the Wall Street Journal article by
GEOFFREY A. FOWLER And JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG are captivating and a must read:

Writer Karen McQuestion spent nearly a decade trying without success to persuade a New York publisher to print one of her books. In July, the 49-year-old mother of three decided to publish it herself, online.

Eleven months later, Ms. McQuestion has sold 36,000 e-books through Amazon.com Inc.'s Kindle e-bookstore and has a film option with a Hollywood producer. In August, Amazon will publish a paperback version of her first novel, "A Scattered Life," about a friendship triangle among three women in small-town Wisconsin.

Ms. McQuestion is at the leading edge of a technological disruption that's loosening traditional publishers' grip on the book market—and giving new power to technology companies like Amazon to shape which books and authors succeed.

Much as blogs have bitten into the news business and YouTube has challenged television, digital self-publishing is creating a powerful new niche in books that's threatening the traditional industry. Once derided as "vanity" titles by the publishing establishment, self-published books suddenly are able to thrive by circumventing the establishment.

"If you are an author and you want to reach a lot of readers, up until recently you were smart to sell your book to a traditional publisher, because they controlled the printing press and distribution. That is starting to change now," says Mark Coker, founder of Silicon Valley start-up Smashwords Inc., which offers an e-book publishing and distribution service.

Fueling the shift is the growing popularity of electronic books, which few people were willing to read even three years ago. Apple Inc.' s iPad and e-reading devices such as Amazon's Kindle have made buying and reading digital books easy. U.S. book sales fell 1.8% last year to $23.9 billion, but e-book sales tripled to $313 million, according to the Association of American Publishers. E-book sales could reach as high as 20% to 25% of the total book market by 2012, according to Mike Shatzkin, a publishing consultant, up from an estimated 5% to 10% today.

Read more at http://alturl.com/7vax

The Digital Newsstand: How Magazines Will Be Sold in the Tablet Age

Let's take a small step into the future and see how digital magazines will be distributed on digital newsstands. WOOOOSSHH...PLOP! We're here!

This looksee through the futuristic curtain is provided by Chandra Johnson-Greene of FOLIO magazine (pictured at left):

Magazine Publishers have quite a few choices when it comes to finding a newsstand in which to sell the digital, e-reader and mobile versions of their titles. From platforms created by digital edition vendors such as Zinio and Nxtbook, to newsstands directly related to devices created by Amazon and Barnes & Noble, publishers have multiple opportunities to position themselves in this new landscape. Here’s a breakdown of what’s currently available as well as what’s to come.

Breaking Down the Options

Digital edition vendors are currently taking two approaches when it comes to helping publishers sell their digital editions online: they’re either creating their own marketplaces or they’re creating magazine-branded storefronts and/or apps.

The majority of vendors, it seems, are taking the second approach. Tulsa, Oklahoma-based iMirus, for example, has been building microsites directly onto its clients’ Web sites where all of the digital subscription transactions take place. “The microsite allows us to strengthen the Pharmacy Today brand and it makes us more searchable,” says Bill Succolosky, senior director, creative services, associate publisher, American Pharmacists Association. “It connects our readers back to our homepage and also allows us the opportunity to sell ads online, which supplements our print edition.”

Lancaster, PA-based Nxtbook also has its own newsstand, but it isn’t actually used to sell digital subscriptions. Nxt-Stand is a portal where publishers can promote their digital content and readers can browse content for free. From there, customers are directed to the subscription page of that publisher’s Web site or are advised to purchase subscriptions via eMagazines.com. All of Nxtbook digital magazines are accessible on the Blackberry via the company’s Liberty platform.

Texterity has no plans to align its current newsstand Coverleaf with its mobile and e-reader offerings, according to a company spokesperson. It is currently working on providing print/digital bundle subscriptions that will be magazine-branded, not Texterity-branded.

“Digital vendors removing themselves from branding makes a lot of sense,” says Technologizer founder Harry McCracken. “There’s no inherent reason why readers should care about digital-distribution companies any more than they do about the ones that deliver print magazines to newsstands.”

Tablets and the iPad could be a boon for digital magazines. “If companies like Zinio, Nxtbook and Texterity play their cards right, e-readers should be the best things that ever happened to them,” says McCracken. “They already have well-established publisher relationships and technologies, and far more people are going to want to read magazine-format publications on tablet-style devices than ever wanted to on PCs.”

Publishers are also producing their own apps. “Very soon, we’ll have our own branded app and then customers will be able to get to our digital edition right from SportingNews.com,” says Jeff Price, president and publisher of Sporting News, which also works with Zinio. “It’s the best of both worlds because now we can focus on the loyalists through our own marketing and outreach efforts.”

Publishers can also sell their digital content on newsstands that Amazon and Barnes & Noble have created specifically for their devices—the Kindle and the nook. Both companies have created apps to make the content users download onto their devices accessible on PCs, Macs, Blackberrys and iPhones.

The subscription prices on these retailer newsstands, however, are more competitive than other digital newsstands. A monthly subscription to Fortune, for example, can be purchased for $1.49 a month on the Kindle, while The Nation costs the same on the nook.

What’s Next?

Going into 2011, publishers should have two more digital storefronts: Next Issue Media and Skiff.

“We don’t want to force people to have to go onto their computer and into a browser to get new content,” Skiff president Gilbert Fuchsberg told FOLIO:. “So we think it’s important to optimize our service for various devices.”

Skiff is in support of a traditional subscription model, according to Fuchsberg, because it’s what consumers tend to prefer, but the company will also sell single copies and bundles that could include the print magazine. When asked about price points, Fuchsberg declined to provide specifics but says that they will probably reflect was consumers are expecting.

“In general, consumers expect digital to be less expensive,” he says. “But at the same time, we want to make sure that publishers are getting paid for the value that’s being delivered.”

The magic price point for e-reader content may not come soon, according to McCracken. “Part of convincing people to pay will be to produce a product that’s meaningfully better than both the print and Web versions, at least for some reasons,” he says. “Nobody has completely solved that riddle. I’m pretty sure that it’s lower than the full print subscription cost—and I hope that it’s meaningfully higher than $0.”

For the most part, consumers are set on how they expect their shopping experience to be, which includes choices that are relevant to them, having access to decent search capabilities, and being able to read what they want in a timely fashion, according to Fuchsberg. “One of the great virtues of e-reading is thinking of something and doing it in a minute or less,” he says.

And publishers looking to get their titles onto any digital newsstands should be thinking about how to do so in the most efficient way possible. “That’s a big challenge especially for smaller publishers,” Fuchsberg says. “It’s not just about the migration of existing audiences. There will be readers that may not have had a previous relationship with your titles. Now you can deliver a new product to them that they would have never experimented with in print form before, but at a lower cost than print.”

Digital Newsstand Rundown

Company: BlueToad, Inc.
Platform: CoverStand
Titles Available: Magazines include GolfWeek, Paste, The Christian Science Monitor and L.A. Parent. Newspapers, books and catalogs are also available.
Sub Options: Users can subscribe to receive a digital version for their computers or, in most cases, their iPhones.
Price: Most magazines subscriptions are free, while most newspapers and books are paid.

Company: Texterity
Platform: Coverleaf
Titles Available: Titles include Ladies Home Journal, Discover, Fitness and Men’s Health.
Sub Options: If you’re already a print subscriber, you can download the digital version of that magazine for free. Single copies, print/digital bundles and digital-only subscriptions are also available.
Price: Single copies start at $0.99, one-year digital subs start at $4.99 and print/digital bundles start at around $9.97.

Company: Amazon
Platform: Kindle
Titles Available: Magazines include The Atlantic, Forbes, Fortune and Newsweek. Books and newspaper subscriptions are also available.
Sub Options: Subscribers are charged on a monthly basis despite the frequency of the magazine. The Kindle version of each title is delivered once the physical issue hits the newsstands. Kindle apps are also available for the PC, Mac, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad.
Price: Monthly e-magazine subs start at $1.49.

Company: Zinio
Platform: UNITY
Titles Available: Magazines include Billboard, Car and Driver and PC Magazine.
Sub Options: With one subscription purchase, users can receive the PC, Mac, iPhone and iPad versions of each title they choose.
Price: Varies

Company: eMagazines
Platform: eMagazines.com
Titles Available: Titles include ESPN, Black Enterprise, Nylon Guys and Family Circle.
Sub Options: eMagazines.com combines digital editions from across various platforms and software. Mostly monthly subscriptions are available.
Price: Varies

Company: Barnes & Noble
Platform: nook
Titles Available: Magazines include The Nation, Guideposts, Foreign Affairs and Harvard Business Review. Books and newspaper subscriptions are also available.
Sub Options: Users have the choice of only purchasing the most current issue or a monthly subscription. All issues will appear in the user’s eBooks Library on BN.com, on their nook and in their Barnes & Noble eReader.
Price: Monthly e-magazine subs start at $1.49.

Company: Mygazines
Platform: Mygazines.net
Titles Available: Titles include Relevant, AudioFile, Peer to Peer and SpaFinder.
Sub Options: Users can browse, share and e-mail individual issues at no cost. A mobile-browser flexible interface allows users to read their Mygazines on an iPhone, iPad, iTouch or Android.
Price: Free

What Does iPad and Kindle Mean for the Future of the Publishing Industry?

Amazon introduced the Kindle THEN Apple introduced the iPad to fight the Kindle and BOOM we have new business models that have drastically overhauled the way publishing will make money and who will get what share of the booty.

This from the iPad News Tracker:

“Publishing executives have an unprecedented opportunity to grow the industry. Yet, what they are doing is defending their old business model – which, frankly, is now antiquated”

NYU Stern Professor Vasant Dhar, an expert in the strategic implications of information technology, warns that the publishing industry will be the next “carcass” if it doesn’t embrace a new business model, and he proposes what this new model should look like.

Professor Dhar, who conducted the first study to quantify the economic impact of user-generated content for the music business, cites the music trade as a perfect example of an industry that failed because it was unprepared and resistant to adopting new technologies. Instead of focusing on providing their customers value and reasonable rights of usage, they became obsessed with preventing piracy, and it cost them dearly.

He argues that publishers should adopt a more market-back-focused business model that welcomes technological innovation. “Executives are disconnected from their rising consumer base. They underestimate the power of and the cultural shift that has been brought on by emerging technologies.”

Professor Dhar explains the drivers behind the technological shift:

Moore’s Law – which states that raw computing power doubles every 18 months, making general purpose devices capable of rendering content at high quality The increasing level of digitization of virtually all types of content and the explosion of user-generated content: data on the Internet doubles every three months, and roughly 20 hours of new content is currently uploaded every hour on YouTube The modularity of software, which makes it easy to build new applications: while software productivity languished for decades, it has now kicked into high gear as object-oriented software makes it easy to plug-and-play self-contained modules into high-quality systems very quickly Taken together, the three drivers are powerful disruptors of existing business models.

He suggests the publishing industry implement a digital strategy based on simple pricing and digital rights aimed at growing the market of readers. “Increasingly, consumers prefer electronic delivery of their content. Publishers should tap this market and see it for what it is – growth,” said Professor Dhar. “Would you rather have a piece of a growing market even if it’s a smaller percentage than before, or try and hold onto a larger piece of one that is crumbling?” he asks. All the evidence to date suggests that defending obsolete business models isn’t a good idea, he says.

If You Publish on Kindle Your Content Can be Read on Other E-Readers...Maybe

This unnoticed change in Amazon's DRM (Digital Rights Management)policy is big and may signal bigger changes in the future for clients who use DTP (Digital Text Platform) to self-publish on Amazon's Kindle.

Frederic Lardinois, who writes for ReadWriteWeb.com, posted this today about Amazon's changing DRM policy:

Amazon quietly made a major change to its Digital Text Platform last week that went largely unnoticed: small publishers and individual authors who use the Digital Text Platform can now opt out of the Kindle's digital rights management (DRM) program. While this change only affects a relatively small number of publishers and authors for now, this move could hint at a larger change in Amazon's DRM policy. Right now, Amazon's DRM policy means that its customers can't transfer their books to a non-Kindle e-reader.

Update: Amazon just contacted us to let us know that a DRM-free option always existed for publishers using the Digital Text Platform. Amazon just added new functionality that makes it easier for publishers to set these options.

For Amazon, it makes sense to experiment with this new option on the Digital Text Platform. Given that this is a self-publishing tool, the company doesn't have to explain this change to its partners in the publishing industry while allowing the company to experiment with a DRM-free solution. Most publishing houses tend to be very conservative when it comes to DRM-free e-book solutions. In the self-publishing world, however, DRM-free books are very common. Self-publishing platform Smashwords, for example, doesn't even offer a DRM solution.

Right now, you can't take your Kindle e-books to a Sony Reader, for example. While the Kindle is a huge success for Amazon, the current DRM solution is surely holding quite a few potential customers back from making the jump to e-books.

The Beginning of the End for E-Book DRM?
If the e-book world follows the same path as the music industry, however, chances are that restrictive DRM solutions will disappear over the next few years. At least for Amazon, giving its self-published authors and small publishing houses this option is a first step in the right direction. For O'Reilly, publishing DRM-free e-book has turned out to be an advantage. Hopefully, other publishing houses will also realize that DRMed e-books do very little

Tip of the hat to Nieman Lab's Joshua Benton for noticing this change first.

Amazon Increases Royalty Rate for Books on Its Kindle E-Reader

The upcoming release of Apple's Tablet has spurred an interesting move by Amazon...substantially increasing royalties paid to authors and publishers.

Let the games begin!

By Motoko Rich of The New York Times:

In what appeared to be a clear bid to anticipate the release of the breathlessly awaited Apple tablet, Amazon announced Wednesday new royalty terms for authors or publishers who release e-books through its Kindle’s digital text platform, a direct publishing initiative.

Authors and publishers will be offered a royalty rate of 70 percent of the digital list price after “delivery costs,” typically about 6 cents per digital unit. This rate is similar to that currently offered by Apple in its app store.

Amazon’s move is also a clear bid to woo authors away from traditional publishing houses. Publishers typically offer authors a royalty rate equal to 15 percent of a hardcover list price and 7.5 percent of a trade paperback list price. On digital books, the emerging industry standard among the largest publishing houses is 25 percent of net proceeds from the sale of an e-book.

Amazon has set some criteria for authors or publishers who want to receive the 70 percent royalty. List prices must be from $2.99 to $9.99, a maximum that is much lower than the typical hardcover price of around $25. The e-book’s list price must also be 20 percent lower than the lowest list price for a physical copy of the same book and the same price as or lower than any competitor’s price.

Note from John: The last paragraph's listed criteria from Amazon seems a little over-the-edge, does it not?

Amazon Rolls Out Kindle Self-publishing Platform Worldwide

Kindle is debuting it's self-publishing component, Digital Text Platform (DTP), worldwide... Authors can now publish their own content almost instantaneously.

Desire Athow, writing for ITProPortal, puts it this way:

Amazon has announced the expansion of its Kindle self publishing solution, otherwise known as Digital Text Platform, that will allow authors to push out their own content.

The scheme, which was only available in the US previously, will support English, German and French languages, but neither Mandarin or Spanish, two more popular languages. Amazon has confirmed that it will be adding more languages to the Kindle in the forthcoming months.

Published works can then be sold through Kindle store to customers across the world who can download them to their Kindle devices over the air for a fee of which Amazon will keep 65 percent (ed: that is shocking).

However, the DTP is not without flaws, as reported by Betanews' Tim Conneally, Kindle supports only Latin-1 ASCII alphabet and ignores the nine other ISO 8859 8-bit alphabet sets.

The Kindle DX e-reader is expected to be launched over the next few days in the UK and in more than 100 other countries for around £350.

Observers anticipate that DTP might lead to a significant increase in the number of litigation as right holders dispute ownership of titles across various territories.

Amazon hasn't described the details of its vetting process but it is likely to have a simple, but effective one to cope with the massive amount of publications the system is expected to receive at launch

Our Comments
This is essential if Amazon is to make a head start in big-gadget consuming markets in Asian countries. Furthermore, Apple's forthcoming tablet is likely to be very adept at supporting the more complex and intricate Asian character sets.

Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2010/1/16/amazon-rolls-out-kindle-self-publishing-platform-worldwide/2/#ixzz0cnpzQOaD

"Kindle" & "Nook" eBook Readers Will Be Left In Dust By New "Blio" !

A higher tech digital eBook reader with many more applications that can be used on ANY device with an operating system, including computers & iPhones, is coming out in 2010.

Mike Shatzkin revealed this discovery on "The Shatzkin Files":

Baker & Taylor has the next big thing in ebooks. Really!
Posted by Mike Shatzkin on December 8, 2009

We’re about to see the Next Big Thing in ebooks next month and it’s coming from Baker & Taylor. Baker & Taylor?

For the past ten years, Baker & Taylor in relation to Ingram has looked remarkably similar to Borders in relation to Barnes & Noble. Ingram and B&N are family-owned companies (although B&N has the very significant complication of being publicly traded which, with Ron Burkle as a publicly disaffected shareholder, has been well-reported lately) while B&T and Borders are highly leveraged and controlled by private equity. Ingram and B&N with their long-view management styles have made significant infrastructure investments that the always-looking-for-an-exit B&T and Borders ownerships haven’t matched. Ingram built a great supply chain support structure and digital capabilities and B&N built a well-oiled, customized-to-their-needs internal supply chain. And B&T and Borders have made publishers’ credit managers bite their nails while B&N and Ingram are financially solid.

Over the past couple of years, Baker & Taylor has been cobbling together a team of third party vendors attempting to match the service offering Ingram has bought and built internally. To compete with Ingram Digital’s content conversion and digital repository offering, B&T teamed with LibreDigital. To match Ingram’s ability to set up retailers to sell ebooks, B&T created a partnership with OverDrive’s Content Reserve. And to create a print-on-demand capability like Ingram’s Lightning Print, B&T teamed up with Donnelley, which put a machine in B&T’s Momence warehouse.

All of this made sense to me, but it didn’t add up to B&T presenting any serious challenge to Ingram. But they’ve now developed something that might not only give Ingram food for thought but might have them scratching their heads at Amazon and Google and Apple, as well as ScrollMotion and Vook and anybody else thinking about enhanced ebooks.

On January 7 at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, K-NFB will unveil a new “reading technology.” We in the book business will get to know it as a proprietary ebook platform from Baker & Taylor that has capabilities nothing presented previously can match. The platform is called Blio and creator K-NFB is a partnership of tech visionary Ray Kurzweil and the National Federation of the Blind...

Read more at http://alturl.com/fjyt