Meet the REAL Mark Twain!

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was an all-American writer...and a man after my own heart. Not so much because of his legendary writings (that too), but because of his legendary thinking!

The University of California Press will publish volume one of three of his 500,000 word unexpurgated autobiography this coming November. This autobiography shows his true thoughts on politics and worldly affairs to be current and contemporary as well as passionate...A must read for history buffs.

This autobiography was dictacted to a stenographer from 1906 to 1910 and witheld from publication at his request for a century...Primarily because Mark Twain believed his more brash positions might hurt his reputation at that time.

Two brief excerpts:

"Twain’s opposition to incipient imperialism and American military intervention in Cuba and the Philippines, for example, were well known even in his own time. But the uncensored autobiography makes it clear that those feelings ran very deep and includes remarks that, if made today in the context of Iraq or Afghanistan, would probably lead the right wing to question the patriotism of this most American of American writers."

"He is similarly unsparing about the plutocrats and Wall Street luminaries of his day, who he argued had destroyed the innate generosity of Americans and replaced it with greed and selfishness. “The world believes that the elder Rockefeller is worth a billion dollars,” Twain observes. “He pays taxes on two million and a half.”

This report from Larry Rohter of the New York Times:

Dead for a Century, Twain Says What He Meant

Wry and cranky, droll and cantankerous — that’s the Mark Twain we think we know, thanks to reading “Huck Finn” and “Tom Sawyer” in high school. But in his unexpurgated autobiography, whose first volume is about to be published a century after his death, a very different Twain emerges, more pointedly political and willing to play the role of the angry prophet.

Whether anguishing over American military interventions abroad or delivering jabs at Wall Street tycoons, this Twain is strikingly contemporary. Though the autobiography also contains its share of homespun tales, some of its observations about American life are so acerbic — at one point Twain refers to American soldiers as “uniformed assassins” — that his heirs and editors, as well as the writer himself, feared they would damage his reputation if not withheld.

“From the first, second, third and fourth editions all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out,” Twain instructed them in 1906. “There may be a market for that kind of wares a century from now. There is no hurry. Wait and see.”

Twain’s decree will be put to the test when the University of California Press publishes the first of three volumes of the 500,000-word “Autobiography of Mark Twain” in November. Twain dictated most of it to a stenographer in the four years before his death at 74 on April 21, 1910. He argued that speaking his recollections and opinions, rather than writing them down, allowed him to adopt a more natural, colloquial and frank tone, and Twain scholars who have seen the manuscript agree.

Read more at http://alturl.com/d9psa

Publishing Business Not Dead Quite Yet?

The latest figures tumbling out of the trade magazines RE publishing shout the fact that there are numerous "new-kids-on-the-block"! This reflects the high impact of the e-media on traditional publishing (TP)...And is forcing TP companies to either bankrupt or adapt new business models.

Those TP companies that try to form new biz models with hidden agendas (that try to regain ill-gotten control of the past) will fail...Those that genuinely set new goals to work as team members with equal partners will survive...Simple as that!

Michael Wolff , the founder of newser.com, reports this on what the new numbers and rankings from the online trade magazine MediaPost (a newbie itself) mean (many feel these numbers are suspect):

What is there to conclude from the recent ranking of the top 100 publishers by the online trade magazine, MediaPost?

It’s a ranking that claims to figure in traffic, plus “prestige, share of voice, content quality, overall design and UX, innovation and, well, importance.” In other words, it’s as sketchy as any ranking. But it does illustrate the obvious, albeit hard to quantify, fact that the consumer publishing business—the business of gathering audiences by aggregating information and then selling those audiences to advertisers—has in a remarkably short period of time been turned on its ear.

While many traditional publishers still figure on the list, with the New York Times at number one, and the Wall Street Journal at number four—Google and Wikimedia are respectively at two and three—more than half of the list consists of publishers who didn’t exist 10 years ago, half again of which did not exist five years ago. Three-year-old Newser is on the list at 25; 88-year-old Time is on the list at 100.

Read more at http://alturl.com/bm2mi

Are E-books Obsoleting Ink and Paper?

Another interesting question and one I have alluded to in past posts. I don't feel that printed books will ever go away...they just won't be the prom queen anymore.

This Paul Levine post in the Huffington Post is informative, descriptive AND funny:

I was standing in a circle of Chardonnay sippers at an art show in Santa Monica when the conversation turned to the future of reading. As a novelist, I had skin in the game, so I grabbed a canape, sidled over, and eavesdropped.

"I'll never buy one of those electronic gizmos," said a heavyset man in his fifties, a humanities professor. "I'd miss the smell of ink on paper, the conjuring of medieval libraries and ancient parchment."

Funny, I don't recall anyone blissfully sniffing their books until the threat from e-publishing appeared. Now, readers can't resist comparing their moldy old tomes to the finest Bordeaux.

Respectfully, I say, move over Gutenberg!

E-books are to traditional publishing what the internal combustion engine was to the horse and buggy. Some experts predict that half of all books will be digital downloads within two to three years. That's astonishing. For 600 years, Johannes Gutenberg's printing press and its progeny have produced our books, newspapers, and magazines. Now, in the blink of an electronic eye, the application of ink to paper is approaching obsolescence.

Complaints about progress are hardly new. When Gutenberg invented movable type, a Venetian judge whined that "The pen is a virgin, the printing press a whore." Some New York publishers have called Amazon and Google even worse names.

I'm all for nostalgia. I have dreamy memories of a rickety blue Bookmobile rumbling into my central Pennsylvania hometown, and my standing on tip-toes to haul down a well-worn volume about dinosaurs. But my Kindle holds more books than that old truck, and there are 600,000 more at Amazon just a few clicks away.

A recent newspaper headline asked: "Will the Kindle Save the Written Word?" The hope is that those techno-savvy kids will interrupt their music and games and videos and texts and tweets and blogs...and start reading.

Call me crazy, but I think they will. I predict that packing a portable library will soon become a hip way to impress the opposite sex. More so, hopefully, than a barbed wire tattoo.

So why is that wine-sipping professor so afraid of the Kindle or Nook or iPad or Kobo? There will still be books in hardcover, trade paperback, and mass-market.

Or will there?

Garrison Keillor, the bard of the prairie, recently wrote that "book publishing is about to slide into the sea." The numbers give reason to worry. For the first quarter of 2010, Simon & Schuster reported a decline in revenue from print, but a 233 per cent increase in digital publishing. Expect that trend to continue, industry-wide. Is the book biz in the same position as the music industry a decade ago? It's not a coincidence that Apple's iTunes store now sells e-books, too.

Consider Amazon, where you can buy a 6000 BTU window air conditioner or a Kindle e-reader for the same $189. Amazon is now a book publisher, not just a retailer. The company is cutting deals with fledgling and mid-list authors for original e-books. How long will it be before Stephen King, or some other literary luminary, inks an exclusive deal to publish in both print and digital editions?

Amazon enjoys a huge advantage over both New York publishers and the bricks-and-mortar retail stores. The Internet behemoth knows the e-mail address and reading habits of every customer, and it need not kill trees, run presses, or hire trucks to produce and distribute its electronic products.

There are advantages for readers, too. Classic literature can be downloaded for free. My first two Kindle "purchases" were "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"and "Pride and Prejudice." Both gratis. Prices of bestsellers are in a state of flux, but they're consistently lower than paper-and-ink books.

The new paradigm is a great deal more democratic for authors, too. Writers who could never land a literary agent, much less a publishing deal, are putting their books on Amazon at customer-friendly prices. True, the writing often warrants a C-minus in eleventh grade English class, but there will be undiscovered gems to be dug from the electronic slush pile.

The shelf life of dead-tree books roughly approximates that of a pint of yogurt, but out-of-print books get eternal life on the Internet. Recently, I celebrated the 20th Anniversary of my debut legal thriller, "To Speak for the Dead." The book is long gone from bookstores, which is where e-publishing comes in. For less than $1,000 in costs - scanning, proofreading, formatting, and cover art - I became my own publisher. In the next year, awaiting release of an old-fashioned hardcover novel from the Bantam imprint at Random House, I'll be publishing eight of my out-of-print mysteries and thrillers.

Woody Allen once said, "I don't want to become immortal through my art. I want to become immortal by not dying." The latter remains impossible, but the former - our work living on forever - just became a bit easier.

"To Speak for the Dead," by Paul Levine, is now for sale at Amazon's Kindle Store and Smashwords, with all proceeds going to the Four Diamonds Fund for cancer treatment and research at Penn State Hershey Children's Hospital. More information at http://www.paul-levine.com/content/jake-lassiter.asp

Is Big Publishing Turning "Agency" Over-reaching?

I was exposed to the term "agency model" in publishing jargon a few weeks ago. I understood the meaning, in the context of the aricle I was reading, to be a business model where the publisher set the price for his work (or contracted work) instead of the online retailer (e.g. Amazon)...

Now, in the following article the phrase "publisher as agency", which I assume to be "agency model", takes on an additional meaning of a publishing company that expands it's usual services to include additional services above and beyond it's original core mission.

So, which is correct? Or are both correct? Or does the word "agency" take on different meanings in publishing jargon?

Anyone?

This article for Marketing Pilgrim by Frank Reed uses the "agency" term in the context of expansion of known services in describing the troubled Tribune Company 's fight to re-invent itself...Keep in mind that Frank Reed is also an internet marketer and is speaking from that frame of mind:

The Tribune Company is struggling to pull itself out of bankruptcy proceedings but it continues to try to move its business forward by becoming the latest publishing company to turn agency. This type of move by larger publishers is becoming more commonplace these days as they scramble to re-invent themselves in light of the digital ‘revolution’ that has kicked many in the tail pretty hard.

“With ad dollars for magazines and newspapers continuing to shrink, publishers like Meredith and Gannett have expanded the purview of their digital ad sales teams to include digital marketing services offerings outside of the content they produce. Tribune Company is the latest entrant into the interactive marketing space. The publisher, still struggling through its interminable bankruptcy proceedings, has formed a new interactive marketing consultancy called 435 Digital Services. Named for Tribune’s Chicago street address, the project will shift a small number of current ad sales staffers into the new 10-person unit, as well as making a few new hires, according to a piece in Crain’s Chicago Business.”

Newspapers are under attack from all fronts which include the general move to online consumption of content, the rise of classified ad killer Craigslist and the challenge of smaller, more nimble hyperlocal blogs.

Honestly, it’s hard to imagine how these companies including Meredith and Hearst (who purchased iCrossing recently) are going to pull this off. Even traditional advertising agencies were slow to truly pick up on digital offerings and are playing catch up. Add to the fact that everyone knows the troubles that the newspaper industry is having and it’s tough to see how even a small to medium business, or SMB, would trust their marketing to a newspaper entity.

Of course, what companies think they can charge the SMB for such services will play a very large role in their level of success. No matter what the politicians say, the economy for the smaller players is still very bad and the fears of getting worse are getting more play these days. As a result, SMB’s won’t pay top dollar for services that many tell them they can do by themselves. Whether that is good advice to the SMB is irrelevant because many use it as a shield to keep service providers at bay.

So this move to be all things to all businesses is interesting. Interesting in a way that it could very well be too little too late. It also looks like a move born more out of desperation rather than something that was part of a bigger business plan to succeed in the online space. Heck, if any of these companies had been actually planning for the new digital world order they wouldn’t be where they are now anyway.

So would you trust your marketing services to a newspaper or magazine publisher who just put on another hat to attract your business?

Update on Blio: E-reader Software Adds to Arsenal!

I have posted about Blio in the past (9 Dec 2009 & 18 June 2010)...Now I read that the Blio principle players are adding rich digital media content to Blio's already advanced package of leading edge technology...

The only drawback on Blio is the delayed launch date!...Come on Blio principles...let's get this thing to market!

This update from PR Newswire:

CHARLOTTE, N.C., July 6 /PRNewswire/ -- Baker & Taylor, Inc., the world's largest distributor of physical and digital books and entertainment products, is proud to announce it has entered into an agreement with Quayside Publishing Group to provide rich, highly-formatted content on Blio. Blio is the revolutionary e-reader software application created by K-NFB Reading Technology and powered by Baker & Taylor. Quayside is a specialty publisher whose imprints publish more than 300 new titles a year on wide-ranging topics – from transportation and sports to cooking and crafts and history and graphic design.

"Baker & Taylor is pleased to include Quayside's specialty titles on Blio," said Tom Morgan, Chairman and CEO of Baker & Taylor. "Blio is simply the best e-reader application for showing off Quayside's books, which are chock full of highly specialized and informative text and graphics. Readers are in for a real treat – a totally immersive e-reading experience, too."

By leveraging strong relationships with the publishing community as well with its best-of-breed digital technology partners LibreDigital and K-NFB Reading Technology, Baker & Taylor is converting new content for Blio every day. With more than 41,000 customers in 120 countries, Baker & Taylor's global reach makes it the perfect partner to provide superior content management and distribution for the world's most innovative e-reader application. Baker & Taylor's affiliation with Blio is its latest step in bringing comprehensive digital media services to multiple channels and to a wide variety of customers, strengthening its position as the premier source for digital and physical media distribution.

"It is important to us that e-book editions of our frontlist and backlist titles maintain the same high-level quality of layout and design that our readers have come to expect – and that's exactly what Baker & Taylor and Blio deliver," said Ken Fund, CEO and President of Quayside.

Blio, featuring cutting-edge print-to-speech (for rights-enabled titles) and full-color 3-D technologies, is the brainchild of futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil, CEO of K-NFB Reading Technology. Blio delivers the most advanced, flexible and open reading platform in the world. Blio simply brings books to life. And Blio is also hardware neutral, meaning it works on a number of devices, including personal computers, laptops, netbooks, iPhones and iPads.

About Baker & Taylor

Baker & Taylor Inc. (www.baker-taylor.com) is a global media distribution company and leading provider of digital media services. Baker & Taylor ensures that its more than 30,000 publishing partners get their materials into readers' hands in the format and on their device of choice. Baker & Taylor is especially proud to power Blio, the world's most advanced, flexible and engaging e-reader software application. Based in Charlotte, N.C., Baker & Taylor has been in existence for more than 180 years and has developed long-term relationships with major publishers.

Baker & Taylor maintains one of the largest in-stock book inventory in the United States, and services the broadest customer base in the industry. Baker & Taylor is majority owned by Castle Harlan Partners IV, L.P., an institutional private equity fund managed by Castle Harlan Inc., a leading private equity investment firm. Baker & Taylor and the Baker & Taylor logo are trademarks of Baker & Taylor, Inc. Blio is a trademark of K-NFB Reading Technology, Inc. Other company and product names mentioned for identification purposes may be trademarks of their respective owners.

About Quayside

Quayside Publishing Group (www.quaysidepublishinggroup.com) represents a dynamic group of imprints dedicated to providing quality and excellence to its readers. Each imprint embodies the breadth and scope of its non-fiction specialty topics. Quayside encompasses Creative Publishing international, Fair Winds Press, Motorbooks, MVP Books, Quarry Books, Quiver Books , Rockport Publishers, Voyageur Press, Walter Foster Publishing and Zenith Press. Quayside, a division of the U.K.-based Quarto Group, has offices in Beverly, Mass., Minneapolis, Minn., and Irvine, Calif.

About K-NFB Reading Technology Inc.

K–NFB Reading Technology has propelled reading technology forward for the last 30 years with the invention of omnifont OCR, flatbed scanners, text-to-speech technology and reading machines for the blind. Once again, K-NFB is redefining the boundaries of the printed word, via Blio – the new generation in e-reading. This free application, works across platforms, and presents books as they are intended, in full color, as laid out by the publisher. A joint venture between Kurzweil Technologies and the National Federation of the Blind, K-NFB is headed by CEO Ray Kurzweil, a 30-year innovator and pioneer in assistive technologies. The National Federation of the Blind is the largest, most influential membership organization of blind people in the United States. For more on Blio, created by K-NFB Reading Technology and powered by Baker & Taylor, go to www.blioreader.com. For more on Blio, created by K-NFB Reading Technology and powered by Baker & Taylor, go to www.blioreader.com.

SOURCE Baker & Taylor, Inc.

Are Best-seller Lists Accurate in the E-book Age?

An interesting question. Hell, I wonder how accurate best-seller lists were BEFORE the eBook age. I'm very skeptical about these lists...I feel they are just paid lists (mostly through celebrity or notoriety) without any REAL connection to artistic-worthiness! Yep, I think money behind marketing is what lands a book on these lists...Have you ever read a so-called best-seller? Some really stink!

Maggie Galehouse of the Houston Chronicle wrote this insightful piece:

Best-seller lists help readers decide which books to buy by ranking books readers have already bought.

So is the tail wagging the dog?

To complicate matters, e-book sales are still fighting for representation on most of these lists, even though 30 percent of fiction sales could be electronic by next year.

For now, securing a spot on a best-seller list is like winning a literary jackpot. Best-selling titles are sold at a discount and enjoy prominent placement in bookstores.

"Hitting the lists gets a book and author noticed by producers, booksellers, critics and reviewers who may have overlooked it or passed the first time around," Dawn Davis, vice president and editorial director of Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins, noted via e-mail.

"When I published Steve Harvey's Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, many producers passed when we tried to book him on various morning shows," Davis wrote. "But once he debuted at the top of the list, our publicist was able to get so many more bookings for him. The content hadn't changed, but the perception of the book had."

In some instances, though, how a book lands on a best-seller list is a bit of a mystery.

With Amazon, which updates its list hourly, authors and readers get a real-time sense of book sales.

But the sacred New York Times best-seller list is based on book sales from a full two weeks earlier, a huge lag time in a digital age. Although the Times' weekly rankings are culled from sales at thousands of venues — including independent retailers, national and local chains, and online entertainment - they are hardly a comprehensive tally of book sales across the country.

At best, the rankings are educated guesstimates.

"I don't know what the secret magical formula of the New York Times list is, and I don't know if anyone knows," said David Hale Smith, who runs a literary agency and creative management firm in Dallas. "It's not necessarily about the numbers. It's about velocity - rate of movement of certain titles related to other titles."

Publishers recognize the importance of the Times list and its limitations.

"Nowadays a great number of publishers don't rely on the New York Times list at all," said Lorraine Shanley, a publishing consultant and principal at Market Partners International. "But as it is with many things, the more you're perceived to have sold, the more you sell. The New York Times list is the ultimate in terms of being able to tout your success, but it's not used as a yardstick in creating marketing because you want to be able to respond more rapidly."

Industry insiders pay more attention to Nielsen BookScan rankings, which cast a wider net and are more up-to-date. But these rankings aren't comprehensive, either.

New e-book lists

And e-books are making the picture even murkier.

Last summer, USA Today started including Amazon Kindle e-book sales in its best-seller list. Last month, Kindle split its best-seller list, creating one for paid titles and another for free titles.

And e-readers are more affordable than ever.

Two weeks ago, Barnes & Noble slashed Nook prices (the WiFi version is now $149), and Amazon dropped the Kindle to $189. And last week, Amazon subsidiary Woot sold nearly 5,000 Kindle 2s for $149.99 in about eight hours.

Although e-books make up just 5 percent of book sales, that number is much higher in certain genres.

"I think fiction is going to be 30 percent e-book sales by next year," Shanley said. "If you look at a given title, you can see that some books have reached almost 40 to 50 percent e-books penetration. … I know the most recent Stieg Larsson book sold hundreds of thousands of e-books very early on."

Though digital book sales offer more data, unpacking the numbers is tough.

"I'm in a unique spot to talk about this," said Smith, the founder of DHS Literary. "I have a client named Michael Koryta whose book, So Cold the River, was released by Little Brown a few weeks ago."

Print and e-books sales for this new title are exploding, Smith said. So Cold the River reached the top 100 in Amazon hardcover and hit the top 50 on the Kindle best-seller list. It was also featured in Parade magazine.

"But we're trying to figure out whether e-book sales have added to overall sales or whether they've taken away from bookstore sales that might have gotten him on the New York Times best-seller list two weeks ago," Smith said.

Marketing oppor-tunities for e-books are different. Last month, for example, readers who brought their Nooks to a Houston Barnes & Noble where author Justin Cronin was appearing to promote The Passage were offered "exclusive free content" from the author.

Owners of Kindles, iPads, Nooks and Sony e-readers represent different demographics, and each e-reader has apps available on other devices.

"What I think will be really interesting is where you start seeing the correlation between the device, the platform and the reader," Shanley said. "Is the 17-year-old boy buying graphic novels on an iPhone? Is the 50-year-old woman buying romance novels on a Kindle?"

Sharing is an issue

Sharing e-books is another thorny issue.

"Only the Nook has dealt with the question of being able to pass along and share books," Shanley said. "You can share a book with another Nook user, but basically what happens is it gets turned off your Nook and turned on somewhere else. The other person has two weeks to read the book. Libraries are also starting to offer e-books, but publishers are worried that it's going to be like the second-hand book market and eat into their sales."

Shanley is excited about the digital possibilities for cookbooks, children's books and illustrated books, which have been slow to enter the e-book market because of their graphic nature. With sophisticated e-readers like the iPad, she says, there's a potentially robust market with huge opportunities for interactivity.

Smith shares her enthusiasm.

"We're just beginning to see the power of the digital delivery," he said. "It's a great tool for authors and publishers. And what I think we're all hoping is that someone will figure out a way to combine the number of e-book sales with print sales."

That way, there would be a definitive best-seller list, one that offers a clearer picture of which books people are buying.

Of course, one of the peculiarities of books — as opposed to most other merchandise — is that the more successfully a book sells, the better the discount.

maggie.galehouse@chron.com

The Ben Franklin Project is a Publishing Revolution!

The Ben Franklin Project is a brainchild of the Journal Register Company, a publishing leader in local news and information serving 992 communities in 10 states. The Company's 324 multi-platform products reach an audience of nearly 14 million people each month.

Essentially the Ben Franklin Project is an effort to produce their entire news products using only available free resources on the internet...They have succeeded!...Damn, what an achievement! I knew something like this was probably possible for individuals on a small basis, but on this large of scale is mind-boggling to me! This validates my beliefs in the power of the internet...

This press release is from MarketWatch.com:

YARDLEY, PA, Jul 04, 2010 (MARKETWIRE via COMTEX) -- Journal Register Company, a leading local news and information company, declared its independence from proprietary publishing systems this weekend by producing the Company's 18 daily websites and newspapers using only free web-based tools.

"In the process, we have declared our independence from not only old proprietary systems but the old way of thinking as well and opened up new opportunities for this Company to grow and continue its mission of providing compelling journalism to the communities we serve," Chief Executive Officer John Paton said.

The Company's Ben Franklin Project, which started in April as an experiment to publish a daily and a weekly using free web tools within a 30-day window, expanded to encompass all of Journal Register's daily operations following the success of the initial project. The Company celebrated this achievement on July 4.

The Ben Franklin Project not only proves that websites and newspapers can be freed from the restraints of legacy, proprietary publishing systems, but also heralds the potential of an open and transparent newsgathering process. The Project allowed audience members to help shape editorial story budgets through crowd sourcing. Stories ranged from an in-depth look at property taxes and community revitalization projects to reports on childhood obesity.

"These are everyday issues that impact the health -- physical and fiscal -- of our readers," said Jon Cooper, Vice President of Content. "The Ben Franklin Project has renewed the focus on stories that impact the communities we serve because the ideas for those stories come from the communities we serve."

The Company's newsrooms were not the only focus of the Ben Franklin Project. From advertising ordering, to print and digital ad design, to finance, free web-based tools were utilized throughout the production process. Employees throughout Journal Register participated in collaborative conference calls and web-based seminars as part of a peer-to-peer training program to learn the software and tools compiled from submissions of project observers from across the globe.

"The collaborative nature of the Ben Franklin Project has provided opportunities for innovation and created an environment where the best ideas will win out. Journal Register's employees have developed new low-cost solutions to long-standing, legacy issues," said Mr. Cooper. These include using free, open-source desktop publishing tools and combining software programs that could serve as models for future development of billing and ad tracking interfaces.

The Company will continue to expand on this ground-breaking experiment and will continue to share -- through blogs and social media -- lessons learned from the Ben Franklin Project with others in the industry.

For more information visit the company website at http://www.journalregister.com/.

SOURCE: Journal Register Company

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