Category Archives: Publishers

Small Press Month 2008

Small Press Month 2008Tomorrow kicks off the 12th year of Small Press Month, highlighting and featuring the smaller fish in the huge ocean of publishing. So let’s hear it for the folks still doing it for the love of it and loving what they sell. Don’t get me wrong, it is still about money and making a living, but there’s something almost perfect about a job that is built around creating and pushing products, you believe in and that you know contribute something to society. It’s about quality… not just appealing to the lowest common denominator.

In So Many Books (which should be required reading for anyone thinking about publishing, Gabriel Zaid notes:

“If not a single book were published from this moment on, it would still take 250,000 years for us to acquaint ourselves with those books already written.”

“Maybe the measure of our reading should therefore be, not the number of books we’ve read, but the state in which they leave us. . . whether the street and the clouds and the existence of others mean anything to us; whether reading makes us, physically, more alive”

Take that you multi-national conglomerates! You get the other 11 months… this one belongs to readers and smaller publishers alike.

Many mini-books

While writing a previous post about a local book release party for Susannah Felts’ debut novel, I got sucked into her publisher’s site and found this rather cool, yet simple marketing tool.

howto.jpg

Basically, they take a few excerpts and type set them onto letter size pages, for you to freely print out, from their site. Then, following the numbers, you fold it all up and have a little mini-book with cover and all.

Quills are no more

Over the past three years, Reed Business Information has pushed the Quills as publishing’s “Oscar night”, even having the literary award show televised. But today, RBI announced the plug has been pulled on the awards and the broadcast. So now we’ll all just have to rely on things like the Pulitzers, PEN awards, the Man Booker, etc. to tell us who is popular and who is not. Much like Jerome Weeks’ post today spells out.

Also, RBI has announced that they are for sale and looking for a buyer. So I’ll be happy to set-up a PayPal account if we all want to go in together and make an offer! I wonder if there would be much backlash if we moved the company headquarters to Birmingham, Alabama?

Turning free web material into books

The NY Times ran an article on blogs/sites moving into printed products. Pretty interesting though nothing really new is mentioned. They don’t even mention the word “blook“. Which is a book mainly consisting of blog posts (and one word I hope never makes it into the dictionary). Basically some marketing folks look at a blog’s traffic stats and see dollar signs, but over the last two years, publishers have realized that a high number of unique visitors does not always translate into dollars.

Though it seems that comics and illustrations do seem to do better than fiction and narratives.

Basically, Frank Warren (of Post Secret fame) summed-up the whole business model when he is quoted in the article saying “I don’t think there is a formula,” Mr. Warren said. “There is a bit of magic there that can’t be replicated.”