Publishing tagged posts

I was at the Frankfurt Bookfair about two weeks ago. First time in 13 years. I started out in publishing after high school and went every year at the end of the 90s. Then I switched careers and the rest is basically history. Now I had the chance to go back there.

In recent years the trend has been about how self publishing is this big new thing and “traditional” publishing is doomed and what not. Publishing is not doomed. Not with one bestseller after the other. Not with over 7.000 exhibitors from all over the world at the fair this year.

By the end of the day my legs were killing me, but it was worth it. I even got a massage during it – which was necessary.

For the industry, this event is about making deals. So hall 6...

There was a panel at the recent Science Fiction Worldcon in Reno, where a few notable figures from known short fiction markets discussed how technology changed or will change short fiction.

You can read the whole article over on io9.com … http://io9.com/5833833/how-technology-has-transformed-short-science-fiction-and-fantasy

I agree with a lot of points. Especially with the paragraphs about novellas and adventure fiction. I like the pulp stories of the 30s and 40s a lot, and I’d love to see those stories and formats rise again. Over here in Germany we still have those novellas, which were called “Groschenroman” back in the day. “Groschenroman” is a quite literal translation of the term “dime novel”...

So its been a month since I managed to blog about something. Back then I wanted to do a post about how Amazon should finally open their Kindle store to the rest of the world … or at least to my neck of the woods, which happens to be Germany. There had been rumors for weeks that the opening was imminent.

And now, just before the Easter weekend, Amazon finally did it. They opened the Kindle Store to German users. 650,000 titles are now available to download, including 25,000 German titles … which is a number bound to increase. The majority of German book titles is not yet available in ebook format, but that will change if and when publishers convert their massive backlists.

Until now the German ebook market is just a footnote in the overall publishing industry...

Wow … what a week so far. Let’s recap the 2 major news I want to a adress in this post.

1) Barry Eisler, an NYT bestselling author turns down a $500,000 deal from St. Martin’s Press in order to self publish his next novel.

2) Amanda Hocking, the ebook-self-publishing shooting star of the past few month signs a $2,000,000 deal with … wait for it … St. Martin’s Press.

So basically St. Martin’s went “We don’t care about you leaving Barry … we’ll just give your money and way more to Amanda Hocking. Take that!”

Until a couple of weeks ago, when he announced on JA Konrath’ blog that he’d be publishing a short story on Kindle, I never heard of Barry Eisler, let alone that he was an NYT bestselling author...

So I am trying this blogging thing again. And since I am a writer, I might as well start with writing about … writing.

Right now it seems, that there is a bit of a revolution going on in the US publishing industry. Just a few facts:

• Borders just filed for Chapter 11
• Amazon sold more Ebooks than Paperbacks in Q4 of 2010
• more and more authors are going into self publishing

If you believe the likes of JA Konrath, it won’t be long before the big 6 publishing houses in New York will go belly up or at least see a dramatic change in their business model. It is probably akin to the music industry 10 years ago, what with that whole napster / mp3 debacle.

Indie authors are making money hand over fist right now self publishing through Amazon, CreateSpace, SmashWords, Barnes & Noble and other outlet...