This week Litopia After Dark looks to the future. As we move rapidly into the digital age, there are undoubtedly opportunities for writers, plenty of pitfalls, but mostly uncertainty. It’s a timely subject – this week, Britain’s Society of Authors alarmed everyone with a shock prognostication: authors may stop writing – so their chairperson said – because it simply wont pay any more!

This has also been the week in which the blogs-to-books publisher The Friday Project crashed and burned its way into liquidation yet paradoxically, on the other side of the Atlantic, Random House has just paid $300,000 to an unpublished blogger! All this makes our key question tonight – How will authors survive? -very opportune.

We also discuss HarperCollins intention to do away with author advances, the growing furore over Amazon’s print-on-demand plans and we comb the bookshelves for the latest wave in book covers.

Our very special guest this week is Martyn Daniels, author of the seminal, pathfinding report for the Booksellers Association of Great Britain about their digital future – New World, Digitisation of Content: the opportunities for booksellers and The Booksellers Association. We also have author and polymath Brian Clegg, whose latest book, Upgrade Me: Our Amazing Journey to Human 2.0 is about to be published by St Martins Press, NY and our regular panellist Dave Bartram completes the team.

Piracy: what will it cost us?

In the same week as The Friday Project, the books to blog publisher has gone into liquidation, the blog Stuff White People Like has been signed in a $300,000 deal with Random House.

Ron Hogan of Galleycat says…

“I was shocked and amazed that they got that much for a concept that Martin Mull had written a book about back in 1985.”

In an interview with Ben Hoyle in the Times…

Tracy Chevalier, the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring who also chairs the London-based organisation, said that her members were deeply concerned that the publishing industry was failing to adapt to the digital age.

Opposing this view in Ars Technica is Nate Anderson who feels that…

Internet piracy, no matter how pervasive, is not about to bring the worldwide production of literature to a grinding halt, just as rampant music piracy isn’t stopping my neighbor’s kid from playing his drum kit in the garage every day before dinner.

So, is piracy a big problem or mass hysteria? Will this affect fiction in the same way as academic text books? Is the world of literature heading down the same route as the music and DVD industry and what should we do to guard against the thievery of our work?

Show us the money

In the New York Times, Mokoto Rich says…

HarperCollins Publishers is forming a new publishing group that will substitute profit-sharing with authors for cash advances and will try to eliminate the costly practice of allowing booksellers to return unsold copies.

With no advance payments and authors waiting years to see the money from royalty payments, how will a writer afford to live while they work? And what sort of marketing commitment is the publisher making with no initial outlay on the project?

Amazon want all the cash

In an article in Writers Weekly, Angela Hoy states…

Reports have been trickling in from the POD underground that Amazon/BookSurge representatives have been approaching some Lightning Source customers, first by email introduction and then by phone (nobody at BookSurge seems to want to put anything in writing). When Lightning Source customers speak with the BookSurge representative, the reports say, they are basically told they can either have BookSurge start printing their books or the “buy” button on their Amazon.com book pages will be “turned off.”

What does this mean for Print On Demand authors? Does this mean that aspiring self-publishers will have no option but to go through Amazon?

And what is the future for POD in general? Is this a market where writers can make a living wage? And what should writers do to take advantage of this? The panel discuss reverting your rights, multimedia opportunities for writers and the options opening up through digitisation.

Big Money, Big Hair?

What is with book covers showing the backs of hair covered heads? Does big hair sell big?

Links to big hair sites…

Galleycat 1 Galleycat 2

Car Crash or Cash Cow – a discussion with Martyn Davies

In Martyn Davies report for The Booksellers’ Association he says…

When digitisation first became an issue in the music industry, the music companies thought they could create a direct market and by-pass the music retailers. That strategy turned out to be a disaster. The music publishers did not have the brand position to achieve this and could only offer limited range. Consumers wanted specific works or performers and had no knowledge as to which music company could supply it.

Booksellers can play a key role in helping publishers sell their e-books and e-content. The Booksellers Association wants to work with individual publishers and The Publishers Association to help bring this about.

“The brand is the author. There are only two people who matter in this whole chain – the author who puts the talent in and the reader who puts the money in. Everybody in between is an intermediary they have to add value to the equation and they often add cost and it is those positions that are under threat.”

Paul Watson at Lazarus.co.uk has a blog post which outlines the different revenue models.

But which would be more appealing to the author of the future? And are we talking here about the breakup of the Publishing Industry?

“What it is really important to understand is that there is such a diversity of talent, a diversity of material and a diversity of different consumers out there and to treat them all as just one generic… you can’t do it.”

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Photo by uxud

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