Munsey’s Technosnarl

Something really interesting to take away from the Forbes story about Apple’s new Ipad store.  It’s a little subtle, but bear with:

There are also two sections for “Erotica” books; one under “Fiction & Literature” and one under “Romance.”

The division in erotica is something that Amazon doesn’t do.  In the Kindle store, we’ve got a great big mixup, with “Erotica,” and that latter category, “Erotic Romance” all dumped into one grouping.

It’s gotten more interesting, since Christmas, when women began using Kindles in droves for the first time.  Dec. 24th, Olympia had around 15-20 titles in the Kindle Erotica bestsellers category, including 10 in the top 50.  Post Dec. 25th, it’s been more like half a dozen titles from me in the top 100, including a couple in the top 50.  Maybe.

What blew us away was “erotic romance,” the category dominated by Ellora’s Cave, Samhain, Harlequin Spice, etc., etc., now selling in droves to Amazon’s new-found hoardes of female Kindle owners.

For the record, I’m not bitter.  My personal definition of the difference between erotica and erotic romance is that, if it’s erotic romance, my customers will never ever buy it ever.  (And if it’s erotica, erotic romance customers will only pick the title up by accident or ‘cuz it’s really intriguing.)  I just gave an early advance to an author for Jan.-Feb., and showed him the same 250-300% boost in Kindle sales everyone else saw for that period.  Erotic romance is a bigger market, but it isn’t my market.*

The fact that Apple’s smart enough to grasp the difference between the two, eliminating the risk to me of future reviews from Debra, is enough to get me all in to the Ipad store.

Since nobody contacts the pornographers first, what I’ve heard is you put .pdfs into Lightning Source/Ingram Content, with fresh ISBNs (sigh), and then LSI automatically converts from .pdf to Epub.

Guess I’ll be busy next week.

*Sure, erotic romance sells better, but you ladies can’t mix in drama from 10th Century German Nuns, or obscure Gregory Corso novels, or even Polish Nobel Laureates to your smutty print series and hope to get away with it, let alone make money.  Whereas people kind of expect that with me.  Plus, they tape up all the bathrooms for men and make them women-only at the Romance Writers of America conference, leading to discomfort.  So, neener.

Just ‘cuz I haven’t outnerded anybody else in a while:

All right, that dude who wrote the book about Abe Lincoln killing vampires?

His first book was about Jane Austen and zombies.

Jane Austen’s first published book, Northanger Abbey was a spoof of Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho.

Century after Radcliffe, decades before Stoker, Paul Feval, noted French author in the Dumas tradition, does a book called “Vampire City” with its plot being Ann Radcliffe, Vampire Hunter.

Noted SF author Brian Stableford translated the work several years ago, I think first for Ash-Tree Press, or maybe Daedalus, now having found himself a nice home with Hollywood Comics.

Given his obvious familiarity with all things Jane, I kind of think there’s more to the story about where Mr Seth Grahame Smith got his idea for the Lincoln: Vampire Hunter book.  But, hey, anyone who gets paid in this business is cool with me, and I just bought my copy.

Book’s the Giveaway.  Nobody got shot.

I’m in South Carolina this weekend, and then the Small Press Show in NY next week, so… been up to stuff.

The one interesting bit of news out of Tools for Change is that apparently Ingram will be setting up smaller presses into Apple’s new ebook store.  (And may be the only route for smaller presses to get into that store.)  That’s speculation on my part as derived from tweets by Dear Author and others.  Last I checked, what’s now called Ingram Content accepts PDFs, Indesign-generated epub files, and nothing else for epub sourcing.

Obviously, most of my commercial stuff could never go into Apple’s forthcoming ebook platform, but it’s another story with Silk and the education market.  We’ll see. I got a ton of ISBNs if need be.

Elsewhere, I’m not going to comment much on the spectacular failures of certain DRM providers and software companies in the ebook marketplace–long story, having bombed so completely on books, they’re now developing magazines, and, cryptically of course, given my personal history and their incompetence, you might say, really, they’re working for me.  And I just don’t speak badly about people who work for me.

/I’m sure Apple will see the light and support Flash, though.  Or at least, Flash apps will export flawlessly to html5 on the Iphone… just as Indesign files export flawlessly to Epub.

I suspect the ghostwriter for I, Mobster was up on the big names — Luciano, etc. — from the period.  Not exactly The Hoods, or even Tucker’s People, but, then, what is?

This is the first Munsey book to be scanned using Abbyy 10, hopefully I caught all the weirdnesses.  Much better job, but at times, I was a bit frightened by the errors (completely different word.)

No plans to print, but, hey, if Goodloe wants to go on a road-trip again…

Congrats.  Probably the most money ever paid to an unregistered nonprofit that migrated into news, sorta.

/No good info here on #s, but, given the iterated 100k uniques,  some multiple of that for an 18-year venture might be on order.

Yeah, I’ve done sales of books my books through Amazon’s Marketplace for 3rd party book sellers.

Mr. Curtis has the right idea, but Amazon makes a little bit more than 3-4% of sale.  It’s more like 6-15%, plus an additional $.99 from the smaller sellers, plus an additional “closing fee” of $1.35.*

Way Marketplace works: most of the sellers have a drop-ship arrangement with Ingram, Baker & Taylor or some other wholesaler. Amazon takes the order from the customer on behalf of, say, InterWebBooks.  That order is automatically processed, with emails going to the customer, and an EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) file, with Book information, Customer Name, Address, Shipping Method (post office or UPS), is uploaded to Ingram.

Ingram quickly sends out the order with an InterWebBooks logo on the box from one of their warehouses.

IWB, for the curious, is paid by Amazon within 2-3 days, and Ingram is paid within 30.  This is a big part of why prices from 3rd party sellers are often lower than you’d think possible (as little as 55% of the cover price, plus shipping of course).

That 6-15% of 3rd-party sales is, per some earlier reports, one of the most lucrative parts of Amazon’s business, and could easily represent a bigger net profit for them than does warehousing and shipping the books themselves.  They’re probably not losing as much from the Macmillan stand-off as you’d think.

It’s $99 a month to get the really good Marketplace store up (and avoid paying $.99 to Amazon per sale).  To integrate automated feeds with Ingram (after credit checks and such), you’d only be out-of-pocket $10k or so from the South Asian programming shop of your choice–they study Ingram feeds and APIs in that part of the world.

/Ironically, prior to a shift by LightningSource in 2005, most print-on-demand books were shown as “available in six days or from these sellers,” so at the moment Macmillan’s living the way us peons used to.

*Edited to add closing fee.

Charles Willeford is well-remembered today for many novels, not least this one.  But his fellow Beacon author, Orrie Hitt, isn’t particularly known, even for strong efforts like Ladies’ Man.

Actually, nobody aside from Michael Hemmingson seems to have heard of him.  There’s a little something to Hitt’s style that’s certainly worth reading… trust me, it was an old Beacon, and so took quite a while to digitize.

Definitely worth a couple hours of your time.

Y’all might remember, they were onstage when Apple did its summer product launch, so ScrollMotion’s new deal to put textbooks on the Ipad is obviously happening with Apple’s blessing… unlike some other firms that Apple doesn’t like as much lately.

ScrollMotion is staffed by publishing industry veterans, and of courses bases their entire product layout on .pdf, something that, to me, never really worked on the Iphone.

We’ll see how committed Apple is to an ebook store.

Four days, no buy buttons for many (not all) Macmillan books on Amazon.

Credit Richard Curtis, legendary agent and publisher of Ereads, with best graphic…

/Via Publisher’s Weekly.

This is getting fun. I have no idea how long the spiel with Macmillan’s gonna last.  It’s of course ridiculous for a Macmillan division like Tor, given its online following, etc., to not be selling most of its ebooks direct — and, no, Cory Doctorow, there’s nothing that says Tor can’t sell Kindle-formatted ebooks DRM-free, using any software out there, or a homebrew solution.

But the bigger concern for Amazon is, while I still don’t think Apple’s iPad is truly intended to sell ebooks (like a lot of men in my neighborhood, I’ll be getting one for my wife to watch her YouTube videos from Taiwan and China on… Korean Soap Operas will sell 50k Ipads in Montgomery County, MD alone) suddenly, ebooks on Ipad will live up to the hype, at least somewhat.

If you remember back to the days when the App Store opened, suddenly, companies like Fictionwise, with its Ereader App, were able to really tap into the growing market.  Instead of 10 million or so PDA devices in use, plus the old Gemstar/Rocket eBooks, Fictionwise was now able to sell to more than 50 million Iphone users–with all the great Apple customer demographics (higher-income, better-educated, etc.)!

This five-fold (at least!) increase in available readers, on enhanced screens allowed Fictionwise to go from (ballpark), selling 50,000 ebooks a month, to (their own words), 90,000, at least the first month!  Before the hype wound down a bit and downloads decreased!  As it has each time, until there was another app update!

Or, in other words, given what Amazon achieves with its Kindle base of hard-core readers, (who pretty much have Amazon’s back in the push to keep ebooks below $10), Fictionwise is selling dick.

The Ereader model–person installs software, then maybe visits Fictionwise, then opens an account via webkit-browser, then buys books, then downloads them, then sorta has them–was a non-starter.  Amazon sold more ebooks last Christmas Day than Peanut Press/PalmReader/Ereader sold in its history.You could repeat the above scenario for any of the other competing ebook apps–Kobo or what have you.  Or, indeed, any of the other “retailers” that have been floating around since Kindle.  They never lived up to the hype, and the sales of epub books with DRM from Overdrive+Adobe, etc. are absolutely pathetic in comparison, statistically no different from the sales of epub books with DRM from DNAML, or the sales of epub books with not-entirely-compatible DRM from Barnes & Noble.

At least with a direct channel, Apple will leverage its existing customer base.  This isn’t the unicorn, but, finally, though Apple isn’t really doing the enhanced editions thing, nor seems to be going full-blast on ebooks the way they are with videos and games, in sales of epub books with Apple DRM, directly through Apple’s channels, to Apple’s customer base, Amazon has something to worry about, at least for best-sellers.

Only two months away.