The FastPencil Marketplace brings authors, editors, illustrators, marketing professionals, and other experts together as part of a new approach to writing, publishing, and distributing books and eBooks.
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Authors are between a rock and a hard place, as today’s TechCrunch piece by Paul Carr illustrates. He describes how Amazon customers expressed their displeasure at the lack of a Kindle version of Michael Lewis bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by giving 1-star reviews of the book, even though they hadn’t read it. They were so upset that W.W. Norton, the publisher, had elected to “embargo” the Kindle version, milking sales of the hardcover version as long as possible.
For Carr, this sort of customer activism is problematic. He understands customer annoyance at W.W. Norton’s antiquated belief that denying customers what they want is actually good business strategy. But as a published author, he feels for authors whose books are impugned because of these business decisions:
I speak from pained experience as an author when I say that we have absolutely no say on when our books are released, in what format and at what price.
As an author you are beholden to a big publisher like W.W. Norton. You place your hard work in their care and hope that they’ll understand your audience. You hope that they will stop thinking of themselves as publishers of printed books, and start thinking of themselves as purveyors of your work, in whatever printed or digital form it might appear.
You’re also beholden to Amazon. You’re almost asking to get stepped on as the online goliath battles the titans of old world publishing. You are in the middle. They fight over pricing and distribution, while you hope that somehow, miraculously you will emerge from their duel unscathed.
If you’re an author, published or not, it’s time to realize that business as usual doesn’t favor you. It’s not about you. It’s about big publishers trying to stave off the future, and Amazon trying to control it. Meanwhile, they’re both pissing off your customers.
So try something different.
As this NY Times article illustrates, there’s a war on. It’s a war for the future of eBooks. The combatants are fighting over who controls pricing. Will the “agency model” used by Apple (publisher sets price and Apple receives a 30% commission) prevail, or will Amazon’s approach ($9.99 standard eBook price) win?
And while the big guys slug it out, where are authors? Who is watching out for their interests?
What about a model in which the author sets the price for eBooks? In fact, why not let the author set the price for any book they publish, regardless of format?
Electronista takes a closer look at the three devices. While the Kindle’s capabilities are limited, it costs less than the iPad. The HP slate will run Windows 7, so could be more like a full-fledged laptop than either of its competitors, but it will also likely cost more.
The success of Amazon’s Kindle and speculation about the Apple iSlate has led to many a blog post about the future of eBook publishing. Neven Mrgan’s take is one of the most interesting. He hopes Apple will unveil an eBook publishing system that will make micropublishing easy:
Let’s say you’ve written a short story. (You’re still working on your first novel; courage!) As a piece of entertainment and education, it’ll enrich about twenty minutes of someone’s life. That’s worth 99c in my book. You write this in Pages, perhaps using the app’s writer-friendly full-screen mode, and lay it out using Apple’s elegant templates. You publish it to the, err, Media Store - hey, I’m no ad wizard - where it’s checked for plagiarism, validated for formatting integrity, and placed in your desired category. Congratulations! you’re an almost-self-published writer. Tell your friends, blog about it, buy ad space. Whether you make millions on your story or not, you’re better off than when it just sat on your hard drive.
It’s an excellent idea. John Gruber, who makes a living writing about Apple, agrees with Mrgan, and adds this flourish:
Here’s my other thought: the old-growth print industry — books, magazines, and newspapers — have shown zero aptitude to date to produce compelling designs and business models for digital content. Left to themselves, they’d botch this too.
It’s hard to argue with Gruber on this one. The legacy publishing world is built around a scarcity-driven model. Scarcity of access to publishing tools. Scarcity of distribution capability. Scarcity of pricing options. It’s no wonder they are having a difficult time adapting to abundance.
So it’s up to a completely different kind of publisher to bust the mold. Enter FastPencil.
You can use our book writing software (which also includes built-in collaboration tools) to write your book. Sell any combination of print, PDF, or ePub in the FastPencil Marketplace at a price of your choosing. Your book is stored in XML, so you never have to tie yourself to a particular army in the eBook Format Wars. As new eBook formats become popular, FastPencil will support them. As new devices take center stage, content developed in FastPencil won’t be trapped inside a walled garden.
Easy micropublishing is already here, as these sample FastPencil titles illustrate:
