Writers

Author Jonathan Franzen is against eBooks. ”Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do,” he said while speaking at the Hay Festival in Cartagena, Colombia.

“When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place,” he is quoted as saying in The Telegraph UK. “The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.”

Franzen defended the paperback technology saying that he could spill water on it and it would still work. He also defended the print format for its permanence. He said, “And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model.”

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Author Amy Tan published her first e-xclusive story this week as part of digital imprint publisher Byliner.com’s new fiction series.

The author talked to The Sacramento Bee about writing the short story “Rules for Virgins” for the digital medium. She said: “This is the first story I’ve directly written for e-publication, and I found the form liberating because there was no word-length limitation. I likely will do more.”

The story came out on December 5th and costs $2.99. GalleyCat explains more: “Readers can find it in the Amazon Kindle Singles store, at BarnesAndNoble.com, as a Quick Read in Apple’s iBook store and in the Google eBookstore. According to the company, this will be Tan’s first fiction publication in six years. Tan’s new novel, The Valley of Amazement, will be published by HarperCollins’ Ecco imprint.”

Read more

For author C. Leigh Purtill, when the rights to her traditionally published novel reverted back to her, she decided that she would self-publish the eBook version. Purtill caught up with eBookNewser to explain why.

EBN: Why did you decide to self-publish your eBook?

LP: I didn’t want to wait for a publisher to give me the green light and then have to go through the lengthy process that is typical of traditional book publishing. While a publisher controls elements I would like a bigger hand in, such as cover design and title choice, it usually offers only a minimal marketing budget in return. I’m a writer, not a publicist, marketing professional or ad person. But in the current publishing climate, these marketing tasks are laid at the feet of lesser-known writers. I do love taking an active role in connecting with readers but when my efforts seem to be a publisher’s sole marketing plan, it really leaves me scratching my head. Read more

Author Lewis Perdue is inviting readers to help him choose the cover for his next book, Die By Wire. The author has five different choices listed on his website and is asking readers to vote on their favorite by December 7th.

The book is a conspiracy thriller about global terrorism. Here is more from Perdue’s website: “When guardian sniper Mira Longbow arrives in Amsterdam to take out the head of a global child-smuggling ring, she quickly stumbles across a diabolically creative, high-tech jihad that will bring the West to its knees. Problem is, she also crosses paths with Jackson Day, an unwanted visitor, and would-be lover from her turbulent past in Iraq. Day is a deadly effective loner assigned to the Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Command whose motto (and his) is ‘Never Fight Fair.’”

Follow this link to vote.

Random House Children’s Books has a new eBook coming out from children’s book author Michael Scott.

Billy the Kid and the Vampyres of Vegas: A Lost Story from the Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel is the second story in a six-part eBook series original from the publisher and author. The first story in the series is called Warlock and came out in May. The final edition will come out in May 2012.

Here is more about Billy the Kid from the press release: “This story about the famed 19th-century American outlaw is available exclusively in digital format and is the newest addition to Scott’s series The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, which is based on individuals from history, folklore, and legend. The series has sold nearly 2 million copies to date in North America.”

It comes out from Delacorte Press Books for Young Readers on November 22 for $1.99.

Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Taylor Branch has a new eBook out about college athletes. The eBook, entitled, The Cartel: Inside the Rise and Imminent Fall of the NCAA, chronicles college sports scandals and the NCAA.

Here is more from the eBook: “College athletes are not slaves. Yet to survey the scene—corporations and universities enriching themselves on the backs of uncompensated young men, whose status as ‘student-athletes’ deprives them of the right to due process guaranteed by the Constitution—is to catch the unmistakable whiff of the plantation.”

A portion of piece was first published in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic. Byliner Originals released the complete eBook title, which is available in eBookstores for $3.99.

 

British author Graham Swift is not a fan of eBooks. In an interview with The Telegraph, the author compares the eBook revolution to mass production in the mid-19th century, and accuses publishers of using eBooks as an excuse to pay authors less.

Swift, whose 1996 novel Last Orders won the Booker Prize, says that the way that writers are paid for their eBooks is too “up in the air.”

He said in the interview: “Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is a real danger they will take even less, unless they are vigilant and robust about protecting their own interests.”

Let’s face it, dropping a print book or an eReader into a body of water would be an awful way to ruin any summer reads. An eReader would be worse, because it costs more and houses a lot more books, but still no one wants to lose their paperback to the sea.

To combat water destruction of books, author Alan Cork is using a new water resistant technology for his eBook The Greater Bad when it comes out in print next year.

The Daily Mail has more about the technology: “It is said to increase shelf-life by up to 200 per cent as well as prevent running ink. Banks in Australia already use the technology to prolong the life of banknotes and to reduce the risk of forgery. But it is the first time that a standard paperback will receive the same treatment.”

Marty Beckerman, a former Esquire editor, has a new eBook out that takes a humorous look at Ernest Hemingway, called The Heming Way.

To memorialize the 50^th anniversary of the great American novelist’s passing on July 2nd, Beckerman looks at Hemingway as “history’s ultimate man.” The book pokes fun at Hemingway’s drinking, womanizing and self destructive tendencies with chapters such as “For Whom the Beer Flows,” “Death in the Afternoon… Lunch is Served,” “A Farewell to Smooth Arms, Backs, Taints, Etc.,” and “The Old Man and the See You in Hell.”

Beckerman had this statement: “Fifty years have passed since this giant walked the earth, and we’ve forgotten every lesson he taught. Instead of wasting our time on Facebook and Twitter, we should be climbing mountains, dominating battlefields, and transforming majestic creatures of the Southern Hemisphere into piano keyboards.”

The eBook is now available for $3.99.

 

Stieg Larsson’s The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest has sold more than 3.4 million copies in the U.S. in hardcover and eBook formats combined. Random House has sold more than 17 million books for all three books in the Millennium Trilogy, eBooks and print combined.

According to a Random House press release, Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy in the U.S has sold15 million copies in print in hardcover, trade, and mass market editions and more than 17 million in all formats. Random House breaks out sales as 80% physical and 20% digital. By these calculations, Larsson has sold 3.4 million eBooks in the U.S.

According to the release, Larsson has sold 60 million books in all formats worldwide.