#1 New York Times Bestselling Author & TV Producer
American Airlines is charging domestic travelers $15 for their first piece of checked luggage. USA Today reports:
Blaming extraordinary fuel prices, American Airlines (AMR)
said Wednesday it plans for the first time to charge many passengers
$15 on top of airfares to check one suitcase on a domestic flight.
If American follows through, many domestic
passengers who check two bags this summer will pay $40 extra each way
in addition to much higher airfares than last summer.
The Rap Sheet clued me into the recently "rediscovered," rejected theme for the 1983 Bond movie NEVER SAY NEVER AGAIN sung by Phyllis Hymann and composed by Stephen Forsyth. To be honest, I don’t think it’s any better than the bland Lani Hall/Michel Legrand tune (performed in the video below) that the producers ended up using… but you can decide for yourself.
Victoria Strauss has an excellent post up today on her Writer Beware blog with great advice for aspiring writers about what to look for before signing with a small press. It’s a must-read for those considering signing with a POD press.
J.T Ellison also offers up some good advice today on How To Avoid Scams over on the Murderati blog:
The biggest problem new writers are faced with is desire. You’ve
worked so damn hard, have slaved away writing your book, and you WANT
to get it out to the reading public. We understand. We were there once
too. But DO YOUR HOMEWORK! There are several easy steps you can take to
ascertain whether the offer you’ve been approached with is legitimate.
Because that’s the problem with scams. The veneer of legitimacy can be
shiny and obscuring.
The Martinsville Reporter-Times reports that the FBI and the U.S. Postmaster have launched a joint investigation into the business practices of Airleaf Publishing/Bookman Publishing, a notorious vanity press scam that went bankrupt last year. Let’s hope this is just the beginning of a national crackdown on the deceptive practices of the vanity press industry.
But its hard to feel any sympathy for the Airleaf victims. Any reasonably intelligent person could have seen that Airleaf (and its previous incarnation Bookman Publishing) was a sham. Even if the aspiring authors were too blind with desperation and naivete to see the scam for themselves, a simple Google search would have turned up plenty of resources (including my blog and others) that talked about the company’s many deceptive practices and false promises.
They made a dumb, costly, and humiliating mistake.
So you’d think that now the Airleaf victims would know better than to ever get involved with a POD vanity press again.
Well, you’d be wrong.
Incredibly, many of them are once again writing checks to vanity presses, including Bonnie Kaye, who founded the Airleaf victims blog and whose relentless efforts are largely responsible for Airleaf’s fall and the subsequent federal investigation.
She’s now a customer of CCB Publishing, a print-on-demand vanity press that she calls her "new publisher." CCB’s former Airleaf clients include John Krismer, who has written a book that reveals this:
Few realize a New World Order plans to replace our constitution with a
Single World Government, nor that our Federal Reserve Bank is privately
owned and is not subject to oversight by Congress or the President.[…]George H. W. Bush, the undisputed “Overlord” of the Shrub Dynasty, in
his State of the Union Message in 1991 said: “What is at stake is more
than one small country, it is a big idea – a new world order.” Did We
the People ever agree to this treasonous act of turning over our
nation’s sovereignty to a Single World Government?
Uh-huh. This is the kind of unpublishable swill that the vanity press industry thrives on. Is it any wonder he has written a check to another POD printer?
I applaud Kaye for going after Airleaf and bringing the company down…but she’s still foolishly writing checks to a POD vanity press and deluding herself into thinking that she’s "published." By doing so, and praising the company to other Airleaf customers, she’s perpetuating the myths that the vanity press industry thrives on. How sad.
But that’s not the worst of it.
Some other former Airleaf clients have become customers of Jones Harvest, a vanity press that is run by former Airleaf employees! Those particular Airleaf customers aren’t victims at all. They are brain-dead morons.
Today WGA members received an email from Patric Verrone, our Guild president, regarding the small number of writers who decided to go "financial core" during the strike. I have a great deal of respect for Patric, and I wholeheartedly supported the strike, but I found the wording, intent, and underlying message of the email offensive, particularly this:
[…]there were a puny few who chose to do otherwise, who consciously and selfishly decided to place their own narrow interests
over the greater good. Extreme exceptions to the rule, perhaps, but this handful of members who went financial core, resigning from the union yet continuing to receive the benefits of a union contract, must be
held at arm’s length by the rest of us and judged accountable for what they are – strikebreakers whose actions placed everything for which we fought so hard at risk.
He went on to include a link to a list of those writers, who number less than two dozen.
Patric’s letter, and his rallying cry to scorn those writers, harkens back to one of the darkest chapters in entertainment history for writers — the blacklist. In my view, Patric is asking us to engage in that same, despicable behavior… to exclude these writers from work opportunities because of their political views. While I strongly disagree with what those writers did, I resent the Guild asking me to blacklist them because of it.
The writers who went financial core objected to the strike but at least they followed the rules to express their dissatisfaction. I can respect their courage and integrity if not their views. They didn’t hide in the shadows, saying one thing ("I support the strike!") and doing another (writing scab scripts for a daily soap). They stood up and were willing to be held accountable for their actions.
I would, at least to some degree, understand Patric’s suggestion if he was talking about the people who actually scabbed…who toiled in secret, writing scripts for shows while the rest of us were walking the picket lines and losing our incomes. Go after the scabs, expose them, fine them, throw them out of the Guild. I am all for that.
But tarring-and-feathering the writers who went financial core, and suggesting that we not hire them, is wrong. The boards of the WGA West and East should be ashamed of endorsing this wrong-headed action and supporting this offensive letter.
UPDATE: The complete text of Patric Verrone’s letter, and a spirited debate about it, can be found at Nikki Finke’s Deadline Hollywood Daily.
UPDATE: WGA members Craig Mazin and John August share their opinions about the letter.
UPDATE 4/22/08: Nikki Finke reports that the AMPTP has filed an unfair labor practices charge with the NLRB over the WGA’s letter. The AMPTP statement reads, in part:
By publicly naming names and encouraging people who have the power to
hire writers to keep them "at arm’s length," and saying they must be
"judged accountable" it is clear the WGA leadership is seeking to deny
employment to these writers in the future. That is a direct violation
of federal labor law, and as the employers of those writers we have a
responsibility to defend them and the rule of law in this case.
I don’t condone the AMPTP’s motives for filing the charges, but their statement is absolutely right and I hope the NLRB slaps the WGA with stiff sanctions for this. For the first time since I joined the WGA, I am ashamed of my Guild and its leadership. The WGA Board needs to apologize for what they have done.
UPDATE 4/26/08: I have now heard from three board members, two of whom said that they were blindsided by the letter. They told me that the Board had voted to release the names of the fi-core writers, but they had no idea that the membership would be told not to associate with them. I am hoping that there will be a clarification and/or apology to the membership following the next board meeting.
Richard Wheeler reports that some literary heirs have found a way to undermine public domain — they trademark the name of the author, as Zane Grey’s estate has done with his name.
What the trademark accomplishes is to make it impossible for anyone to
publish a Grey novel that has fallen into the public domain unless the
publisher licenses the name of the author from the heirs. Oh, you can
print the public domain material, all right; just don’t put the
author’s name on it.
I wonder if this has ever been tested in court? If not, it probably will be soon.
There were lots of interesting statistics in Publishers Weekly today relating to retailing and Print-On-Demand.
According to a Bowker study, the Mystery Genre is what Americans read most, accounting for 17% of all books sold. Science Fiction accounts for 5.5%, General Fiction snags 3%, and Horror scares up 2%. The same study also found that chain bookstores account for 33% of booksales while the Internet sells 21%.
A study by the Association of American Publishers found that total industry sales rose 3.2% in 2007 to $25 billion. The largest gain is among adult hardcovers, which are up 7.8%. The "largest overall gains in the year came from the smallest segments." They note that ebook sales jumped 23.6% and audio books rose 19.8%.
PW editor Sara Nelson notes in her column that Amazon accounts for slightly more than 10% of online sales. She doesn’t seem particularly worried about the company strongarming POD presses to use Booksurge, their POD service. She observes that big publishers use POD "only sparingly," that there remain many other venues of POD sales, and that lawyers she has contacted don’t see the grounds for an anti-trust suit.
And in a news brief, Lightning Source has partnered with On Demand Books, the company that makes the Espresso Book Machine that prints novels for readers on the spot. So far, there are a grand total of seven machines in operation…not exactly a major force in book retailing.
NBC has already announced their fall schedule — nearly two months earlier than usual. Variety reports that there are some surprises: SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE will do a live, prime-time edition on Thursdays, THE OFFICE is hatching a spin-off, and the long-running series SCRUBS and LAW & ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT are missing from the schedule (and are presumably cancelled). New drama series include the revamped KNIGHTRIDER, MY OWN WORST ENEMY (starring Christian Slater), CRUSOE (a new take on Robinson Crusoe), and the Tom Fontana-produced series THE PHILANTHROPIST.
You can find the full schedule after the jump.
Variety reports that TNT is developing a series set in Boston based on Tess Gerritsen’s bestselling novels. Other shows in development include one about a female reporter who discovers "a magic lamp with a genie." I’m banking on Tess.
Earlier this month, I told you about a scam called "Beneaththecover.com," which purports to offer authors inside news and expert advice about the publishing industry when, in fact, it’s just a front for a bunch of vanity press and book promotion hucksters selling their wares. This point was driven home the other day when one of their so-called "experts," vanity press publisher Yvonne DiVita, offered this outrageous lie in a post she had the chutzpah to title "POD Myths Dispelled – Get The Scoop Here":
In today’s
emerging digital world, if you truly want to attract that big name
publisher, use a professional POD firm to self-publish because the big
name publishers are watching.
The best way to attract a publisher is to write a good book, not blow thousands of dollars having it printed in POD form by a vanity press. If anything, printing your book in POD is more likely to prevent a publisher from taking you or the book seriously.
DiVita is one of a pack of POD vanity press hucksters who prey on the gullibility, desperation, and ignorance of aspiring authors. She argues that vanity presses aren’t merely printers but real publishers because they pay more attention to their authors than real publishers do. What she neglects to mention is that vanity presses like hers make the vast majority of their money off their authors, not from booksales, and that all that attention they slather on their clients (not authors, ladies and gentlemen, clients) is to convince them to spend even more on their worthless services. She writes:
IF authors don’t sell enough books with their publisher, POD
or otherwise, the author isn’t trying hard enough. I’ve worked with
traditional publishers, and they require an extensive marketing plan
from authors before they will consider publication. And research shows
that books published by traditional publishers sell around 150-300, on
average.
That’s right, blame the author for the fact that their POD vanity press books aren’t sold in stores and are unlikely to sell to anyone but the client… and then back it up with pointless "facts."
I’ve had over two dozen books published by real publishers. No editor has ever asked me for an "extensive marketing plan" before considering my books.I’ve also asked a few published friends…and they have never been asked for marketing plans, either. But they are novelists, and perhaps they would be asked for one if they wrote non-fiction. So let’s give DiVita the benefit of the doubt and say publishers want marketing plans along with non-fiction book proposals. To which I say… So what? How is that a persuasive argument for going to vanity-press instead of a real publisher? You’ll need a marketing plan either way. The key difference is that a real publisher will pay you and a vanity press will ask for your credit card number.
I’ve scoured the web and I can’t find any "research" that backs up her outrageous claim that most books published by genuine publishers sell only 150-300 copies.
The closet statistic I could find to her numbers was a 2004 Bookscan study that tracked sales of 1.2 million books sold that year. According to their figures, the average book of any kind published in 2004 sold 500 copies. The study noted that only 25,000 titles sold more than 5,000 copies each,
500 sold more than 100,000 copies and only ten sold more than a million
copies. But the figures are controversial, because the sales were not broken down by genre, like fiction or non-fiction, nor did they differentiate between titles from large
publishers or small ones, traditional publishers or vanity presses.
But lets pretend her figures are right. How is that an argument for going to a vanity press? Authors published by real publishers whose books only sold 500 copies in 2004 were still paid to be published. They earned money, though not as much as they’d hoped.
By comparison, most vanity press authors will lose money because they paid to be published. But don’t take my word for it, let’s look at the 2004 sales figures from iUniverse, the biggest name in self-publishing:
18,108: Total number of titles
published792,814: Number of copies
printed14: Number of titles
sold through B&N’s bricks-and-mortar stores (nationally)83: Number of titles that sold at least 500
copies
Out of 18,000 titles and nearly 800,000 copies printed, only 83 authors sold more than 500 copies. Good God. Think of all the money that authors lost …and how much iUniverse made. That’s the business that DiVita is in…and it’s a profitable one. For the printer, not the author.
So what is the truth about POD self-publishing companies? It’s obvious. Vanity presses are in the "author services business", not the publishing business which, in a rare bit of candor, even DiVita concedes on her vanity press website:
Windsor Media Enterprises specializes in author services. We offer idea development, manuscript critiquing, editing, proofreading, formatting and cover design, for new and existing authors.
And for that, they charge you a price and that’s how they make their money. That is their business. And if your book, by some miracle, manages to sell a few copies, they make a little more.
A vanity press will tell you any lie they can to convince you that they are real publishers (when they are merely selling editing and printing services), that self-publishing is the route most successful authors take (it’s not), and that you have as much of a chance to sell books with them as you do going with a traditional publisher (you don’t).
Is Yvonne DiVita really someone qualified to give writers sound advice? Or is she someone with a clear conflict-of-interest hoping to coerce naive authors into buying her product? The answer is obvious, and it came right from the founders of Beneaththecover.com when they tried to solicit my brother Tod into being one of their experts:
Beneath the Cover is a cooperative venture for building marketing platforms of everyone involved.
That’s what should be written on the masthead of their home page, not "Where book industry professionals who know almost everything go to discuss news, insights, and evolving industry issues." And it should be stated in big print on each and every piece of "advice" that they give.