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Why Outer Banks Publishing Group is Green

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It’s nice to say you are a green company, but doing it effectively is another story.

With digital printing we don’t have thousands of books sitting in warehouses waiting to be sold – spent resources that may or may not be purchased and read.

We print books only when an order is received.

The majority of our book sales (85%) are electronic as manufacturers of ereaders have opened their walled gardens allowing their books to be read on any device, any platform, anywhere, anytime.

Think printed books will go away? No way. Did movie theaters close when home theater systems became mainstream?

The Association of American Publishers reported that the annual growth rate for eBook sales fell during 2012, to about 34% – a sharp decline from the triple-digit growth of the preceding four years.

But that doesn’t mean ebooks are going away.  A recent Pew Research Center survey showed that adults who have read an e-book increased from 16% to 23% in the past year. It also revealed that 89% of regular book readers said that they had read at least one printed book in the last year.

Ebooks are merely another channel, another technology to promote, sell and enjoy books. It compliments printed books. Printed books won’t go away – there will just be fewer printed.

Fewer printed books is not good for the big six publishers, but it won’t bankrupt them – just lower their sales volume and profit margins.

That’s why they won’t fully embrace ebooks and why they charge artificially high prices for their ebooks close to the full price of their printed books.

They want to revive the same high profit margins they enjoyed with print books for so many decades.

But they will never convince their customers or the general public that ebooks cost as much as print books to edit, process and distribute.

Ebooks are a disruptive technology and like all disruptive technologies is condemned, rejected and deemed catastrophic for society by those who stand to lose.

The market will determine the accepted price of ebooks, not the publishers and there is nothing they can do to stop it. The tsunami has already hit land.

Can geckos write books?

 

Well, yes, because the lovable, popular Geico Gecko has written and illustrated a book called You’re Only Human: A Guide To Life, released today by Workman Publishing for $11.95.

Gecko's book

Courtesy of Workman Publishing

Bloomberg Businessweek online quoted Workman saying the Gecko “has spent the last few years traveling across America, like a modern-day de Tocqueville.” What’s more, it adds:

“He’s a philosopher, an aphorist, a humorist, an artist, a warm companion, a natural storyteller—and, in a grand tradition, a keenly observant and wise outsider who in the course of living and traveling among us has discovered quite a lot about the things that make us human.

“He makes curious and interesting observations on everything from dreams to job interviews to adversity, Twitter to the Golden Rule (it’s not what you think it is) to talking animals: I’m really not sure what all the fuss is about. Lots of animals talk, including humans. The bigger question is, what do you have to say worth listening to?

See the trailer on YouTube.

http://youtu.be/gnRKMt6LI4k

Available at bookstores everywhere.

________________________________

Product Details

  • Paperback: 176 pages
  • Publisher: Workman Publishing Company (April 23, 2013)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0761174826
  • ISBN-13: 978-0761174820
  • Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 6 x 0.7 inches

 

 

 

Suspenseful Debut Novel reflects repression of Middle East still thriving

 

When I heard this sad story on NPR radio this morning it moved me so much and reminded me of Doug Roberts novel, The Man Who Fooled SAVAK, a suspenseful love story based on true events. This is the kind of repression that still pervades a lot of the Middle East today as it did forty years ago when Mr. Roberts staged the successful escape of his fiancé and her mother from a repressive and threatening Iran.

In January of this year in Pakistan, the governor of Punjab province, Salmaan Taseer, who was an outspoken defender of civil rights, was gunned down for criticizing the hardness of Islamic law. He was merely sticking up for a Christian woman who was accused of blaspheming Islam. Her punishment: death.

His daughter, Shehrbano Taseer, is a journalist in Pakistan, and she talks to Steve Inskeep, host of NRP Radio’s Morning Edition, about her father’s legacy and her own fight against extremism.

Here is part of that interview:

“INSKEEP: And it was not that your father committed this alleged act of blasphemy, but merely spoke up for the rights of someone who was accused of blasphemy and asked for her to be accorded mercy. This is what many clerics described as itself being blasphemous.

Ms. TASEER: Yeah, because my father had criticized the law. He had criticized the misuse of the law.

INSKEEP: Did anyone speak up for your father after his murder?

Ms. TASEER: There were three people who believed that this law was being misused and that this was an unfair Cover for The Man Who Fooled SAVAKallegation of blasphemy. There was my father. There was our federal minister for minorities, Shahbaz Bhatti, and there was Syeda Imam, who is a parliamentarian. And she had tabled a bill in the national assembly trying to water down this law and stop the misuse. And two out of three of these people are now dead. Shahbaz Bhatti, our federal minister for minorities, was gunned down outside his mother’s home two months after my father was shot dead.”

You can read the rest of this moving interview or listen to it on the NPR site. And if you want to read more about a similar story with a much different outcome, download a copy of The Man Who Fooled SAVAK, available on the Kindle, Barnes and Noble NOOK, Apple iBooks and in various ereader formats from Smashwords.

You Don’t Have to be Psychic

With all the buzz around the iPad, you don’t need to be psychic to predict that Amazon would sooner or later develop a comparable color screen tablet device.
Kindle color version with touch screen

Well the sooner is here. Amazon is now accepting iPads and other devices as trade-ins for their new touch-screen color tablet at http://amzn.to/jbdaq2

Steve Windwalker reported in the blog Kindle Nation Daily that Amazon is well on the way to preparing to launch the device sometime this summer. Here’s what he wrote about the trade-in program.

“It extended its relatively unknown Buyback program, previously associated mostly with textbooks, movies, and video games, to include a wide range of electronics products including the iPad, the iPhone, the Samsung Galaxy, the Motorola Xoom, and all kinds of other devices that might — if you could trade them in for a decent sum — prepare the way for you to buy a Kindle tablet, both in terms of the need to replace functionality and the financial wherewithal to make the purchase.”

They actually want you to own their new Kindle Color version knowing full well that owners of iPads and other color tablet like devices wouldn’t buy the new Kindle after shelling out $500+ for their current iPad or similar device.

It’s another marketing first for Amazon to grab the lion’s share of the spawning tablet market, and I’m sure it won’t be their last.

You can also read Amazon’s press release about the trade-in program on Steve’s post on Kindle Nation Daily.

Kindle books can now be loaned – Newest Trends

We just received this newsletter from a new site called kindlelendingclub.com launched by Amazon last December.

If you have a Kindle or any of the Kindle reading apps (Kindle for PC, Kindle for iPhone, Kindle for Blackberry, etc.) you can go to the site, sign up and borrow any Kindle book that has lending enabled.

The book will then be loaned to you for 14 days and then automatically transferred back to the original owner.

What we found interesting is the lending trends reported by the site in the following newsletter and the 25 most wanted books.

In light of the demographics (females between 35 and 55) we would have thought romance novels would be the leading lending genre. However, here’s what they reported.

The 25 Most Wanted

Literary fiction, the paranormal, sci fi, crime fiction, thrillers and even a memoir about a comedian’s one-night stands; it seems like KindleLendingClub.com readers (who tend to be female and between 35 and 55 years of age) are borrowing anything but traditional romance in the lead up to Valentine’s Day 2011.

While Amanda Hocking’s vampire and paranormal romances for young adults remain perennially popular, only two of the top 25 most requested books are traditional romance novels: A Season to be Sinful, by Jo Goodman, and Terry Spear’s An Accidental Highland Hero.

(Another interesting trend we saw last week as well? Eight of the 25 titles fall under the umbrella of young adult fiction.)

KindleLendingClub.com Most Wanted – Week of January 30, 2011:

1. The Hangman’s Daughter, by Oliver Pötzsch

2. Water for Elephants: A Novel, by Sara Gruen

3. The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins

4. Switched (Trylle Trilogy, #1), by Amanda Hocking

5. Wicked Appetite, by Janet Evanovich

6. Mockingjay (The Final Book of The Hunger Games), by Suzanne Collins

7. Catching Fire (The Second Book of the Hunger Games), by Suzanne Collins

8. Heart of the Matter, by Emily Giffin

9. My Horizontal Life, by Chelsea Handler

10. My Blood Approves, by Amanda Hocking

11. The Lover’s Dictionary: A Novel, by David Levithan

12. Freedom: A Novel (Oprah’s Book Club), by Jonathan Franzen

13. The Templar Concordat, by Terrence O’Brien

14. Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card

15. We Interrupt This Date, by L.C. Evans

16. A Season To Be Sinful, by Jo Goodman

17. Sizzling Sixteen, by Janet Evanovich

18. Favorite, by Karen McQuestion

19. The Boy Who Came Back from Heaven, by Kevin Malarkey

20. Ascend (Trylle Trilogy, #3), by Amanda Hocking

21. Ender in Exile, by Orson Scott Card

22. Crossing Oceans, by Gina Holmes

23. Shiver, by Maggie Stiefvater

24. Firefly Lane, by Kristin Hannah

25. The Accidental Highland Hero, by Terry Spear

A New Trend in Publishing is Emerging




As more and more authors turn to self-publishing, a new trend is emerging that may benefit publishers as well as authors.


Joe Konrath




Successful crime novelist Joe Konrath is probably the author who started this new trend and is the poster child of successful authors moving into the self-publishing realm.


According to an article in The Star-Telegram online written by Alex Pham of The Los Angeles Times,

“Joe Konrath can’t wait for his books to go out of print.


When that happens, the 40-year-old crime novelist plans to reclaim the copyrights from his publisher, Hyperion Books, and self-publish them on Amazon.com, Apple’s iBooks and other online outlets. That way he’ll be able to collect 70 percent of the sale price, compared with the 6 to 18 percent he receives from Hyperion.


As for future novels, Konrath plans to self-publish all of them in digital form without having to leave his house in Schaumburg, Ill.


‘I doubt I’ll ever have another traditional print deal,’ said the author of Whiskey Sour, Bloody Mary and other titles. ‘I can earn more money on my own.'”



Mr. Pham goes on to write, “It’s difficult to gauge just how many authors are dumping their publishing houses to self-publish online, though for now, the overall share remains small. But hardly a month goes by without a well-known writer taking the leap or declaring an intention to do so.”

However, Mr. Konrath is one of the exceptions to successful self-publishing because his fan base was primarily created by the marketing and distribution efforts of traditional publishing houses.

Does that mean an author needs to be published by a traditional publishing house to be successful later in self-publishing?

Not at all.


Mr. Konrath just stood up on his surf board and is about to catch one of  the largest new waves in publishing. He knows where his readers are and how to read them – online where most hang out.

As an aspiring or first-book author who is relatively unknown, you need to market your work to where people seek, read, recommend and review books – in social media: Facebook, Twitter, NING, Linkedin, Foursquare, Goodreads, and all the other social networking sites out there.

There is only one problem. By the time you learn how to effectively market your work on all the social media, you may be in an old-age home especially if you are not so computer savvy. Besides, when would you have time to write another book?

Most authors just want to write. They don’t want to wear six or seven hats and be the marketing guru, the sales superstar or the promotional genius.

This is where publishers can get their own surf board and ride the same wave as Mr. Konrath.  But some are just standing up on their boards, others are knelling and most don’t even see the social media wave.

Publishers can offer social networking services, electronic distribution and all the perks of traditional publishing to authors in digital and electronic form. This is a wave that is coming whether publishers like it or not so the best strategy is to make sure to have a surf board and to look out over the horizon. This publisher is certainly standing on his surf board poised to ride the next giant wave.

So You Thought E-books were a passing fad?

From Twenty Four Times

Amazon Kindle: Partially Responsible for $1 Billion E-book Sales

by Manisha on November 12, 2010

Market research firm Forrester has estimated e-book sales to touch the 1 billion mark by end 2010 in US and to triple by 2015!

Although only 7% of the 4000 people surveyed by Forrester actually read e-books these few are probably the most important ones reading 41% of their books in the digital form and buying books by the heaps.

In what might be viewed as a pat on the back for Kindle, it has surfaced as the most popular e-reader (32%), followed by Apple iPhone, Sony e-reader and Dell notebook and finishing a close second to the ubiquitous laptop in the Forrester findings.

Doing 66% of their reading in the digital form, Kindle users have emerged as the most avid e-book patriots and as if on a cue Kindle has already announced the flipping of its revenue sharing agreement with its publishers which we covered right here for you.

The findings could be a wake-up call for the tentative publisher yet to decide on whether to go digital with his next publication-the writing seems clear on the wall though-and before paperback becomes old hat it’s time to cash in on the promising prospect of e-books as unveiled by Forrester.

If you liked this article, share it on FACEBOOK.

Kindle Outselling iBooks 60 To 1?

Not hard to believe when you consider the Kindle was the first mass-market ebook reader and the iPad is really a computing tablet with an ebook reader.

The iPad appeals to a larger market segment overall,  but a smaller segment who just want the device to read ebooks.

Our own titles show sales on the Kindle, the Nook and the Kobo and none so far on the iPad.

Here’s the post from TNW.

By Alex Wilhelm on August 22nd, 2010

If you follow the ebook market you were likely stunned this June when Steve Jobs claimed to have captured 22% of the electronic book market overnight with the release of iBooks and iPad. Many of us who watch this market with carefuleyes were leery of the numbers that Jobs was tossing around, they sounded too good to be true.  more>

Will Literary Agents become the Next Ebook Publishers?

In an unprecedented move, the Wiley Literary Agency struck a deal with Amazon to publish 20 classic titles as ebooks on the Kindle. According to reports, this is the first time a literary agency moved into the publishing business.

Will this be a trenliterary agencies, ebook rights, ebooks, authors, publishingd as agencies struggle to survive in the dwindling print market? It might be. An agency would sign on an author, retain electronic publishing rights and then sell print rights to traditional publishers.

Agency revenues would increase considerably for ebooks, especially with the current structure where agencies only receive 15% of the author’s royalties.

However, the big question is will traditional publishers go along with this scenario or refuse to publish an author unless they retain electronic rights?

Will this be beneficial to authors?

Read Stephen Windwalker’s column for more information on this emerging development.

Read the report from The New York Times.

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