Monatsarchive: July 2018

If you found Faleena Hopkins’s attempt to trademark the word "cocky" infuriating then this next trademark could give you a stroke.

An author in the SPF Community FB group just brought my attention to a newly filed trademark. It seems someone is trying to trademark one of the fundamental designs for book covers.

Note: We’re not talking about a trademark on a design for a specific series but on the most broadly generic design possible. This is what was included in the paperwork:

Here’s the description:

The mark consists of a title and/or series name at the top of the trade dress; one or more human or partially human figures underneath, at least one of the figures holding a weapon; and an author’s name underneath the figures; wherein the title/series and author’s name are depicted in the same or similar coloring. The dotted lines represent the product, and are used to show the location of the trade dress on the product, and do not constitute part of the trade dress.

Most trademarks (not including other trademarks filed by this company) very specifically name the title or series that is covered by the mark. By leaving out that detail this filing is claiming to trademark book covers where someone is holding a weapon.

In short, I violated the trademark by creating the following book cover in Canva:

Okay, I didn’t actually violate the trademark because it has not been approved  – which is never going to happen.

The thing about trademarks is that not only do you have to use the trademark commerce in order to claim any right to it, you also have to be the first to use it. If someone files a trademark on a term that is already widely used then the application is declined. (Or at least it should be declined; Hopkins still managed to get her trademark on "cocky" – it has since been invalidated.)

In the case of the "guy holding axe" trademark application, there are so many covers with similar designs that there is no way that this trademark could be valid.

I mean, there are only like three or four thousand books with similar covers on the market; surely that is enough to show prior art.

P.S. And the same goes for the other trademarks filed by this company. It has also filed trademarks on terms including The Destroyer, Star Justice, and Dragon Slayer. Those terms have been used a few hundred times each, at least.

Book cover image by jepoycamboy on Flickr

The NYTimes has finally discovered that under capitalism, sellers can price their products however they want. Earlier this week they published a story on books being listed on Amazon.com at prices ten times or greater than the market rate.

I know, I know, this has been going on for years, but apparently it was news to David Streitfeld.

Many booksellers on Amazon strive to sell their wares as cheaply as possible. That, after all, is usually how you make a sale in a competitive marketplace.

Other merchants favor a counterintuitive approach: Mark the price up to the moon.

“Zowie,” the romance author Deborah Macgillivray wrote on Twitter last month after she discovered copies of her 2009 novel, “One Snowy Knight,” being offered for four figures. One was going for “$2,630.52 & FREE Shipping,” she noted. Since other copies of the paperback were being sold elsewhere on Amazon for as little as 99 cents, she was perplexed.

“How many really sell at that price? Are they just hoping to snooker some poor soul?” Ms. Macgillivray wrote in an email. She noted that her blog had gotten an explosion in traffic from Russia. “Maybe Russian hackers do this in their spare time, making money on the side,” she said.

…

The wild book prices were in the remote corners of the Amazon bookstore that the retailer does not pay much attention to, said Guru Hariharan, chief executive of Boomerang Commerce, which develops artificial intelligence technology for retailers and brands.

Third-party sellers, he said, come in all shapes and sizes — from well-respected national brands that are trying to maintain some independence from Amazon to entrepreneurial individuals who use Amazon’s marketplace as an arbitrage opportunity. These sellers list products they have access to, adjusting price and inventory to drive profits.

Then there are the wild pricing specialists, who sell both new and secondhand copies.

…

A decade ago, Elisabeth Petry wrote a tribute to her mother, the renowned novelist Ann Petry. “At Home Inside,” published by the University of Mississippi Press, is now out of print, but late last week secondhand copies were for sale on Amazon. A discarded library copy was $1,900. One seller offered two copies, each for $1,967, although only one was described as “Nice!” All these were a bargain compared with the copy that cost $2,464.

The general consensus on Twitter is that this is a sign of some kind of money laundering activity. After all, these books aren’t just being listed, they’re actually selling at the inflated prices.

That is how I initially approached this story, and in fact, I had this whole intro that referenced a romantic comedy, but I’m not convinced that it is applicable.

One of the subplots in the 1999 Hugh Grant movie Mickey Blue Eyes involved Grant’s future father in law using the auction house where Grant worked for a money laundering scheme. A truly awful painting was sold at a high price, and the sale was used to transfer funds from one accomplice to another.

If the movie were set ten years later, they could have used Amazon.

But now I am not so sure that is the case. Yes, money-laundering operations have been found on Amazon.com before, but it’s not at all clear that is what is going on here.

Instead, these prices remind me of the weird over-priced gadgets that people have wasted their money on.

The Juicero, for example, was an $700 that took DRMed juice packets and performed about as well as squeezing the packets by hand.

People not only bought the Juicero sight unseen, the company picked up $70 million in capital investment based on nothing more than hype.

If people are eager to buy a Juicero and invest in the company then (in the absence of any evidence to the contrary) it is just as likely that the high-priced book sales are just as legitimate.

Yes, i don’t understand it either, but that is true for many topics.

What do you think?

image by Coffee-Channel.com

Along with Findaway and Blackstone Audio, RBMedia is one of several small audiobook distributors operating in the shadow of Amazon’s Audible.

RBMedia was sold yesterday to private equity firm KKR. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

From WSJ:

Investment firm KKR has agreed to acquire RBmedia, a major producer of digital audiobooks and spoken content, from investment firm Shamrock Capital, the latest sign of the growing popularity of audiobooks as a consumer-entertainment format.

The deal is expected to close by early fall. Terms weren’t disclosed.

Audiobooks have emerged as the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. book-publishing industry, in part because they can be accessed through a range of mobile digital devices. Consumers can listen while commuting or working out.

“We love the industry sector and its growth, and we think it will continue,” said Richard Sarnoff, chairman of media, entertainment, and education for KKR, in an interview. “Audiobooks create incremental time for enjoying great books, and one thing we lack today is time. We think this type of content will continue to take up more mind share, especially among younger consumers.”

KKR estimates that consumers will spend $900 million on audiobooks in 2018, up about 20% from the year before.

RBmedia owns Audiobooks.com, making it a retailer as well as a publisher and distributor. According to the press release, both parts of the company are included in this sale.

Do you know what surprised me the most about this sale? It wasn’t that it took place but the fact that Rakuten wasn’t the buyer.

Rakuten owns Kobo, OverDrive, and the ebook app developer Aquafadas. One would think that an audiobook distributor and retailer would be a good match for Rakuten’s existing ebook subsidiaries, but apparently Rakuten did not find that to be the case.

Do you suppose they were outbid?

image by davidmulder61

Originally launched by Marco Arment as an iPhone app, the save for later service Instapaper was sold to Betaworks in 2013, who then sold it to Pinterest in 2016.

Now Instapaper is being spun out as an independent company.

Today, we’re announcing that Pinterest has entered into an agreement to transfer ownership of Instapaper to Instant Paper, Inc., a new company owned and operated by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper since it was sold to betaworks by Marco Arment in 2013. The ownership transfer will occur after a 21 day waiting period designed to give our users fair notice about the change of control with respect to their personal information.

We want to emphasize that not much is changing for the Instapaper product outside the new ownership. The product will continue to be built and maintained by the same people who’ve been working on Instapaper for the past five years. We plan to continue offering a robust service that focuses on readers and the reading experience for the foreseeable future.

Playing the game of musical owners does not instill confidence about the stability or direction of the company (just about the only way it could be worse is if Yahoo bought it), which is why as a longtime user and avid fan, I hope this isn’t a bad sign for the future of Instapaper.

Instapaper isn’t just one of my core tools, it’s also my touchstone for legibility. I use it to judge a website’s designs by loading their articles into Instapaper, and then seeing whether the original is easier to read than the copy in Instapaper. (The majority of websites, including the much-lauded Medium, fail this test.)

If Instapaper fails we will all be the worse for it.

Amazon just gave us a practical demonstration of why you might want to use someone else’s hosting services.

The retailer is 16 hours into its 36-hour Prime Day sale, and its site has gone down under the entirely predictable load.  The crash has taken other Amazon services with it, including Prime Video, which has failed twice in the past hour.

In place of the promised deals, shoppers are being treated to photos of Amazon employee’s dogs.

There’s no word on when service will be restored, but the most likely possibility is that the site will be up and down throughout the Prime Day sale.

Amazon was queried before this post was published, and has not responded.

Amazon announced on Monday that the Kindle Unlimited funding pool totaled $22.6 million in June (plus bonuses), up from $22.5 million in May 2018. At the same time the per-page rate royalty rose to $0.0046 in June, compared to $0.00454 in May and $0.00456 in April 2018.

• US: $0.0046 (USD)
• Germany: €0.0031 (EUR)
• Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy: €0.0046 (EUR)
• Canada: $0.0045 (CAD)
• Brazil: R$ 0.0111 (BRL)
• Japan: 0.5702 (JPY )
• India, UK, Mexico, Australia: unknown

Here’s a list of the monthly funding pools. It does not include the bonuses paid out each month.

• July 2014: $2.5 million (Kindle Unlimited launches early in the month)
• August 2014: $4.7 million
• September 2014: $5 million
• October 2014: $5.5 million
• November 2014: $6.5 million
• December 2014: $7.25 million
• January 2015 – $8.5 million
• February 2015: $8 million
• March 2015: $9.3 million
• April 2015: $9.8 million
• May 2015: $10.8 million
• June 2015: $11.3 million
• July 2015: $11.5 million
• August 2015: $11.8 million
• September 2015: $12 million
• October 2015: $12.4 million
• November 2015: $12.7 million
• December 2015: $13.5 million
• January 2016: $15 million
• February 2016: $14 million
• March 2016: $14.9 million
• April 2016: $14.9 million
• May 2016: $15.3 million
• June 2016: $15.4 million
• July 2016: $15.5 million
• August 2016: $15.8 million
• September 2016: $15.9 million
• October 2016: $16.2 million
• November 2016: $16.3 million
• December 2016: $16.8 million
• January 2017: : $17.8 million
• February 2017: : $16.8 million
• March 2017: $17.7 million
• April 2017: $17.8 million
• May 2017 :$17.9 million
• June 2017: $18 million
• July 2017: $19 million
• August 2017: $19.4 million
• September 2017: $19.5 million
• October 2017: $19.7 million
• November 2017: $19.8 million
• December 2017: $19.9 million
• January 2018: $20.9 million
• February 2018: $20 million
• March 2018: $21 million
• April 2018: $21.2 million
• May 2018: $22.5 million
• June 2018: $22.6 million

via Self Publisher Bibel

Earlier today The Book Designer published a post where I argue that authors should invest in swag to give away or sell to their fans. This is still be a rather controversial idea in the indie author community, but it is widely accepted in the larger business community, and it’s high time that indie authors followed suit.

I’m sure everyone knows about the immense number of product tie-ins  for successful movie and TV adaptations.  Rowling’s Harry Potter series has everything from collectibles to theme parks, while Tolkien’s The Hobbit George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones have swords, armor,  figurines, and what have you. (The letter opener pictured above is The Hobbit merchandise.)

Indie authors don’t have access to the resources of HBO or Warner Brothers, but they can still take advantage of this booming market. For those who are looking for inspiration, here are a few examples of authors who offer swag of one kind or another.

In addition to the official HBO merchandise, George RR Martin also has 1″ figurines modeled after Game of Thrones characters (the books, not the tv series).

Larry Niven has get well cards you can download and print out.

Cassie Clare has scarfs, temporary tattoos, collectible card sets, and even a $15 pint glass that references a bar in her fantasy novels.

Stephen King has shops on both Zazzle and CafePress where you can buy bugs, t-shirts, etc.

James Lee Burke has hats, t-shirts, and a $49 vintage Indian head belt buckle that was copied from the one the author wears.

Lee Child has partnered with the Baltimore Coffee & Tea Company to develop the Jack Reacher Custom Roasted Coffee blend. This is particularly apt for Child because he famously drinks 30 cups of coffee a day.

Anne Rice has t-shirts, coffee mugs, and a $40 "Prince Lestat Journal Bundle" consisting of a pen, notebook, and bookmark.

And Nora Roberts’s site sells books, shirts, a $25 Eve Dallas Bullet Necklace, and an Inn BoonsBoro Cookbook that costs $27.

O O O

While swag might seem like a distraction from the important stuff – writing the next book – the simple truth is fans love buying merchandise connected to their favorite books, shows, and movies. (If I told you the stuff I owned, you would think me daft.)  So even if you weren’t going to make money from the sales, selling swag to your fans is  a great way to build your author career.

NYTimes

In what is being widely mis-characterized as a purge of fake users, earlier this week Twitter started removing "locked" accounts from the follower counts belonging to active user.

According to Variety, some accounts lost millions of followers from their follower counts.

One of the biggest losers seems to have been Twitter’s own primary account (@Twitter), which shed 7.5 million fake accounts to drop 12% Thursday, from 62.85 million earlier in the morning to 55.35 million as of 2:45 p.m. ET. By Friday morning, that was down to 55.1 million.

By comparison, the decline of other large accounts has been smaller. The 100 most-followed Twitter accounts saw an average drop in followers of 2% on Thursday, according to social-analytics firm Keyhole, with a median decline of 734,000 followers.

Singer Katy Perry, who has the most-followed account on Twitter, lost 2.8 million followers through Friday at 8 a.m. ET, dropping 2.6% to 106.8 million followers. Follower counts for Justin Bieber and Rihanna fell 2.5%, Ellen DeGeneres dropped 2.6%, Taylor Swift fell 2.7%, and Lady Gaga declined 3.2%.

While some are saying spam accounts, or bot accounts, or fake accounts, were purged, a better way to describe this is that Twitter  purged the accounts that had been "locked" by Twitter for some rules violation. These accounts were effectively dead, and thus no longer active, so Twitter removed those accounts.

Most users lost a few followers, and a few of my friends lost hundreds or thousands. I lost around 190 followers, and here’s how I found that out.

Social Blade is a social media analytics startup that (among other things) tracks Twitter activity. If you visit its site and enter a Twitter handle, you can find out how many followers, tweets, RTs, etc, that particular account had over the past month.

SB is not 100% accurate – it has my current follower count wrong – but it’s still  useful tool that you can use to quantify your losses.

So how many followers did you lose?

image by Nursing Schools Near Me

Amazon has finally taken steps to squash the cheating in Kindle Unlimited once and for all. They just updated the KDP content guidelines with new rules about compilations, collections, and other multi-work ebooks:

If you’re publishing multiple stories as one book, ensure the contents of your book are accurately reflected both in the title field and on the cover, by including terms such as "Boxed Set," "Bundle," "Collection," "Compilation," or "Series." Stories that are part of a series must be in sequential order within a book and collections of individual stories must have all stories listed in the metadata.

Collections of works and numbered series may include content you’ve previously published in your catalog. However, in order to provide an optimal customer experience, the same content may not be excessively reutilized across multiple books. We consider "excessive" any amount of content repetition that would create a poor shopping or reading experience.

Multi-work books must meet all program guidelines (e.g., you must have exclusive publishing rights for all content enrolled in KDP Select). For more information, see our content guidelines and Terms and Conditions.

These rules were added some time in the past month and apply to all content in KDP, which means that the cheaters who were stuffing books to boost page count in KU no longer have a place to hide.

For those just tuning in, here’s a little background.

The story starts a little over a month ago when one of the problems Amazon was ignoring in Kindle Unlimited was promoted to a full-blown scandal. That’s when bloggers such as myself started bringing everyone’s attention the the "authors" like Chance Carter who would stuff multiple stories into a single ebook and then upload it to Kindle Unlimited.

Their goal was to get their fans to click through each book to the end, thus collecting up to $15 for each reader (a 3,000 page limit, time a half a cent per page, is a nominal $15) . But after all the public criticism, Amazon changed the rules to limit the duplicate  content in KU, and then banned Chance Carter and other cheaters from the Kindle Store.

And now Amazon has changed the rules to make it clear that this practice is not welcome in the Kindle Store (finally).

image  by Jonathan Gross

The fifth anniversary of the passing of Google Reader went largely unremarked in most circles, but there was some coverage on Techdirt and other sites (Wired even called for a revival of RSS).

RSS largely died with Google Reader; development of the RSS standard (and the Atom standard that replaced it) had petered out years before, and aside from a brief surge in new apps in 2013, we haven’t seen a new feed reader service in years.

Nevertheless, a lot of us still use RSS on a regular basis, and I was wondering just how many people are still using RSS as much as they did 5 years ago.

I’ll go first.

I am still using BazQux Reader, the app I switched to from Google Reader 5 years ago (in fact, I had to pay the annual subscription on 2 July). I still have over two thousand RSS feeds in Bazqux, but they are not half as useful as they used to be.

I checked with Feedly* and discovered 843 of the feeds I follow are now dead because either the site went away or moved its RSS feed in an update, and another 621 feeds are inactive  (new posts are only published a few times a year).

All of those feeds used to be alive with at least weekly updates, but in the past five years most of their owners have moved from owning their own platform to being, as Mike Masnick pointed out, trapped in one or another social media silo (Facebook, Twitter, etc).

How about you? Do you still RSS?

* If you use Feedly, you can check how many dead feeds you follow by opening the "organize" menu.

image by Phil Denton

Book fairs and trade shows are a couple of the only times that print books have a clear advantage over ebooks. It’s really hard to give away or sell ebooks to the person standing in front of you without some type of physical media, and most of the companies that could supply that media (Livrada, Enthrill) keep going out of business.

That is why I was thrilled when I read today that Book Funnel now offered download codes.

As you may know, Book Funnel is one of the companies that authors can use to build their mailing list by giving away an ebook to everyone who submits their email address. Now BF has expanded its platform to give authors the option of giving away or selling download codes that can be exchanged for an ebook.

Today, we’re announcing BookFunnel Print Codes. Now you can carry your ebooks in your pocket and take them anywhere you go.

WHAT IS A PRINT CODE?

It’s a tiny, little code you can give to a reader to download a copy of your book. Print them on postcards, bookmarks, business cards, write them on the back of their hand in black marker, whatever you want. Each code is good for one download, and once it is redeemed, it can’t be used again. Give a reader a print code and direct them to MyBookCode.com where they can download the book, and BookFunnel will handle the rest. Super easy.

The new download option is included with Book Funnel’s existing "Mid-List Author" and "Bestseller" plans. The plans costs $100 and $250 per year and allow for up to 5,000 downloads and unlimited downloads, respectively.

In other words this is available at no extra cost to existing customers, making it a really awesome feature.

Amazon just eliminated one of the few differences between its two POD platforms. Yesterday they announced that authors and publishers who use KDP Print can get their print books distributed to US bookstores.

KDP now offers Expanded Distribution to bookstores in the United States. Through Expanded Distribution, you can distribute and make your paperback book available (this doesn’t guarantee that your book will be ordered) to online retailers, bookstores, and distributors. Learn more about how Expanded Distribution works.

If you enable Expanded Distribution for your paperback, the royalty rate is 40% of the book’s list price effective in the distribution channel at the time of purchase, minus printing costs and withholding. Learn more about paperback royalty rates.

Launched in 2016, KDP Print is Amazon’s intended replacement for Createspace, one that gives authors and publishers a single dashboard where they can manage both their ebooks and POD books.

They haven’t announced a specific date when KDP Print will replace Createspace, but Amazon is expected to reveal that information in a couple months.

I am currently following a discussion over on KBoards about Kobo and Walmart, and one author just dropped a useful nugget of information that authors might find useful.

Kobo is telling authors who distribute through Kobo Writing Life that they need to limit their book descriptions because:

As you have may have heard, Kobo is going to be launching with Walmart in the US very soon. We wanted to let you know that due to a limitation on Walmart.com’s side, they are not able to accept book descriptions longer than 4000 characters. This limit includes spaces, punctuation, and all embedded HTML. A description that is longer than 4000 characters will not completely block the book from being sent to Walmart.com, but it will result in the description showing as blank on Walmart product pages.

It occurred to me this morning that I didn’t know whether Kobo had told any else about this restriction, so it might be worth passing along.

If you are an author who uses book distributors like Draft2Digital to put your books in Kobo, now would be a good time to check your book descriptions and make sure that they are compatible with Walmart’s rules.

Speaking of which, I’ll go ask Kobo for any other helpful suggestions.

Stay tuned.