In February 2016 I broke the news on Eleven, an ebook service from Breakaway Media that wanted to let users read for free in exchange for being bombarded by adverts.

That service is back in the news again, only now it is called Inara, and it is about to launch a beta test in September.

Breakaway Media CEO Glenn McCreedy sent an email this week to authors who had signed up to be beta testers. (thanks, source!) One hundred authors have been selected for the private beta, which is scheduled to begin next month. McCreedy told authors that " J. Carson Black, Scott Nicholson, Will Graham, and Michael Prescott" had already signed up, and:

There are roughly 5,000 readers eagerly waiting for access to our private beta, yearning to discover books like yours. If you are interested in joining the first platform that enables authors to monetize their free eBooks and strategically expand their audience, please reply to this email and we can get started.

I had already written extensively on this topic last spring, so I won’t repeat myself here.

I didn’t think this was a viable idea then, and I still don’t. Advert-funded reading has to compete with free ebooks in the Kindle Store and elsewhere, and since Inara’s ads are only shown in its own app it is at a distinct disadvantage.

Furthermore, the ad market is split into Google and Facebook, leaving a few crumbs to be divided between everyone else. There’s just not a lot of money in ads, which is why so many sites also generate revenue from affiliate links, promo posts, and user memberships.

And really, if ad-funded ebooks were a workable idea then Amazon would already be doing it.

Despite of hopes to the contrary,  Amazon has largely ignored the Polish ebook market. It has no local Kindle Store there, and doesn’t even support Polish as a language option in KDP.

A new survey suggests that may have been a mistake.

The research institute ARC Rynek i Opinia revealed earlier this year that 2/3 of ebook users in Poland use the Amazon Kindle., with Pocketbook and Poland’s own InkBook brand coming in distant second and third place (11% and 7%, respectively).

Kindle was by far the most popular hardware, but when it came to apps, iBooks tied with the Kindle app for first place, with Adobe DE finishing out the top 3 (21%, 21%, 17%).

The most common way to get an ebook was free from official sources (67%), followed by purchased (55%) and borrowed from a friend (40%). Those who do buy ebooks report that they mainly(90%) buy for themselves.

Mystery and crime novels were the most popular genre among Polish ebook readers, followed by fantasy, horror, and how-to books.

These survey results are based on a survey of 1107 Polish readers who had read at least three books in the past year. Around half (576) had read ebooks, and a quarter (306) had listened to an audiobook.

The survey was commissioned by Polish media retailer Virtualo, and can be downloaded from its website. This company sells Kindle format ebooks, and is one of several local retailers that moved into the Polish ebook market years ago when Amazon declined to do so.

For nearly a decade now news publishers have stared greedily at Google’s growing profits from its search engine and demanded that they be paid for their articles showing up in the search results.

This demand was ridiculous both because they wanted to be paid for the free advertising Google was giving them and that previous attempts to force the issue, either through legal battles (Belgium, Germany, and elsewhere), new copyright laws (Germany, Spain), or antitrust complaints (Germany), generally backfired when Google responded by choosing to remove the snippets rather than pay for them.

Any future attempts (like EU’s proposed snippet tax) are bound to fail. They are inevitably doomed, and anyone who doesn’t see that coming is a fool. But to make matters worse, there was never any money to be got in the first place.

Thomas Baekdal crunched some data earlier this week and he found that Google is making hardly anything from each search made by a user.

Baekdal made a couple goofs in his calculations (he thought Google would be paying for clicks rather than for impressions) but

First of all, Google is big, in fact, the current estimate is that Google is serving up between 1.5 to 2 trillion searches per year.

…

I have no idea. But let’s estimate that 75% of Google’s own ad revenue is from Google Search and the rest is for YouTube.

This means that Google Search has a revenue of $4.65 billion per month, of which about $700 million (not billion)is profit per month.

Now, we can take the $700 million in profit and divide that by the 125 billion searches to get the profit per search query.

The result is that Google makes… $0.0056 per search query.

…

But, "wait-a-minute", you say. That’s because I’m talking about profits. Google should do a revenue split instead.

Okay, so if we do the same calculations based on revenue, we get this:

• 125 billion searches
• $4,65 billion in revenue

This gives us a 'per search' revenue of $0.037

Google is making under 4 cents per search, and turning a profit of around a half a cent per search.

Of course, that is an average across all of Google’s search results, and it includes search terms and even whole verticals which are not monetized (Google News, for example). And that is also a global average and not based on EU revenues, so it is not 100% applicable. (And those calculations are based on a bunch of unsupported assumptions.)

Leaving those caveats aside, the point that matters is that news publishers want Google to pay for the use of their links and snippets. This means that Google would need to take that 3.7 cents and divide it between all of the relevant links returned with each click of the search button (after taking a cut for itself).

That money is not going to go nearly as far as the news publishers think.

Even a small blog such as this one will show up in Google’s search results nearly 3 million times in a given month, and if the news publishers got their way then each of those 3 million impressions would (in principle) have to be paid for by Google.

I can’t find any estimate of the number of impressions generated each month, but it is safe to say that the news publishers might as well be squeezing blood from a turnip.

Not only was the idea of a snippet tax never going to fly, there’s just no money to be had in the first place.

Is anyone else suddenly reminded of that apocryphal definition of inanity?

image by reynermedia

Have you visited your "My Books" page on the Kobo website lately? Me neither, but someone on Mobileread has noticed that Kobo has added a notice to that page telling users that PDFs are going away.

Here’s the notice:

Beginning November 1st, Kobo will no longer make your eBooks in PDF format available for download.

We’ll do our best to replace your PDF books with their equivalent EPUBs, but it is possible that some cannot be replaced.

We’ll let you know by email which books we can’t replace. You’ll need to download these books before November 1st to continue enjoying them.

I don’t know about you, but I sure as hell didn’t know about this change until I heard on Mobileread. Kobo did not send me an email with the news, and I didn’t want anyone to find out the hard way.

If you have an account with Kobo you should absolutely check your library to see if you have ebooks at risk. You will only see the notice if you have a PDF in your Kobo library, so if yousee nothing then you don’t have to worry about losing access to any of your ebooks.

image by andsleonardo

There are a hundred and one different ways to make a Kindle ebook.  many start with Microsoft Word, and now there’s an option that both begins and ends there.

Amazon has released a Kindle Create add-in for MSWord that can be used to make a Kindle ebook. I don’t have Word (Libre Office for the win) so I cannot test it. But according to the download page:

• Format your manuscript by specifying styles like Chapter Title, Chapter Subtitle and others.
• Save time by using pre-formatted sample pages like book title, copyright, dedication to complete your book.
• Preview your book any time on as it would look to customers reading on Tablets, Phones and Kindle E-readers before publishing.
• Work in Microsoft Word and publish your .doc/.docx manuscript with Kindle Direct Publishing.

The install file requires a PC with Word 2007 or newer, just not a PC that runs macOS.

If you install the add-on, please do let us know how well it works.

Amazon

P.S. There’s no Kindle-making extension for Libre Office, but Writer2Epub fills a similar role.

Here’s a story that sounds like a 1 April joke, but it really is not.

When Amazon launched the Kindle in 2007, they used a primitive and limited ebook format to sell ebooks in the Kindle Store. (It didn’t even support CSS, much less basic formatting like fonts and word wrapped around images.)

Amazon tried to make up for the shortcomings by adding in 2010 the ability to embed audio and video, improving the formatting in late 2011 (KF8), adding animated covers and page backgrounds last year (Kindle in Motion), and adding advanced typography in 2015 (KFX, which brought with it a whole host of DRM and other problems).

Only the formatting and typography improvements were widely adopted (to be fair, Kindle in Motion is still in beta), but now Amazon has moved on to the next enhancement to the Kindle.

JellyBooks founder Andrew Rhomberg found a job listing yesterday on Amazon.Jobs that drops clues about Amazon’s future plans for its ebook platform.

Amazon"s Kindle team is looking for "an innovative and results-oriented Software Development Engineer" who has experience with the one or more of the following:

• Graphics software compositing, video, images with hardware assist.
• Graphical User Interface toolkit with widget libraries adopting the MVC paradigm for event handling.
• Animation and Interactivity software for creating effects.
• Multi platform programming languages for 2D and 3D graphics rendering such as Core Graphics, Skia, OpenGL, Direct3D, Metal, Others.
• Application Execution Framework interfacing to multiple platforms.
• Animation and physics engines like Unity, Turbulenz, Others.

Andrew pointed out, and I agree, that the Kindle team would only need an expert in 3D graphics and physics engines if they were planning to add either

or Virtual Reality to the Kindle platform. (Click the links for more info.)

(Coincidentally, Amazon still hasn’t found the expert they were looking for; the job was initially posted at the beginning of 2016, and then reposted a couple weeks back.)

I’m sure some are wondering how Amazon could add AR or VR to a Kindle with an E-ink screen. The answer is they can’t, and weren’t planning to.

Generally speaking, the Kindle media features only work in the Kindle apps. Kindle Audio/video, for example, was initially released in the Kindle iOS app and then the Android app and Fire tablet.

The Kindle AR and Kindle VR features, if and when they are released, would most likely a require a decent CPU and GPU. The features will be built with Amazon’s own Fire tablets in mind, so they may not be as sophisticated or gee-whiz as what we are now seeing on the Oculus or what Apple has teased with ARkit.

But it would still be better than what we have seen before in ebooks.

Augmented reality and virtual reality have been used in enhanced ebooks several times over the past decade, with little success. In many cases the tech simply wasn’t ready – for example, Wondla relied on AR tech that had to be installed in your web browser and tied to a website, and its features died when the site stopped working.

And a lot of the time creators had trouble finding a use for AR that improved a story rather than gilding a lily. The experience was in fact so frustrating that I am averse to the idea.

That said, I can’t wait to see what Amazon is going to do.

image by WIKITUDE

Amazon has made another periodic change to the payment terms for Kindle Unlimited in the name of fraud prevention, but it’s not clear what they changed.

When Kindle Unlimited launched in 2014, Amazon paid out each time a reader finished a certain percentage of a title. Scammers soon learned how to game the system by releasing very short works, thus getting paid after only a few pages were read.

Amazon responded by switching to paying authors for the number of pages read. They announced the Kindle Equivalent Normalized Page Count (KENPC) and launched it in July 2015.

By the end of 2015, scammers had figured out how to game that as well: they made their scam books incredibly long and then tricked readers into clicking to the back of the book.

This took advantage of a design in the Kindle software; Amazon can track a location in an ebook, but not what was actually read.

Amazon’s next move in this game of cat and mouse was to crack down on Kindle ebooks with links leading to the back. Amazon also developed a new way to measure KENPC (2.0), and in February 2016 Amazon imposed a cap of only paying for up to 3,000 pages in an ebook in Kindle Unlimited.

As you may know from reading David Gaughran, that only slowed down the scammers, it did not stop them. Instead, they got creative in coming up with ways to trick readers into clicking to the end of an ebook.

Now Amazon has responded yet again, this time with the release of KENPC 3.0, only it’s not clear what Amazon has changed.

All they have told us is that:

To determine a book’s page count in a way that works across genres and devices, we developed the Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC). KENPC is calculated using standard formatting settings (font, line height, line spacing, etc.). We use KENPC to measure the number of pages customers read in your book, starting with the Start Reading Location (SRL) to the end of your book. Amazon typically sets SRL at chapter 1 so readers can start reading the core content of your book as soon as they open it. Non-text elements within books including images, charts and graphs will count toward a book’s KENPC.

KENPC v3.0
We released KENPC v3.0 to improve the way we measure how many pages of each book Kindle Unlimited and KOLL customers read. We’re constantly working to improve our programs and increase fairness of how we allocate the KDP Select Global Fund. These changes continue to improve the program and reward authors whose books are being borrowed and read the most by customers.

The most we can say at this time is that this is _probably_ an anti-fraud measure, but that is just a guess on my part.

I have my ear to the ground, and will report again if I find anything new.

Stay tuned.

Update: Over at KBoards someone has posted a version of the KENPC 3.0 announcement that mentions a fix for the bloated ebook scams:

We released KENPC v3.0 to improve the way we measure how many pages of each book Kindle Unlimited and KOLL customers read. This update makes a number of improvements, including improving our ability to measure pages read for such cases as non-linear reading. We’re constantly working to improve our programs and increase fairness of how we allocate the KDP Select Global Fund.

That was removed before I saw the notice, so apparently it doesn’t quite work yet. But it is coming, which is great news.

image by plaisanter~

Draft2Digital has just announced that they can now distribute ebooks to OverDrive:

We’re pleased to announce that, starting today, Draft2Digital now distributes to OverDrive, enabling our authors to place their books into one of the most trusted and far-reaching library distribution services on the planet.

OverDrive currently serves to more than 38,000 libraries and schools, in 70+ countries, including public, college and corporate libraries.

As a D2D author, you’ll be able to distribute your books through OverDrive and receive benefits you won’t find elsewhere:

• Lower minimum pricing—Set your price as low as 99 cents
• Better royalties—Earn 46.75% of your list price
• No contracts or limitations—Distribution with OverDrive is opt-in, and you can choose to include or exclude your books right from your Author Dashboard

The next time you log in to Draft2Digital, you’ll see a pop-up that will let you include all your books at once, making it easy to start distributing right away! If you’d prefer to wait, you can opt in one book at a time, any time.

Draft2Digital distributes to all the major ebookstores as well as Findaway (for audiobooks) and Kobo Plus.

This is great news, but perhaps not the best way for indie authors to get their books into libraries. Over at The Passive Voice, one author has remarked that his library would prefer to buy a POD copy rather than the ebook because it is easier for the librarians and less expensive in the long run.

Just an FYI.

Selecting the appropriate typography for an author website or social media post is much like choosing a book cover; it sends a specific message and triggers an emotional response that can increase engagement and shares. Furthermore, a strategically chosen font for a site title or author name can offer readers subtle hints regarding the book’s genre.

While premium fonts are an option, many creators prefer free alternatives protected by Creative Commons licenses. Paid licenses can be restrictive, particularly since most site visitors will not have the same license installed on their devices, preventing them from seeing the intended design. Additionally, popular graphic design platforms like Canva often charge extra for premium fonts or for the ability to upload custom files. While some curated lists of hundreds of "cool" fonts exist online, they are often impractical for digital design, blogging, or social media if they aren’t web-compatible.

Google Fonts serves as a comprehensive resource for these needs. Launched by Google to improve web aesthetics, the directory currently features 991 free-to-use fonts. Many modern website builders, including Elementor and Divi, have these fonts integrated directly into their systems.

When searching for genre-specific typography, Google Fonts offers numerous options. For fantasy authors, fonts such as Aladin, Aclonica, Lobster Two, or Almendra are effective for site headers or promotional graphics. For those working in the horror genre, Butcherman, Indie Flower, Piedra, Stoke, or UnifrakturCook provide a more fitting atmosphere. Some styles, like Trade Wind, are versatile enough for both fantasy and horror.

Science fiction and thriller authors might consider geometric or tech-inspired options like Orbitron, Press Start 2P, Quantico, Unica One, Audiowide, or Julius Sans One. Meanwhile, the library contains a vast selection of script and handwriting styles suitable for the romance genre.

Because the library is so extensive, users are encouraged to explore and discover hidden gems. One useful feature of the Google Fonts website is the recommendation tool, which suggests complementary font pairings to help create a cohesive design.

Users should be aware that software compatibility varies. For instance, Canva supports a large selection of Google Fonts but not the entire library. If a specific font is unavailable in your primary design tool, you may need to use a secondary program that allows for font imports as a workaround. Regardless of the genre, the Google Fonts catalog remains a vital, cost-free tool for authors looking to professionalize their digital presence.

Recent events have convinced me that I need to formally announce a policy on answering questions from bloggers and journalists.

Yes, I answer media queries either as an expert or on background details. If you are working on a story, send me an email and ask. I may not have time to help you but I won’t just ignore your email (you’d be surprised how often that happens to me).

image by e-magic

Have you ever had one of those moments where you kinda sorta agree with someone’s conclusion and yet still disagree with many of the assumptions that lead to the conclusion?

That’s how I feel towards a piece published in The Bookseller earlier today.

Simon Rowberry argues that ebooks aren’t dead, but his arguments betray legacy industry biases. For example, he cavalierly tosses off the assumption that $10 ebook prices are unsustainable.

The fall in revenue from ebooks is a direct consequence of legacy publishers’ prioritization of print sales at the expense of digital books. The Kindle’s North American launch in 2007 marketed new ebook titles at $9.99, a discount of at least $10 on the hardback equivalent. This approach was unsustainable, but it set readers’ expectations for the cost of ebooks.

What’s funny about this assumption are the many indie authors who would disagree, or the publishers like Baen Books that price all of their ebooks under $10.

Baen Books has been selling its ebooks at what Rowberry would describe as an unsustainable price for close to twenty years, and yet they have somehow managed to pull it off.

And that’s not the only data that Rowberry  didn’t include. A little earlier in the piece he cites stats from the UK PA and then vaguely hand waves at reasons why the data is incomplete:

But despite the early promise of the ebook, many are questioning whether it has lived up to these expectations. In recent years, the ebook has faced significant backlash amid reports of declining sales in trade publishing. The Publishing Association Yearbook 2016 noted a 17% slump in the sale of consumer ebooks while physical book revenue increased by 8%. Over the last couple of years, audiobooks have replaced ebooks as digital publishing’s critical darling on the back of a rapid increase in revenue. In this climate, several commentators have asked “how ebooks lost their shine.”

…

The ‘ebook plateau’ argument also ignores emergent sectors of digital-only sales, including self-publishing, where new genres drive a vibrant and divergent market. Amazon facilitates most self-publishing sales, and the company steadfastly refuses to provide sales data for books published exclusively on the Kindle. So a potential increase in sales for emergent digital-only genres is hidden by the headlines about traditional publishers.

Yeah, the data is only obscured if you refuse to go looking for it.

I am referring of course the Author Earnings Report and the pseudonymous Data Guy (who does answer press queries about the latest data).

We know exactly the limits of the stats from the PA (it misses 38% of the UK ebook market), and that is the point that Rowberry should have made.

But that would involve looking beyond the legacy industry. Unfortunately, Rowberry gives the dying part of the traditional publishing industry more credence than it deserves.

He actually think the legacy industry could kill off ebooks:

For the moment, reports of the ebook’s death are exaggerated. If the disinterest of Amazon and resistance from the book trade continue, however, there is a chance that the ebook is killed off – in my view, prematurely.

While an industry can refuse to supply the market with what the market wants, that industry cannot kill that want.

And in the case of digital goods, it cannot prevent consumers from adopting the digital goods – they’ll just turn to someone else to supply the content.

Remember, for the longest time Rowling would not allow Harry Potter ebooks, so people who wanted a Harry Potter ebook simply downloaded a pirated copy.

And need I spell out the early history of the digital music market (back before the iPod, when record labels refused to sell in said market)?

This is the single biggest flaw in Rowberry’s  piece, and it betrays a viewpoint shared by a lot of people in the legacy industry. So many have forgotten that consumers get to decide whether a product, idea, or service succeeds or fails.

The most that an industry can do is to provide what the market wants. If it can’t or won’t then it will be supplanted by another industry that will.

In the case of book publishing, the legacy industry is being replaced by those who will supply either the (fiction) ebooks consumers want, or the (nonfiction) videos and other content that people are using to learn.

Digital isn’t dying – the industry is. (And yes, there is data to back up that claim.)

image via ABC News

News is by definition the reporting of recent events, but sometimes it is equally important to note when an event does not occur.

On Sunday, the voting period for the 2017 Hugo Awards ended. According to the announcement, a total of 3,319 votes were cast (compared to 3130, 5950, 3587, and 1850 in the past four years).

You can see the list of candidates on the Hugo Award website.  What you won’t find is any sign of  the influence of the Sad Puppies. According to author Sarah Hoyt, the organizer of this year’s Sad Puppies, that’s because there was no slate this year.

Starting in 2013, the Sad Puppies (and its Rabid Puppies offshoot),  were either a concerted attempt to introduce a right-wing slate, a regressive slate, an indie slate to the Hugo Awards, or, an attempt to wrest control of the Hugo Awards from an insider clique, prove there was a clique in control of the Hugos, or simply to sow chaos. (The descriptions varied depending on who you asked, the year, and how much they had had to drink).

This year, however, there was no coordinated Sad Puppies campaign. As Hoyt explained in June on her blog and on the Mad Genius Club blog, that was by design.

From Mad Genius Club:

If we’d planned to do something different this year, I’d have passed it on to Amanda early.  But since what we’re planning has no defined deadline, as soon as we get it up (eh) in the next couple of months, we’ll be fine.  And we want to make sure we do it right.

So, originally, we’d planned to do nothing, and let Sad Puppies ride into the sunset with Kate’s campaign, which did everything the left claimed to want and yet was still subjected to the same complaints as ever.

But the problem with a decentralized, almost leaderless campaign is that it’s prone to be high jacked, and we realized late last year that if someone didn’t announce then someone who was wholly (really) in the rabid camp was going to take it, and make it sound like the campaigns were always one.

Hoyt went into greater detail on her blog;

THE POINT of the fight for the Sad Puppies was never to get the Hugos, to conquer the Hugos or to hold the Hugos in perpetuity. It was simply to show that the fight was rigged and in the possession of a small clique.

THIS was amply proven by Larry and Brad, and if more was needed, Kate did a double reverse maneuver and actually proved that even if you did EVERYTHING they wanted you to do from open nomination, to more than the slots per category, to actually attending conventions and being very very nice, they would still attack you if you weren’t one of the club.

So if you were wondering about the status of the Sad Puppies, the official word is that they have accomplished their goal and retired from the field.

image by Jeff Kontur

Here’s some news that will keep Potter fandom on the edge of their sat until September: I’ve just heard that  a new enhanced Harry Potter ebook will be released on 5 September.

The first enhanced Harry Potter ebooks were released for iBooks in late 2015, but the new one is being developed for Amazon’s Kindle in Motion, and will feature animated goblins, moving covers, and more:

Other highlights from the moving book will include a multi-page spread of the lively Diagon Alley, an animated portrait of Draco Malfoy and a handy guide to trolls.

As well as moving images, readers can still tailor their reading experience, adjusting font sizes with the newly sized words magically reflowing around the animation and images, and, if they choose, toggle the animations off or on.

This ebook is going to be the 22nd title to be released in the Kindle in Motion format, Amazon’s second go at an enhanced Kindle ebook. Launched last year, KiM features full page animations, moving covers, and page backgrounds that don’t interfere with  changing the text size (a defect found in fixed-layout ebooks).

So far Pottermore has only announced Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in the new edition, but they may add more titles in the future. This ebook will be released on 5 September. You can pre-order it, and see more details, on Amazon UK and Amazon US.

And when it is released, you can enjoy the enhancements in the Kindle apps for Android and iOS, or on your Fire tablet.

When Google shut down Reader four years ago, they made it clear that they wanted to replace self-directed reading choices with an app that algorithmically choose what a user should read next.

At the time Google called that app Google Now, but the latest iteration is simply called "the feed", and Google says it got a major update this week.

The Verge’s Casey Newton reports that the feed showed up in their account this week, and they weren’t impressed.

Google today is rolling out its take on the news feed, a personalized stream of articles, videos, and other content. The feed will appear in its flagship app for Android and iOS, simply called Google. The feed, which includes items drawn from your search history and topics you choose to follow, is designed to turn Google’s app into a destination for browsing as well as search. Google is hoping you’ll begin opening its app the way you do Facebook or Twitter, checking it reflexively throughout the day for quick hits of news and information.

…

The Google feed came to my account Tuesday afternoon, and I spent a long while scrolling through it. The feed offered up articles on several of my interests: Netflix, Instagram, Game of Thrones, and the video game I’m currently playing (and have watched a bunch of YouTube videos about). The best topic I saw in the feed was “fake news,” and featured an article from Lifehacker on how to spot it.

Scroll far enough and you’ll get a basic, ambient sense of the day’s news. But few of the items I saw compelled me to read the article. Part of what makes Facebook and Twitter’s feeds compelling is the social endorsement that links there carry: you read because your friends tell you to, and you trust your friends. They also give you commentary and analysis around what you’re reading. In short, they feel lively — and the Google feed can feel stale by comparison.

You can read more about the feed in Google’s blog post.

You can find the feed itself in the Google apps for Android and iOS; all I had to do was simply open the app and I was prompted to activate the feed.

I have not.

Google won’t activate the feed so long as I block them from tracking me, and since I will never change that setting I will never be able to use "the feed".

That’s no big loss; I have a dozen other ways to sift for important stories, including Twitter, Search Alerts, the couple thousand RSS feeds I follow, mailing lists, etc.

Google’s "the feed" is just one more competitor for our limited attention, and it’s not even a very good one. I mean, they’ve been working on this in one form or another for at least four years, and the best they could come up with earned a "meh" response.

You would think Google, with all of its servers, could do better, don’t you?

We all know that authors have been using Wattpad to refine their work before officially publishing it in the Kindle Store and elsewhere. This has been going on since at least 2011.

Not all authors want to take that last step of going into business for themselves, however, which is why Wattpad has been announcing partnerships with trade publishers.

Today Wattpad announced a partnership with one of Hachette Livre’s French imprints.

The partnership, which is the latest under the Wattpad Studios umbrella, represents the most extensive partnership between Wattpad and a European publisher. Three Wattpad stories have already been selected for publication in the French language as part of the partnership: Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board, Mr. Popular and I, and She’s With Me.  

Following the launch of Wattpad Studios last year, Wattpad has been working closely with publishers and entertainment companies to co-produce stories for print, TV, film, and digital.

Wattpad has no claim on the works created by its 55 million members, but it does have reading stats on each story and it is now using that info to identify popular stories that have yet to be published as ebooks.

Wattpad Studios exists to connect writers with the companies that want to publish a work, with Wattpad getting a cut.

Given what we know about Hollywood contracts and the standard contract terms offered by traditional publishing, I’m sure you can see why I chose the title. (Okay, "indentured servitude" would be more accurate, but it’s not as catchy.)