Remember earlier this year when authors were being punished for putting a table of contents at the end of their ebooks?

As David Gaughran inferred and Amazon confirmed, those authors were getting caught up in one of Amazon’s fights against Kindle Unlimited scammers who were tricking readers into clicking links which lead to the end of an ebook (this enabled the scammers to get paid for an entire read).

Now authors are getting caught up in another enforcement action, only with much more serious consequences. Author Becca Mills writes on her blog, The Active Voice (which I found via The Passive Voice), about an author who was banned because the author had books in KU which showed suspicious reading behavior.

Here’s the email Amazon sent the author:

We are reaching out to you because we have detected that borrows for your books are originating from systematically generated accounts. While we support the legitimate efforts of our publishers to promote their books, attempting to manipulate the Kindle platform and/or Kindle programs is not permitted. As a result of the irregular borrow activity, we have removed your books from the KDP store and are terminating your KDP account and your KDP Agreement effective immediately.

As part of the termination process, we will close your KDP account(s) and remove the books you have uploaded through KDP from the Kindle Store. We will issue a negative adjustment to any outstanding royalty payments. Additionally, as per our Terms and Conditions, you are not permitted to open new KDP accounts and will not receive future royalty payments from additional accounts created.

A search of the KDP support forums turned up two more authors with similar tales. One dates to early May, and was posted by an author who had made the mistake of submitting their book to the wrong KU readers list on FB, but the other may be from an innocent victim.

All of these authors are either innocent victims of, or participants in, shady book promotions scams which are designed to scam Amazon out of Kindle Unlimited royalties by pumping up page views.

As Ann Christy explained over on TPV, the innocent authors with just one or two low ranking books (aka "prawns") are being used for camouflage by the scammers:

Bot driven KU accounts are hired by click-farms. Just like with Adsense and other such click schemes, how do they obfuscate that they are bot driven?

They download a random real book and make sure to do the same to that one. By doing it enough times interspersed with the books they’re hired to click-farm, they make it hard to figure out they’re a click farmer at first glance.

Unfortunately, now that Amazon has responeded to the click farming, they are hammering the innocent victims of the click farmers attempts to hide what they are.

If you’re a prawn, you’re a potential target.

I don’t know which authors were willing participants, unwitting participants, or innocent victims, but that doesn’t matter here.

What matters is that Amazon is banning both scammers and victims. In all fairness, I don’t think Amazon can tell the difference (the willing participants look a lot like the victims), but again, that doesn’t matter.

What matters is that there is a problem, and only one real solution. All authors can do to protect themselves is remove their books from Kindle Unlimited.

That stinks, yes, but what else can authors do?

image by garann

The EU is one step closer to adopting a universal legal policy enabling libraries to lend ebooks. Earlier today Advocate General Maciej Szpunar published a nonbinding advisory opinion which said that libraries should be able to lend ebooks just like they do paper books.

From Ars Technica:

A 2006 EU directive says that the exclusive right to authorise or prohibit rentals and loans belongs to the author of the work. However, countries may opt out of this rule for the purposes of “public lending,” provided that authors obtain fair remuneration.

In the Netherlands, e-books do not fall specifically under that exception. But the association of Dutch public libraries—Vereniging Openbare Bibliotheken (VOB)—has argued that the rules should be the same for digital lending as for traditional books. It went on to bring a case against Stichting Leenrecht, an authors' rights collecting foundation.

Under VOB’s “one copy, one user” system an e-book at a library’s disposal may be downloaded by a user for the lending period, on the understanding that it is not accessible to other library users during that entire period.

At the end of that period, the book in question will automatically become unusable for the borrower in question and may then be borrowed by another user.

Szpunar believes VOB’s method is fair under the law. He points out that bringing digital lending under the scope of the directive could lead to better security for authors, provided those e-books have been made available to the public by the rightsholder or with the their consent, and that the books are obtained from lawful sources.

You can find Szpunar’s opinion here (PDF), and IPKat has more details in a 2014 when the case was referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union by the Court of Appeal of The Hague.

I can’t speak for you but my mind is boggled that a matter as simple as ebook ownership should require the equivalent of a Supreme Court ruling. While I don’t think anyone minds that Europe created a jobs program for unemployable lawyers, did you really have to let them escape civilian control and form a government?

Why didn’t you call in NATO, or the Boy Scouts, or something? We would have helped, I swear.

image by Joris Leermakers

When I broke the news yesterday that Amazon had dropped ebook discovery sites like eReaderIQ from its affiliate program, I argued that Amazon had decided to end its relationship with sites it thought it no longer needed.

Hugh Howey has a different take.

Writing over on his blog, Howey argues that this had less to do with expediency than with Amazon’s desire to control the user experience.

In 2013, Amazon tried to influence the number of free ebooks that affiliate partners were driving readers toward. In 2016, Amazon is trying to influence the discounted ebooks that affiliate partners drive readers toward. What’s happening? Again, I don’t think it’s about money. I think it’s about customer experience.

The Algorithms

Amazon is in a constant battle with those who attempt to understand and maximize their use of Amazon’s rank and sales algorithms. There is a lot of money to be made by people who find chinks in Amazon’s armor. Some of these parties are outright scammers, uploading stolen ebook content in new packaging, taking advantage here of the simplicity of KDP self-publishing. A recent scam involved putting links in ebooks that drove readers to the back of the book, getting credit for an entire read in Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited program. …

One of the unintended consequences of Amazon’s affiliate program is how powerful these email blast discounters have become in shaping the Amazon bestseller lists. In a way, these websites have introduced Barnes & Noble style merchandising on a storefront that has prided itself on not having any merchandising dollars or effects whatsoever. Remember, Amazon is maniacally focused on the customer experience. They practically invented the reader review. They rely on also-boughts (books purchased alongside other books) and shopping/browsing histories to recommend titles to readers. The bestseller list, they hope, reflects what readers crave. Their idea is that this will maximize profits in the long run, because readers will more often than not be happy with their purchases, enjoy the read, and so come back for more.

That’s an interesting argument, but I think I can see a few problems with it.

One, as anyone in publishing will tell you, Amazon accepts/extorts co-op fees from large publishers. Those fees affect a publisher’s ranking in some non-visible way, so you can’t really say that Amazon has no "merchandising dollars".

Two, Amazon games its own best-seller lists by giving Prime members a free copy of the books it publishes. The program is called Kindle First, and we get the ebooks the month before the book is officially published. Check out the free titles for June, and you’ll see that they have been boosted to the top of the best-seller lists. (I’m looking at the best-seller list right now, and the six free titles for June currently occupy the top six spots.)

Three, Goodreads implies in its own FAQ that it will eventually accept paid placement in its ebook discovery service:

How much does it cost to have my deal included in Goodreads Deals?
We’ll announce pricing soon. Stay tuned.

Howey may think that Amazon worships the best-seller list as the expression of what its customers really want, but that is certainly not what I see. I see a company which is gaming the list now and has done so in the past.

So no, I don’t think Amazon is focused on the user experience here.

How about you?

image by Cubosh

When Amazon-owned Goodreads launched its discount ebook service last month, I wondered whether Amazon would find reasons to prune back its competition.

The first to lose its affiliate status with Amazon was Fussy Librarian, which went under the axe the week before Goodreads announced. At the time it looked like that was an isolated incident, but now it has been followed by two more sites, Pixel of Ink and eReaderIQ.

Fussy Librarian continues to operate, but the fate of the other sites is less certain.

Pixel of Ink announced today that they have shut down. They didn’t give a specific reason, but did say that "due to changes in the eBook world and in our life, it is time for us to move on, and Pixel of Ink must now end".

I’m still following up with PoI, so I can’t tell you the specific reason for its closure, but I do know that it wasn’t the only casualty. eReaderIQ has made a similar, albeit more detailed announcement today. They’ve posted a notice on their homepage to the effect that:

As of June 10, 2016, eReaderIQ is no longer eligible to participate in the Amazon.com affiliate program. What this means is that we are no longer able to monetize this site simply by having users click on our links.

Because of this, we will need to rely on our users' support to keep the site running. Our short term goal is to generate enough user support to cover the costs of operating the site.

The notice goes on to ask for donations, and say that the site may relaunch as a subscription-based service in the future.

I spoke to eReaderIQ founder Christian Hupfeld on the phone this evening, and he told me that Amazon terminated the site’s affiliate account for various violations of Amazon’s ToS.

Like Fussy Librarian, eReaderIQ offered an email service where users could be notified of deals in the Kindle Store, and it also had a Chrome extension. Both are violations of Amazon’s ToS, but rather than give the eReaderIQ a chance to correct the violations Amazon has instead cut the site off.

And that’s not all.

Hupfeld told me that Amazon didn’t just disable eReaderIQ’s affiliate account; they also terminated all of his other unrelated affiliate accounts with Amazon sites in other countries (Italy, Germany, etc) even though they had nothing to do with eReaderIQ.

He has effectively been blacklisted by Amazon.

And he’s not the only one, nor will he be the last. Hupfeld told me that another ebook site had also been blacklisted, even after it cleaned up its act and tried to use other affiliate accounts, and as the weeks go by we will surely hear of additional sites shutting down.

Amazon’s affiliate system is one of the retailer’s great strengths. It’s easy to use, and gives websites a financial incentive to send their visitors to Amazon.

This system, and the bevy of ebook sites that grew up around it, helped make the Kindle the biggest ebook platform by giving it lots of cheap advertising.

But now that Goodreads has its own discount ebook service (and now that Amazon has no ebook competitors left), apparently the retailer has decided that it no longer needs the help of the ebook sites.

And so after turning a blind eye to rules violations for many years, it has now decided to crack down.

That is certainly Amazon’s right, but let’s not pretend that Amazon is motivated by anything other than a desire to squash their competitors.

Amazon has demonstrated in the past that they can take a milder approach if they so choose. Remember, in 2013 Amazon took steps to discourage these same ebook sites from promoting the download of free ebooks.

eReaderIQ, for example, was generating one hundred free ebook downloads for each ebook purchased, and then was profiting off the affiliate fees generated when a free ebook downloader went on to buy other items. This cost Amazon money without generating any real sales for Amazon, which is why Amazon took action.

Even though these sites were violating Amazon’s ToS at the time, Amazon didn’t ban any of the sites, but they did hit the sites in the pocketbook and force them to start promoting more paid ebooks deals and fewer free ebooks.

But that was back when Amazon still needed the ebook sites to keep the Kindle on top. Now that Amazon has no real competition in the ebook market, the sites are superfluous.

And they have been given the boot.

image by Akira Ohgaki

Even in 2016, publishers and authors are still struggling when it comes to re-releasing decades-old books, but Penguin had a unique problem when it set out to publish a 30th anniversary edition of Richard Dawkin’s The Blind Watchmaker.

The Bookseller reports that Penguin decided to revive four programs Dawkins wrote in 1986. Written in Pascal for the Mac, The Watchmaker Suite was an experiment in algorithmic evolution. Users could run the programs and create a biomorph, and then watch it evolve across the generations.

And now you can do the same in your web browser.

A website, MountImprobable.com, was built by the publisher’s in-house Creative Technology team—comprising community manager Claudia Toia, creative developer Mathieu Triay and cover designer Matthew Young—who resuscitated and redeployed code Dawkins wrote in the 1980s and ’90s to enable users to create unique, “evolutionary” imprints. The images will be used as cover imagery on Dawkins’ trio to grant users an entirely individual, personalised print copy.

The project came about, Toia says, through Dawkins: “In The Blind Watchmaker and Climbing Mount Improbable, he references a suite of computer programs that he wrote that simulate the process of evolution, creating a ‘biomorph’, as he termed it. Unfortunately these programs were obsolete—they were written in an old programming language called Pascal, which doesn’t run on modern computers—so we wondered if we could bring them back to life again, with the ultimate aim being to make them available and accessible to all.” The new code has since been made open source, for users to utilise or adapt further.

Triay explains the new iteration: “We got hold of a copy of Dawkins’ code and spent a while figuring out how his algorithms work— there is very little documentation available for the Pascal programming language, so it took a lot of trial and error—and once we did, we were able to start rewriting them in a modern programming language, Javascript.

The Bookseller is mostly wrong when it claims that Pascal won’t run on modern PCs; you can compile that old Pascal program and run it, and you can even find online emulators and compilers, but there’s no guarantee that it will run correctly.

Those old Pascal programs are in basically the same situation as a 30-year-old Wordstar document; you might still have the file, but it’s a crap shoot whether you’re going to recover all of the data.

And even if Penguin had been able to run the program, it wouldn’t be very useful by today’s standards. – not compared to what they built after rewriting the programs in Javascript. (Or so The Bookseller implies; the website says that Alan Canon rescued the Pascal programs, rewrote them in Java – a completely different language – and posted the code on SourceForge.)

The original Pascal program would be useful for generating a single book cover, but the new program runs on a website and enables everyone to learn more about algorithmic evolution.

Today Penguin launched MountImprobable.com, a website where users can generate a unique biomorph which can be used on a book cover. They can also buy a copy of Dawkin’s books although not one with a cover they created.

They can also take the biomorph they generated and use Dawkin’s program to watch how it evolves across the generations.

Details of the biomorphs, such as how many branches there are, and the lengths and angles of the various branches, are controlled by ‘genes’ which are just numbers in the computer. Genes in real trees, like genes in us and genes in bacteria, are coded messages written in the language of DNA. The DNA is copied from generation to generation with great, though not perfect, fidelity.

When a biomorph has a child, the child inherits all the genes of its parent (it only has the one parent, for there is no sex), but with some possibility of random mutation. A mutation is a slight random increase or decrease in the numerical value of a gene.

Have you tried it?

I did, although I’m not sure I was watching evolution.

The site lets you choose a biomorph and how many children it has. You can then pick one of the kids, and spawn a second generation, and then a third, fourth, etc.

In as few as five generations, you can end up with a biomorph which looks nothing like the original. But as anyone who has raised livestock can tell you, that’s not evolution; it’s merely selective breeding.

But even with that caveat, it’s still an interesting experiment.

Aside from the news that the iOS Ten beta would let you remove Apple’s spam apps including iBooks, there wasn’t much in the way of ebook news in today’s WWDC keynote.

There was, however, one small bit of ebook news which Apple announced last last week. On Thursday Apple debuted iBooks Editions.

Not to be confused with the many technical enhancements which can be built into the iBooks format by iBooks Author, "iBooks Editions" are a new line of romance titles which feature "exclusive bonus material from your favorite romance authors".

The new category currently includes 20 titles, with prices ranging from $3 to $5 (four of the titles are currently free). According to what I can see in the Books section of iTunes, the bonus content can be anything from "bonus scenes which reveal a character’s motivations to never before published epilogues which tell you what happens after the last chapter wraps".

I don’t have an iDevice any more, so I can’t comment on the quality of the bonus material, but based on what I’ve seen so far I have to second Bradley Metrock’s take on the new program:

Now, nobody cares if Apple wants to promote racy romance novels in the iBooks Store.

But isn’t it just a bit myopic to ONLY promote racy romance novels in the iBooks Store?

 What about educational textbooks created with iBooks Author?

What about scientific works by leading minds?

What about non-fiction works of all different kinds?  History?  Psychology?

What about The Mozart Project, the amazing interactive book created with iBooks Author?

What about taking the opportunity to freshly promote the JK Rowling enhanced editions of the Harry Potter series as well?

What about LITERALLY ANYTHING ELSE?

 This is it?

And none of these books were enhanced using iBooks Author, the technology SPECIFICALLY BUILT BY STEVE JOBS TO ENHANCE DIGITAL BOOKS?

 Seriously?

He’s not wrong. If Apple is going to promote iBooks then why not focus on its unique features rather than a few dribs and drabs of bonus content?

Examining current ebook sales data suggests that remaining with a traditional publishing house may actually hinder a writer’s long-term success. While industry analysts often focus on total revenue, it is the volume of units sold that reveals a massive shift in the publishing landscape. In the United States, digital books are expected to represent nearly 30% of all trade sales in 2012, a dramatic climb from just 0.5% in 2007. Because digital titles are typically cheaper than print, these percentages actually understate their true market share in terms of what readers are actually consuming.

Data indicates that pricing has a profound impact on an author’s ability to build a following. Research into indie publishing shows that while free titles attract the most interest, books priced at $2.99 often generate higher total earnings for the author than those priced at $6.99 or more. Furthermore, a $2.99 price point can attract four times as many readers as a $9.99 price point, and six times as many as a title costing over $10.

This presents a paradox for traditionally published authors. An independent author might earn roughly $2.00 on a $2.99 sale, whereas a writer with a major publisher might only receive about $1.50 for a $9.99 sale. Consequently, authors who stick with high-priced traditional models are at a disadvantage; they earn less per copy while reaching a significantly smaller audience, which slows the growth of their personal brand. Bestseller lists on platforms like Apple’s iBookstore, which appear to prioritize unit sales over dollar volume, increasingly feature independent titles that are successfully capturing the public’s attention.

Furthermore, the historical gatekeeping power of traditional publishers is eroding. In the past, writers needed these companies to access physical bookstores and printing presses. Today, the tools for professional-grade digital production and distribution are accessible to everyone. As physical bookstores decline and digital formats gain dominance, the value of traditional print distribution diminishes.

Traditional publishers are beginning to recognize this shift in power, as evidenced by Pearson’s recent $116 million acquisition of Author Solutions for its Penguin imprint. However, this move is controversial. Author Solutions has been criticized for functioning as a "vanity press," deriving the majority of its revenue from selling services to writers rather than selling books to consumers. Its digital sales figures are also remarkably low compared to specialized ebook distributors.

The acquisition suggests that major publishers are desperate to find a way to stay relevant to independent-minded writers. However, as the barriers to entry vanish and the financial benefits of self-publishing become clearer, traditional firms face an uphill battle in convincing authors to stay within their ecosystem. For the modern writer, reaching more readers at a lower cost may be the most effective way to secure a lasting career.

Literary Hub announced on Tuesday that it’s launching a book review aggregation service called Book Marks.

It’s more or less Rotten Tomatoes clone, only for books. Book Marks aggregates reviews from more than 70 sources (newspapers, magazines, and websites) and averages them into a letter grade.

“We understand it is difficult to summarize the nuance and complexity of a review into a letter grade,” said Literary Hub Editor-in-Chief Jonny Diamond. “But we believe that Book Marks will lead more readers to reviews, and amplify critics’ voices in a way that benefits readers and writers alike.”

From the press release:

While online readers’ reviews create robust conversations about books and foster new and diverse book-loving communities, it is also valuable to read what professional critics have to say about a title. Book Marks will, as well as linking back to their source. Each book’s cumulative grade functions as both a general critical assessment, and, more significantly, as an introduction to a range of voices and opinions that make up the world of American literary criticism.

Interesting.

Book Marks is (at least) the second such aggregator in the book space. The first, iDreamBooks, launched several years ago. Sony was using iDreamBooks in its ebookstore, and at the time the site was aggregating reviews from both the major news sites as well as book blogs.

The latter sources appear to have been dropped from iDreamBooks at some point in the past several years, however.

Now iDreamBooks is using more or less the same sources as Book Marks, with one exception. BM’s FAQ mentions that it excludes trade reviews at the moment (the service focused on consumer reviews). Reviews from publications like Kirkus are included in iDreamBooks.

You can find a complete list of Book Marks' sources on its site. As you can see, very few independent book blogs are included.

Germany’s leading ebook retail consortium announced on Monday that it is no longer going to pay a 70% royalty on all ebooks distributed through its publishing portal, Tolino Media.

e-Book-News.de, BuchReport, and Boersenblatt report that starting on 1 July, Tolino will drop the payout for ebooks costing less than three euros. eBooks priced above that point will continue to earn 70%, but ebooks priced below 3 euros will only generate a 40% royalty. In comparison, Amazon’s KDP pays a 35% royalty for ebooks which sell for less than three euros in Germany.

Tolino explained that operating costs was the driving force behind the change. Jördis B. Schulz, Director Tolino Publishing, explained in a statement that the download cost and payment charges were so high for cheap ebooks that Tolino could no longer justify paying the 70% royalty.

In related news, Tolino will also be withholding a higher VAT rate starting on 1 July, from 7% to 19%.

The change, I’m told, reflects an unanswered question on the business relationship between authors/publishers and distributors like Tolino. A license is taxed at 7%, and a digital service at 19%, and Germany’s tax collectors are insisting that the higher rate applies. Tolino is changing their policy just to be safe.

Launched in 2013, Tolino is an ebook platform where the costs are shared among the participating retailers. It is supported by seven retailers and tech companies (Thalia, Weltbild, Hugendubel, Club Bertelsmann, Libri, eBook.de, and Deutsche Telekom), and has its own servers, mobile apps, ereaders, and tablet.

The consortium had been paying the 70% royalty ever since it launched  Tolino Media, its own publishing platform, last April. When it launched it was limited to authors from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and other EU countries. It distributes ebooks to the ebookstores operated by the seven retailers as well as Tolino-partnered ebook sellers in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Italy.

image by sbchemnitz

Gvido is a sheet music reader based on a pair of 13.3″ Mobius E-ink displays. it was announced on Friday, and according to the press release it was being shown off at a music industry conference in Cannes (said conference ended on Monday – today).

Weighing in at 650 grams, the Gvido measures 48 cm by 31 cm when unfolded. It has a Wacom touchscreen, Wifi, Bluetooth, and supports PDFs. You can use the Wacom stylus to annotate the PDF, and even save the notes and bookmarks for future use.

Gvido is the work of Terrada Music Score Co, but AV Watch also notes that it was designed in partnership with Fujio Noguchi, the former head of Sony’s ereader division.

This is not a Sony product, but it is going to be manufactured in a Sony plant in Nagano and is running software licensed from Sony.

It’s hard to say what that means in terms of software features, however.

Over the past few years several startups have teased us with dual-screen document viewers. So far neither Printless Plans nor NotesNote have brought their devices to market, but now it looks like one might.

But when will the Gvido hit the market?

Terrada isn’t saying. They have, however, released this nifty demo video showing the Gvido in action:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=209Y6cspMAA

AV Watch

When Booktrope launched its publishing service five years ago, this hybrid publisher offered authors the best of both worlds: a five-year contract with no costs for the author, and pro quality work on the book.

But when the publisher suddenly shut down at the end of April, authors were abruptly saddled with all of Book trope’s obligations to the pros who had worked on a book.

You see, BookTrope was based on a revenue-sharing model where everyone who worked on a book would get a cut of the net revenue (less 30% to Booktrope). The authors had even signed a contract (PDF) with the rest of the team, so even after the author got their rights back and Booktrope shut down, the authors were still required to pay the rest of the team.

And that’s causing a lot of stress for the several hundred authors who had published nearly 1,000 books with Booktrope. Elizabeth Barone detailed her experiences on KBoards:

On April 29th, my small press publisher announced they were closing on May 31st and authors' rights would revert June 1st. The catch: because their model was team publishing with royalty split, the contracts we’d signed mandated that authors need to continue sharing royalties for the duration of the term. Each book’s agreement was for five years.

Cue the panic attack. I’m broke. Being with small press publisher actually resulted in a hit to my income. (They didn’t distribute to Kobo, and previously, Kobo was paying my bills because of their majestic indie promo list.) Re-publishing would cost me more (I had to update four books' ebook files (fees to Vellum), paperback files (free; DIY), and covers (fees to designers) to remove all instances of the publisher). I knew I couldn’t afford to LLC and hire an accountant. There was no way. (Side note: some authors' team members started demanding payouts rather than royalties, which they weren’t entitled to. This was another panic attack. Other authors' team members absolved authors from any further payment.)

Someone suggested I use Lulu to self-publish, because they distribute everywhere and also have a nifty feature that allows you to share royalties. But of course, there’s a catch.

I’d settled up with my team — who were all wonderful about the whole thing — and was ready to go at midnight. I’d gone direct with Kobo (to take advantage of those promos), and logged into my Lulu dashboard just to check everything over and uncheck Kobo from the distribution list. Unchecking Kobo resulted in Amazon automatically being unchecked, too.

What a mess.

A lot of these authors had signed with Booktrope because they didn’t want to be self-published authors, and now they’re finding themselves stuck with obligations to pay a whole team of people.

Fortunately for the authors, most of the contributors are apparently willing to release the authors from the contract and write the losses off as a learning experience., but the authors are still left with the headache of recording the quitclaims and republishing the book(s).

What’s even worse is that this is a problem some former Booktrope participants saw coming a mile away. Ally Bishop and Patricia Eddy published a post on Medium in late April where they explained how the shared royalty model was doomed.

What’s worse?—?it failed phenomenally. “Almost 1,000 books” published, yet they couldn’t make their go-for-the-bottom-of-the-pile book marketing plan work.

Why is that?

Because Booktrope never placed a priority on qualifications when hiring. The people at the top had little-to-no book publishing or editing experience, yet those same people were their acquisitions team.

“‘I really feel like literary snobbery is not what the public needs,’ Sears said…Booktrope’s approach is all about letting readers, rather than editors, provide that filter.” Somehow, expecting and producing a high quality, well-written, and polished book became defined as “snobbery,” and releasing books that often received substandard services was the grassroots approach.

Booktrope had no editing or graphic design test in place for bringing on new talent. They didn’t ask, didn’t check backgrounds, didn’t require their book marketing managers to have any previous marketing experience. When Ally was brought on, she received a cursory interview by a woman who was gone from Booktrope’s population the next week. As editors, our preference for proper grammar was called “archaic” and unnecessary, and our suggestions for authors’ stories were deemed optional. …

Booktrope was never going to pay off.

What they preached was a “five year plan” of making $20/month on a book and building a portfolio of work. As though one book will always make the same amount every month. As though authors who stop writing or books that aren’t marketed properly will continue to roll over low profits month after month.

What a mess.

image by Aussie~mobs

A new survey by the Instituto Pró-Livro has revealed that ebooks are slow to catch on in Brazil.

According to the 4th edition of the Retratos da Leitura no Brasil survey report, ebooks have been read by 26% of survey respondents. The survey showed that the number of ebook readers in Brazil grew 6% between 2011 and 2015, and that the average number of books read in the three months prior to the survey was 2.54 books.

The smartphone was the most popular reading device, used by 56% of those who read ebooks, followed closely by computers (49%) and tablets (18%). eBook readers like Kindle, Kobo, and Lev came in a distant fourth, at 4%, thus making Brazil one of the countries which (as I explained three years ago) jumped right past the ereader phase and straight to the app phase of ebook market growth.

Free downloads far outweighed sales, as one would expect, with 88% of respondents having downloaded an ebook versus 15% having bought one. The most popular type of ebooks were literature books such as short stories, novels, or poetry (47%), followed closely by technical books (33%).

The report is based on a survey of 5,012 personal interviews across Brazil. Among those polled, 8% indicated they were "illiterate" or "did not attend formal school."Another 21% said they had elementary school (1st to 5th grade), a quarter had attended middle school (6th to 9th grade), 33% high school, and 13% had taken some higher education classes or completed college.

Globo

image by GiPereira

When Vook announced last May that it was reorganizing as Pronoun and pivoting to offer a distribution platform which was free to authors, many people were left wondering just how Pronoun would keep the lights on.

They said they were going to generate revenue from outside development work, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

Now it looks like Pronoun had another plan.

Pronoun has sent out an email to authors who signed up with the platform, informing them that the company had been acquired:

That’s why we’re excited to announce that Pronoun is joining Macmillan Publishers, a global trade book publishing company with over 100 years experience, and amazing imprints around the world. Macmillan shares our philosophy that publishing exists to serve the full spectrum of authors. By joining forces, we’ll be able to invest even more in improving and growing Pronoun’s self-publishing platform, all while giving successful independent authors a path towards more opportunity.

As a division of Macmillan, we’ll be doubling down on Pronoun’s free core platform, while also investing in additional levels of service and support. We will continue to make the best products we can, starting with the needs of authors and building from there. We can’t wait to show you what we’ve been working on lately!

That’s an oddly appropriate next step for a company that has more pivots in the past 7 years than any other in the digital publishing space.

Pronoun got its start as Vook in 2009. At the time, it was a publisher which made enhanced ebook apps for the iPhone. It later expanded to include the iPad and Android apps, and enhanced ebooks for Kindle and other platforms, and then pivoted to making the enhanced ebooks as a service for authors and publishers.

And then in 2012 it pivoted to focus on distributing ebooks, including all types, before finally rebranding in 2015 itself as Pronoun.

And now it’s a Macmillan sub.

How long do you think it will be before Macmillan kills it?

Bookbub has long charged authors and publishers fees in order to be accepted into one of its ebook deal newsletter, but it has always set a certain standard for quality (reviews) and editorial fit. Now it is setting aside those standards, and is going to start listing straight adverts in its newsletter.

On Wednesday Bookbub announced that publishers and authors no longer have to have a deal for readers in order to get their ebook listed in the Bookub newsletter:

BookBub Ads run in a dedicated space in BookBub’s daily emails. Advertisers — authors, publishers, agents, and other book marketing professionals — can use this space to promote full-priced books, discounted books, audiobooks, novellas, multi-author box sets, and much more.

Bookbub has also posted an FAQ.

The new ad units are CPM ads like you would find on most websites, and not fee-for-placement like the the rest of the email. Bookbub says that the price of an ad unit is determined by a competitive bidding process, with the high bidder obviously getting priority.

Bookbub has long been the king of the ebook discount newsletters, but over the past year has been pivoting more and more to  be a marketing service. One industry insider told me that "strategically speaking it seems to me they’re starting to compete with Amazon for the most important nuggets – the direct connection between author and customers", and they were right.

Bookbub had already expanded beyond just pitching deals. It also encourages authors to fill out their profile on Bookbub’s website so that readers can follow authors and get news about new releases.

This is similar to a service Amazon offers through author pages on its site, and it is only the the most obvious way that Bookbub competes with Amazon.

How long do you think it will take before they get stepped on?

Or even better, how long until Bookbub gets acquired?

A discount newsletter service has a short half-life in an ever shifting retail market landscape, but a marketing service would have real value to a publisher (or Rakuten, which might buy Bookbub and then pivot the company).

Thanks, Anthony!

Thanks, Irish!