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June 28, 2007
Client news and notes
It's actually been a much busier month than this short round-up suggests!
Congratulations to Ronda Racha Penrice, whose African American History for Dummies is currently featured on AOL Black Voices. Ronda signed books with Chris Webber in Detroit last week, to boot, which is great for me by way of reflected glory :-) Sac Town misses you, Chris!
Congrats to Rich Wagner and Richard Mansfield on the publication of Creating Web Pages All In One Desk Reference for Dummies.
Continuing with the Fresh Books West and Southwest theme, congratulations to naturalist Ron Kay on delivering RON KAY'S GUIDE TO ZION NATIONAL PARK: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Zion National Park But Didn't Know Who to Ask, to be published early next year by Countryman Press.
Congrats to Sue Jenkins (star and writer!) on the release of her first training DVD-Rom, Dreamweaver for Designers.
Congratulations to John Mueller on completing his latest Sybex title, IIS Implementation and Administration, which will publish this Fall.
And finally, kudos to Ed Baig. If you want to know what it's like to live with the new iPhone for a few weeks, Ed tells you in his latest USA Today column, Apple's iPhone isn't perfect but it's worthy of the hype.
Posted by matt at 12:23 PM | Comments (0)
June 15, 2007
Reasons to Buy Local: Amazon to take a hit on Harry Potter
Don't get me wrong. I love Amazon. I buy lots of books from Amazon, and I link to my new books at Amazon as a matter of course, but this galls me. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows could be a great boon to the entire book business and to small bookstores everywhere, but many stores are taking a hit on the final Potter book or not stocking many copies because they can't compete with Amazon's deep discounts. And now we know that even Amazon isn't making any money on the deal:
Amazon.com Inc. has taken more than a million pre-orders for the final "Harry Potter" book due out in July, but the world's largest Web retailer won't make a profit, Chief Executive Officer Jeff Bezos told shareholders at the company's annual meeting Thursday. Amazon's handling of the "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" release - a $17 discount off cover price, a free shipping offer and guaranteed on-time delivery - showed yet again that the company is willing to take a hit to cement customer loyalty.
I guess that's no surprise, but I'd encourage you to think about where you buy your books and whether your purchase supports your local economy, your local tax base and small businesses, or whether your purchase supports an admitted loss leader and predatory discounting that is ultimately killing your own local bookstore.
This is one book we're buying from our local bookseller.
Link, via Publishers Lunch.
Posted by matt at 10:27 AM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2007
My book deal ruined my life :-( or :-)? (NY Observer)
This has got to be one of the more pathetic (or funny) things I've ever read, along the lines of boy, that promotion screwed with my head or could it be that cancer isn't so bad, try writing a book?
Of course we all know that dying is easy, comedy is hard, so maybe this is no surprise, or maybe it's a joke. It's hard to say. No matter what, it's nice to remember that there are certainly more important things in life than your book deal! As for me, I'd put my relationship, my kids, my job, my own sense of self worth, all that and more, far ahead of any book.
Posted by matt at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)
June 6, 2007
"It's the backlist, stupid," Random House "Profit Calculator"
Funny short piece in New York mag, via Galleycat.
Money quote --
"Many books are unprofitable,” says CEO Peter Olson. Fifteen to twenty best sellers at a time and a huge volume of steadily selling older titles support Random House, a unit of German media giant Bertelsmann. Every week, the country’s biggest trade publisher releases 67 new books, but it’s the the 33,000-book backlist (Ian McEwan’s Atonement, for example) that supplies 80 percent of its profit.
Below that there's some funny math --
Most authors do not see a 15% list royalty on paperback sales, that figure is decidedly fishy.
Posted by matt at 9:35 AM | Comments (0)
June 5, 2007
Client news and notes -- Diary of a Real Estate Rookie, Newsweek pick of the week!
Congrats to Alison Rogers. Her Diary of a Real Estate Agent: My Year of Flipping, Selling, and Rebuilding, and What I Learned (The Hard Way) is a Newsweek magazine pick of the week. I'd love to say that I tracked Ali down and goaded her into writing this book, but that honor belongs to former Kaplan editor Karen Murphy who noted the wit and charm of Ali's weekly Inman.com column. In a wonderful twist (from my perspective), I landed Ali (a Manhattan realtor and former NY Postie) because I was one of the few agents not on vacation at the end of the summer last year.
Congrats to Sue Jenkins, who recently completed taping 10 hours (!!) of Dreaweaver video tutorials for Class On Demand. This is her first dvd.
Congrats to Dan Gookin on completing his newest book, Find Gold in Windows Vista, coming soon from Wiley.
Congratulations to Janet Rae-Dupree and Pat DuPree on completing their book, Anatomy & Physiology Workbook for Dummies.
Congrats to Rich Wagner and Richard Mansfield on completing Creating Web Pages All In One Desk Reference (for Dummies).
Congratulations to Michele Davis and Jon Phillips on completing the second edition of Learning PHP and MySQL (O'Reilly).
Congrats to Richard Mansfield on completing his newest book, How to Do Everything in Second Life,(Osborne/McGraw-Hill). I don't have the time to visit SL these days but I really want to read about it.
And, finally, kudos to Harold Davis on his stint as a guest blogger at the O'Reilly Media site. Check out his most recent entries: Will You Be my Lensbaby?, Physical Prints in a Virtual World, and When is a Photograph not a Photograph?. If you want to see some amazing nighttime pics, you should check out Harold's long exposure set at Flickr, linked.
Thanks for working with me!
Posted by matt at 1:34 PM | Comments (0)
June 1, 2007
Enter the Best Travel Writing of the Year Contest
Think you've got what it takes to entertain the editors at Travelers' Tales? Enter their Best Travel Writing contest!
The current round ends on September 1, 2007. Some winners may be published in future Travelers' Tales books.
Posted by matt at 11:26 AM | Comments (0)