The Big Bad Book Blog

At the turn of the century, many in the book industry excitedly anticipated the advent of the electronic book. With titles like “The Future of Cyberpublishing Is Now!“, articles breathlessly told of the undiscovered world of e-book publishing and all its implications for authors, publishers, and the reading public. Paperless books would surely revolutionize the stodgy old book industry. So now, almost a decade later, why do most consumers react to the term “e-book” with a blank stare or casual head-scratch? Should the pronouncements of the e-book future seem as ridiculous to us now as the Y2K scare? [Unrelated fact: The author of doomsday classics The Y2K Personal Survival Guide and Millennium Bug seems to have overcome his embarrassment, becoming the president and CEO of Thomas Nelson, the nation's largest Christian publisher, in 2005.]

Some cite a general wariness with the format as the major reason the e-book fizzled so anticlimactically. Aren’t most people who buy books the types who savor sipping coffee in a bookstore, smelling the fresh paper of a printed book? Don’t avid readers enjoy coming home and curling up on the couch by the crackling hearth, a bound copy of their favorite novel nestled in their palm? And who wants to look at a fluorescent screen in their free time after they’ve done so at work for eight hours? continue reading

I recently ran across this post on one of Amazon’s Customer Discussions forums:

DemonsDanceAlone writes: “Both my mother and I received [Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris] as a Christmas gift, and I was quite disappointed to find that the edge of the book was not smooth, but an uneven zigzag shape. When I went to return it, hoping for a better copy, I found that all the books at my local Target and Barnes and Noble had the same uneven edges. Is this a flaw in the book’s production, is it just a bad batch, or is this a new style that this publisher is using for some stupid reason?”

This post brought two questions to my mind: One, who in the heck gives Hannibal Rising as a Christmas gift?! (Cannibalism and candy canes—hmmm.) And two, what is up with those cool irregular edges? continue reading

Marketers are constantly searching for ways to create and promote brand awareness through MySpace, a $500 million site. Born in 2003, it is by far the most popular social networking site. Its success in promoting fledgling music acts is now well known, and the stories of bands and artists who have received a significant publicity boost from their hip, media-laden profiles are plentiful. Can the same strategy work for authors and publishers? continue reading

Book publishing is a lot of things, but an exact science it is not. In fact, it’s an educated guess at best. So what do you do when you finally get down to deciding the hard numbers of how many books you need for an initial print run? First day sales for Bill Clinton’s My Life exceeded 400,000, prompting the publisher to print 725,000 more copies beyond the initial 1.5 million printed. So does that mean that all books on famous people will have instant success? Hardly. According to the Wall Street Journal, in 2005, the book Brad & Jen: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood’s Golden Couple, shockingly or not, sold a meager 4,000 copies. There is no magic answer, but there are factors to take in account when making your decision. continue reading

At the dog park last weekend, a car pulled in with the sticker “I love my French poodle” on the back bumper. My dog Otis stopped midsniff as the pom-pom-sporting poodle darted from the car to the nearest patch of grass. Otis wanted to say hello, but not being able to bark a word of French, he was just too intimidated. No matter how much I tried to convince Otis that the poodle probably wasn’t French as in from France French, he wouldn’t budge. Who would have thought a lousy bumper sticker could have such an effect on a dog’s self-esteem? continue reading