We all remember the good lines. No, not good. The really killer ones. The ones you don’t ever forget, because they’ve done for your soul what delicious food does for your belly. Best of times and worst of times, one ring to rule them all, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo kind of lines.

Then there are the killer lines that I’m talking about. The comments or turns-of-phrase or sentences that are hackneyed clichés or pointless ramblings, useless facts or simply don’t make any sense. Whether in your query letter, marketing materials, biography or synopsis, these five killer lines will mutilate your chances of being published. Or being taken seriously: continue reading

Do you want to be on a book page facing Obama without having to make history?  Or perhaps politics aren’t your thing and you’d rather have the lead role in a steamy romance novel.  Good news!  Customizable, one-off books, the product of POD technology, are available and fanning out into all different genres.  For all of those of us who have a hard time relating to books about other people, there are now all types of ways to insert yourself into the story.

Hewlett Packard has recently employed POD technology for the customizable book The Obama Time Capsule about the presidential inauguration. You can upload pictures of yourself and add your name to the inauguration invite or to the front cover of the book.  Your pictures will appear on various pages like the “celebrity supporters” page, and your children’s artwork can be added to the “Kids for Obama” page.  You get your very own album of the historic inauguration, even though you weren’t really there!

Politics not your thing? Voted for the other guy? You can still put yourself in print!  I know when I read romance novels, I have a hard time relating to Scarlett, Isabella, and Veronica.  But what if I could put my own name in the book?  With companies like Romance By You and Torrid Romance, you can customize the character’s names and other parts of the story online.  They print one copy for you, and voila! You’re experiencing the steamy romance you’ve only dreamed of.

Assuming you haven’t had the time, energy, or mental aptitude for legal matters to get to the bottom of what’s going on with Google Book Search and the settlement reached last October, we highly recommend this helpful FAQ from Wired. It gets directly to the root issues of the debate sans stuffiness or legalese.

Wired points out (as have others) that the real benefit to Google in all this will probably not come from selling or renting books, but from selling expensive database subscriptions to libraries—meaning that the same libraries criticized by publishers for being in cahoots with Google’s purported infringement could be the ones hurting under the new arrangement. Mike Shatzkin points out and discusses this irony in The Shatzkin Files (which, by the way, is a blog worth reading on a regular basis).

In the book industry, “pristine” is the word wholesalers and retailers use to describe books that are in saleable condition. If a book isn’t pristine (which means “absolutely flawless” in this context), it’s sent straight back to the publisher. Its fate—pulping, free giveaway, remaindering, years of gathering dust in a warehouse—is determined from there.

We recently spoke with Debbie Purrington of Ingram Book Company, the industry’s largest wholesaler, who spends her time doing fix-up jobs on the slightly imperfect books Ingram receives from printers. Debbie’s workstation in Ingram’s Tennessee warehouse checks books for twenty types of damage, including dented spines, torn pages, creased dust jackets, oozing glue, unsmoothed Mylar, and printing errors such as missing sections or upside-down pages (which, she says, happens more frequently than you may think). If the damage is too extensive to repair, the pallets of books are returned directly to the publisher. But if there’s something Debbie or her colleagues can fix, she sets to work. The book repair station, which is operated by only one person at a time, mends between 50 and 100 books per shift. The books Debbie fixes have not seen the rough-and-tumble of shipping through the supply chain (in other words, she won’t fix your books that got damaged because the UPS guy dropped them), but her tactics, outlined below, can help any author or small publisher for whom creased, dented, unsellable books can be a huge revenue drain. continue reading

Starting this week, the team here at the Big Bad Book Blog is pleased to introduce its readers to a new weekly feature for your elucidation, pleasure and occasional head-scratching: the Big Bad Link Roundup. Each week we will compile a short list of notable happenings in the world of books and publishing.

For the week of March 16th – 20th:

• Sony and Google are partnering up with a digital book agreement in order to take on their rival Amazon.com.
• Stacey’s, the largest independent bookstore in San Francisco, closed.
• Both the Publishing Triangle and the Lambda Literary Awards have released their list of finalists for this year’s awards for glbt books.
• Author James Purdy, who wrote Malcolm, In a Shallow Grave, Garments and other such “darkly comedic” fiction that exposes a frankly sinister side of America, died at age 94.
• Harlequin, the leader of romance publishing, has announced that they are introducing a young adult line called Harlequin Teen.
• Amazon.com, makers of the popular e-reader Kindle, is being sued by Discovery Communications over claims of patent infringement.
• The longlist has been announced for the Orange Prize award for female fiction writers.
• Wholesale distributor Baker & Taylor are consolidating their book warehousing, closing a site in California and moving key operations to Indianapolis.
• Millard Kaufman, co-creator of Mr. Magoo, writer of multiple Oscar-nominated screenplays and the novel Bowl of Cherries died at age 92.

Be sure to let us know of any news we might have missed. Have a great weekend, all!

Tip #2: Get the price right.

Oh, the headache of self-publishing. You want to realize your dream and publish your book, but you have The Industry to contend with, you have the cost of production, and you have to worry about wholesalers and distributors, and Amazon . . . and the list goes on.  After all that time, energy, and money, it seems only natural that you’d want to earn back your costs through the price of your book.  $22.95 sounds like a fair price for your paperback fiction after all you’ve put into this book, right?

Sorry, but wrong.  continue reading

With the bulk of publishing industry news of late centering around layoffs, declining retail sales, and holds on acquisitions, it’s easy to get pulled into the downward spiral of doom and gloom. While none of us want to see our colleagues out of work or industry decline, the bad news hardly comes as a surprise: inefficient and outdated practices have been pushing us in this direction for years. The current economic bust was (or will be) the last nail in the coffin for many publishing operations struggling to say afloat.

But, to quote Albert Einstein, “In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.” The constant but quiet call for change that has been building for years is now more like an air raid siren. The shakedown coming in 2009 may bring an about-face in our general acceptance of wasteful practices while also bolstering the lines of smart, lean independent publishers and distributors: continue reading

Why aren’t they? Easy. Because there’s no reason to laugh. The comic book industry hasn’t yet begun to languish with the same furor of the publishing industry at large, in part because of its highly unique clientele: geeks like myself, willing to forgo the niceties of modern life (eating at restaurants, fashionable clothes, oil changes) for a great trade paperback. But will this trend continue? With industry followers like Publishers Weekly holding their breaths in anticipation of the success of the New York Comic Con as a benchmark for the comic industry’s success this year, it seems that time (and trade shows) will tell. continue reading