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an online newsletter for publishers, authors, book lovers and booksellers

Vol. 9, No. 6   June 2011

Index (scroll down for stories)  

  1. Data on total books published in 2010 shows competition intensifying

  2. Bedtime book about 2-year-old who won’t go to sleep goes viral

  3. Breaking news: Americans more likely to read in bed than elsewhere

  4. Amazon launches romance Imprint; more genre lines to come

  5. Bookselling: Smashwords overwhelmed by self-publishers

  6. Author recognition: Michael Connelly has 42 million books in print

  7. Books to movies: Sony acquires Burpo book about trip to heaven

  8. How bad is it? AAP says eBook sales slide in March

  9. Digital publisher scores instant hit with ‘Three Cups of Tea’ expose

10. Crash publishing: Enhanced ebook chronicles royal wedding

11. Publishing revolution: Amazon now selling more ebooks than pbooks

12. February book sales put ebooks as top-selling category

13. Simba: ‘Professional books for libraries dominate U.S. ebook market’

14. Harris Poll finds Americans opposed to censoring ‘Huckleberry Finn’

15. Books in bad taste: James Frey promotes latest work on Oprah!

16. Levi Johnston gets contract for book about Palins

17. Self-publishing: Few Smashwords authors make $50K per year

18. Self-published romance writer boosts quarterly revenue to $116,000

19. Self-published books by Joe Konrath net $78,000 in six weeks

20. Marketing books: Only one book for sale in this bookstore

21. How word of mouth made these books best-sellers

22. Books about heaven, hell popular on Amazon.com best-seller list

23. Milestones: Records, prizes and news of note in book publishing

24. Roth wins Man Booker International prize

25. 1,200 romance writers attend annual RT Booklovers Convention

26. News of chicanery, dishonesty and tort-feasing in the book business

27. HuffPo blogger sues AOL for $105 million on behalf of unpaid posters

28. Georgia State University sued over e-reserves

29. ‘Three Cups of Tea’ author Mortenson sued for fraud

30. SEC probing Amazon over Texas sales tax, IRS seeking $1.5 billion

31. Chuckles: Finding humor amid the stacks and shelves

32. News from trade shows, book fairs and book festivals

33. Major upcoming trade shows, book fairs and book festivals

1. Data on total books published in 2010 shows competition intensifying
 

Bowker Books in Print on May 18 issued its preliminary estimates for the total number of books published in the U.S. in 2010. The report raises as many questions as it answers. We have a complete copy of the report, and will have more to say about it in the next issue of Southern Review of Books.
 

For now, here are some highlights of the report.
 

2. Bedtime book about 2-year-old who won’t go to sleep goes viral
 

Thanks to a pirated PDF that went viral, a 32-page children’s book for adults hit no. 1 on Amazon.com a month before its planned release.
 

Go the F**k to Sleep by Adam Mansbach began its life as a joke Facebook post in June. It was the result of a particularly trying instance of bedtime with his 2-year-old daughter, and Mansbach let off some steam in the form of a humorous status post to his friends: "Look out for my forthcoming children’s book, ‘Go the — to Sleep.' "
 

The response from his friends so overwhelmed that Mansbach that he decided to make his joke book a real one. Go the F**k to Sleep, which he bills as a "children's book for adults," will be released on June 14, published by Brooklyn press Akashic.
 

Mansbach is currently on the East Coast for two-year stint at Rutgers University.
 

The book began attracting attention with a sudden climb up the Amazon list after it had been posted for pre-sale earlier this year. While it's impossible to calculate the number of emailed documents shared, media outlets such as the New Yorker have speculated that booksellers and other industry folk have been mainly responsible for circulating the 32-page pirated PDF to the wider world. 
 

Fox 2000 has already optioned the film rights and Mansbach is being readied for a national media tour. 

"The copies have been proliferating since this craziness started," said Ibrahim Ahmad, senior editor at the Brooklyn-based press, "With a PDF, you can make so many duplicates and people have just been forwarding it."
 

Akashic has been fighting the rampant piracy of its best-seller. Ahmad told The Bay Citizen: "As the publisher of this book, our responsibility is to tackle instances of piracy when we become aware of them ...That's just doing a service to our authors, ourselves, book sellers, distributors, to everyone involved in the successful making and promotion of a book."
 

In this particular case, fighting piracy may not be doing a service to the book. Piracy, it seems, is what has driven the book's real-world, money-making, flying-off-the-shelves success. The bootleg copy hasn't replaced the actual book. It has only served as free advertising. (Sources: David Zax,Today; Reyhan Harmanci, The Bay Citizen, May 12, 2011) (Images: Askashic Press)
 

 3. Breaking news: Americans more likely to read in bed than elsewhere
 

According to the Jacket Copy Web site, a survey conducted by Sony found that 79 percent of Americans are most likely to read books in bed. That's more people choosing to read in bed than in the living room (73 percent), on vacation (37 percent) or while commuting (eight percent)… No word yet on whether Regnery Publishing of Washington will go ahead with publication of a book by Donald Trump now that the Donald has withdrawn from a run for the Republican nomination for president. Trump planned to release a book through Regnery later this summer, according to Web site RealClearPolitics. The book, currently without a title, was on a crash schedule for a late-summer release and was designed to fill in some holes in Trump’s political positions. The book was to be written mostly by Regnery Executive Editor Harry Crawford, with Trump supplying some content, according to RCP’s Scott Conroy. Trump withdrew his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination after scathing comments from critics  including Saturday Night Live’s Seth Meyers. Regnery is a powerhouse when it comes to publishing conservative authors. Former Republican House Speaker and recently announced 2012 contender Newt Gingrich, whose candidacy is also in meltdown, released his book, To Save America, through the company in January.
 

4. Amazon launches romance Imprint; more genre lines to come
 

Amazon is launching another imprint, Montlake Romance, which will publish "a broad range of front list titles in popular romance sub-genres, including romantic suspense and contemporary and historic romance novels, as well as fantasy and paranormal."
 

The first announced author is two-time RITA winner Connie Brockway, whose The Other Guy’s Bride will be published this fall.
 

Montlake Romances  will "be available to North American readers in Kindle, print and audio formats at www.amazon.com, as well as at national and independent booksellers," and Amazon says a print edition will be published as a trade paperback, though in the future they expect to publish romance authors in trade paper and mass market.
 

Amazon declined to comment on how many titles they expect to publishing, saying only that it will "announce more books as part of the Montlake Romance list soon." 
 

Montlake joins Amazon imprints Crossing (works in translation), Encore (reissued self-published books, and some originals) and Powered by Amazon (the Domino Project), but will be the most significant overlap of Amazon imprints into the territory of traditional publishers. 
 

VP of  Publishing Jeff Belle notes, "romance is one of our biggest and fastest growing categories, particularly among Kindle customers. We also know our customers enjoy genre fiction of all kinds, so we are busy building publishing businesses that will focus on additional genres as well."
 

Alex Carr is Brockway's editor at Amazon. 
 

5. Bookselling: Smashwords overwhelmed by self-publishers
 

San Francisco-based digital books outlet Smashwords, run by Mark Coker, became profitable in September 2010. The 2008 start-up was one of the first to format raw copy for an array of e-readers, as well as publish and sell works from the site. By the end of 2008, Coker had 90 authors and 140 books. By mid-March 2011, he had 16,000 authors and 40,000 titles. The company’s formatting technology can format and release a book in five to 10 minutes, but submissions are now coming in so fast that there’s an eight- to 10-hour backlog, Coker says.
 

6. Author recognition: Michael Connelly has 42 million books in print
 

Michael Connelly’s books have sold 42 million copies worldwide and been translated into 39 languages. A former newspaper reporter who worked the crime beat at the Los Angeles Times and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, Connelly has won awards for both his journalism and his fiction. He's written 23 novels and one work of nonfiction. His latest, The Fifth Witness, a Lincoln Lawyer novel, was recently released by Little, Brown.
 

7. Books to movies: Sony acquires Burpo book about trip to heaven
 

Sony Pictures has acquired screen rights to Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy's Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent. Deadline.com reported that Joe Roth (“Alice in Wonderland”) will produce with evangelist T.D. Jakes. Roth "became curious after seeing the book on the top of the New York Times bestseller lists about six weeks ago. It reminded him, he said, of “The Sixth Sense,” which he made while running Disney. The book has so far sold about 4.5 million copies, Roth said, and could do 10 million before the year is out.
 

8. How bad is it? AAP says eBook sales slide in March
 

Monthly ebook sales as measured by the Association of American Publishers from 14 reporting members declined modestly in March. Publishers were expecting the drop because January 2011 was the second-biggest ebook sales month on record, at $69 million. Sales of ebooks in March were behind adult trade hardcover and trade paperbacks, and comprised less than 17 percent of all trade sales for March. The AAP members had total ebook sales for the first quarter at $229.2 million comprising 22.5 percent of reported trade sales for the period. With print sales falling only $20 million and ebook sales rising $41 million, total trade sales for March of $413.5 million were up about $21 million - more than five percent - from the same month a year ago.
 

9. Digital publisher scores instant hit with ‘Three Cups of Tea’ expose
 

The first title released by Byliner, a San Francisco digital publishing company, turned into an instant hit

Three Cups of Deceit by Jon Krakauer hit  No. 1 on Amazon.com's nonfiction list immediately after publication - helped to no small extent by the national publicity generated for the book by a story on “CBS 60 Minutes.”
 

The 22,000-word work by Krakauer is an expose of Greg Mortenson, author of the best-selling Three Cups of Tea. It questions Mortenson's claims about his mountain-climbing experiences in Afghanistan, his school-building program in that country and Mortenson’s handling of his charity's finances.
 

The day after the “60 Minutes” program aired, 70,000 free PDF versions of Three Cups of Deceit were downloaded within 72 hours of the book’s release, Six hours after the release of the $2.99 tablet version, available on the Kindle and Apple's iPad, the e-book shot to the top of the Kindle Single list and led Amazon's overall nonfiction sales for days after.
 

Byliner's founder and CEO is John Tayman. A national magazine writer and editor, Tayman is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Colony about leprosy patients on the Hawaiian island of Molokai.
 

"I felt there were stories that were too long for magazines, but not book length, and I believed there was a market for them," he said.
 

The advent of the Kindle and other e-readers sharpened his belief. "These were ideal platforms for great stories that have a time factor, and can be put into the hands of readers quickly."
 

Byliner has 20 of the Amazon Shorts in production. Tayman said each writer gets a competitive assignment fee and a 50-50 revenue split.
 

10. Crash publishing: Enhanced ebook chronicles royal wedding
 

Hyperion pulled all the stops to publish an enhanced ebook on the royal wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William in A Modern Fairy Tale: William, Kate and Three Generations of Royal Love.

The ebook contains text by novelist Jane Green, video from ABC’s archives and dozens of photos. There is also an original video foreword by Barbara Walters.

The narrative covers William and Kate’s lives and relationship, as well as the relationships of Prince Charles, Princess Diana, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. More than 25 minutes of video are embedded in the ebook, including footage of the 1947 wedding of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, and of Lady Diana walking up the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral in her wedding gown.

Fifty photos of the young couple and archival photography of past royal weddings is included, as well as a timeline highlighting important events in William and Kate’s lives leading up to their engagement.

The $7.99 enhanced e-book was produced by ABC News. It is also for sale as a $5.99 text- and photo-only version for e-readers that don’t support video. A free update will be available for download that will feature moments from the events of William and Kate’s wedding day.
 

11. Publishing revolution: Amazon now selling more ebooks than pbooks
 

Amazon said on May 19 that “Amazon.com customers are now purchasing more Kindle books than all print books - hardcover and paperback –combined,” adding that “Since April 1, for every 100 print books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 105 Kindle books. This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition.” Amazon says ebook unit sales are more than three times sales for the same period in 2010. Amazon reiterated that its print book sales continue to grow - taking share from everyone else - and that their U.S. books business overall, including ebooks, is showing “the fastest year-over-year growth rate, in both units and dollars, in over 10 years.” … “The book publishing industry has entered a period of long-term decline because of the rising sales of ebook readers,” reads an April 28 research note from IHS iSuppli, which predicted a decrease in book revenue at a compound annual rate of three percent through 2014 - a reversal from the period between 2005 and 2010, when revenue rose. For the traditional book publishing industry, the implications of the rise of the ebook and ebook reader markets are frightening, given the decline in paper book printing, distribution and sales,” Steve Mather, IHS iSuppli’s principal analyst for wireless, wrote in the April 28 statement. “The industry has entered a phase of disruption that will be as significant as the major changes impacting the music and movie business.” The firm predicts that physical book sales will decline at a compound annual rate of five percent. While ebook sales will rise during that same period, the increase won’t cover the revenue gap created by the decline in the physical book market. By 2014, the research note predicts, ebooks will occupy some 13 percent of U.S. book publishing revenue, more than twice its current level ... E-books were .05 percent of the trade-book market in 2002 and 3.2 percent in 2009. Last year, they shot up to 8.3 percent of the $5.3 billion market, according to the Association of American Publishers, totaling $441.3 million in sales … Barnes & Noble is releasing an upgrade to the Nook reader that allows Nook owners to have authors sign their ebooks using a stylus. Nook owners can activate the autograph function, hand the stylus over, and get the signature. Just like with a paper book… According to an article posted to the Web by Piotr Kowalczyk, of the top-100 Amazon Kindle titles on April 21, 2011, 28 were by self-published authors. Eleven of the self-published titles were in the Kindle top 50. All of the self-published best-sellers were priced at $3.99 or less. Eighteen of the titles were selling at the lowest possible price tag: $0.99… Jeffrey Trachtenberg in a Wall Street Journal article noted that advance sales of a short story by best-selling author David Baldacci hit no. 51 on Amazon's digital best-seller list in April. Grand Central Publishing, a unit of Lagardere SCA's Hachette Book Group, listed Baldacci's original short story "No Time Left," which features Frank Becker, an aging assassin with work-life balance issues, for 99 cents. The work was published May 2. "No Time Left" was originally published in January 2010 when it was included in an anniversary edition of Baldacci's thriller Absolute Power… App maker Scroll Motion will create mobile apps out of Smashwords' "premium" catalog of over 30,000 ebooks at no additional charge to the authors and publishers. The royalty rate on the apps will be 60 percent of list price.

12. February book sales put ebooks as top-selling category
 

Ebooks have become the single bestselling category in American publishing for the first time, according to new data.

The report from the Association of American Publishers, compiling sales data from U.S. publishing houses, shows that total ebook sales in February were $90.3 million. Tht made digital books the largest single format in the U.S. for the first time ever, the AAP said, overtaking paperbacks at $81.2.millon. In January, ebooks were the second-largest category, behind paperbacks.
 

America's ebooks enjoyed a 202.3 percent growth in sales in February compared with the same month the previous year, the book trade association said. Print books fared much worse by contrast, with the combined category of adult hardback and paperback books falling 34.4 percent to $156.8 million in February. The children and young adult category of print books fell 16.1 percent to $58.5 million.
 

The AAP attributed the ebook growth in February to "a high level of strong post-holiday ebook buying" from readers given ereader devices for Christmas, with the greater selection of devices and the broader range of ebooks now available also playing a part in the increase.
 

"Additionally, trade publishing houses cite ebooks as generating fresh consumer interest in - and new revenue streams for - 'backlist' titles, books that have been in print for at least a year," said the AAP. "Many publishers report that ebook readers who enjoy a newly-released book will frequently buy an author's full backlist."
 

Philip Jones, deputy editor of the Bookseller, called the U.S. ebook sales growth a "significant milestone amongst digital milestones which are coming thick and fast", but pointed out that "the ebook figure includes children's, so overall the trade print book market is still bigger than the ebook market.”
 

"Ebooks have grown massively, but they do not yet match overall print books and nor is it predicted that they will," said Jones. "The most bullish predictions suggest that ebooks will account for 50 percent of the U.S. market by 2014 or 2015, and then will probably plateau."
 

13. Simba: ‘Professional books for libraries dominate U.S. ebook market’
 

An April market research report from Simba Information says that although consumer trade books get a majority of the attention, professional and scholarly books, which include the legal, scientific/technical, medical and business segments, hold 75.9 percent of the $1.76 billion U.S. library acquisitions ebook market, where the more expensive ebooks prevail.
 

The latest market research report from media and publishing forecast firm Simba Information, “Professional Publishing in the Digital Age: E-Books in Libraries,” predicts library collection managers will set aside more of their budget for ebooks over the next few years.
 

The clear advantages ebooks offer librarians, including archiving and long term access, enhancements and features, usage statistics and cost savings, are pushing professional publishers to continue to work with the library community to fully develop this market.
 

According to the report, surveyed library collection managers are expecting ebooks to become a more significant share of publishers’ and distributors’ offerings, with 60 percent indicating that in five years ebooks will represent 11 percent or more of their library’s acquisition budget.
 

“The professional market is unlike the trade book and education market; professionals need to be able to access content that is searchable and streamlined into their workflow,” notes Dan Strempel, senior analyst at Simba Information and author of the study. “Librarians understand these needs, which can only be serviced on an electronic platform.”
 

The current mindset of professional publishers is to replicate the print version of a book, which is creating challenges in the adoption of ebooks, including the use of format standards like EPUB and establishing acceptable digital rights management.
 

“Some of the challenges are arising from disagreements between the publishers and the librarians: 69 percent of surveyed librarians had a negative opinion of digital rights management, specifically the limited length of access and no allowance for interlibrary loans,” added Strempel. “However, it should be noted that most librarians are acquiring their ebooks through third party vendors or aggregators and not directly through publishers.”
 

14. Harris Poll finds Americans opposed to censoring ‘Huckleberry Finn’
 

A majority of Americans are opposed to the changes made to a new edition of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which saw the offensive term "nigger" expunged from the classic novel.
 

Only 13 percent of American respondents said they supported the change made to publisher NewSouth Books' edition of the book, first published in 1884, which substitutes Twain's 200-plus uses of the word "nigger" with the word "slave,” and also replacing the word "injun.”
 

A Harris poll of 2,379 American adults in March found that 77 percent opposed the change, with 59 percent strongly opposing it.
 

Conservatives, moderates and liberals were all equally likely to disagree with the change, according to the survey, while 80 percent of white adults were against it, as opposed to 71 percent of Hispanic adults and 63 percent of black people polled.
 

Publisher NewSouth Books has said that its edition is an "alternative for teachers who want to use the books in their classrooms, but are unable to present them in their original form because of pressure from parents or administrators to exclude the books.”
 

NewSouth is not the first publisher to address the issues around the “n” word.
 

Last year, Dutch publisher WordBridge Publishing removed it from the title and text of Joseph Conrad's novella The Nigger of Narcissus to avoid offending "modern sensibilities,” renaming the 1897 novella as The N-word of the Narcissus, also replacing the word "nigger" with "n-word" throughout the novel.
 

15. Books in bad taste: James Frey promotes latest work on Oprah!
 

James Frey, pilloried by Oprah Winfrey over his fabrications in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces, was one of the last guests on Oprah’s show before it goes off the air. He’s self-publishing another book which will probably outrage many in the reading public, even more than the last one did. It’s The Final Testament of the Holy Bible. Frey faced Oprah for a full hour on May 16 to promote his new novel. In the book, in which the second coming of Christ takes place in the Bronx projects, the messiah turns out to be a former alcoholic who impregnates a prostitute. It’s being published in a limited edition of 10,000 copies and as an ebook. Among other things on “Oprah!,” Frey admitted that he had originally planned to publish his Million Little Pieces memoir as fiction.    

16. Levi Johnston gets contract for book about Palins
 

Levi Johnston, the father of Bristol Palin’s baby Tripp, has scored a book deal with a small Simon and Schuster imprint.
 

Both parents were barely 18 and unmarried when their son was born, and for a few months the relationship seemed to go well, but fell on harder times, much of which Johnston claims was due to Sarah Palin’s influence.
 

It was announced earlier this year that Bristol and Johnston would try again to rekindle their love, announcing their engagement to the surprise of the former half-term governor, who published a statement saying she was mostly confused, but warily supportive of her daughter’s actions, but the relationship again fell through weeks later.
 

Touchstone Publishing, a division of Simon and Schuster, will publish Johnston’s memoir, titled Deer in Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. A press release from the publisher quoted Johnston as saying “I want to tell the truth about my close relationship with the Palins … my sense of Sarah, and my perplexing fall from grace - how I feel and what I’ve learned. I’m doing this for me, for my boy Tripp and for the country.” Oh, really?
 

17. Self-publishing: Few Smashwords authors make $50K per year
 

Morgan James Publishing, says it doesn’t charge to publish your book - and also claims to pay generous royalties. However, they require all authors to take a $5,000 marketing course from them before they’ll publish your book. But you get 10 copies of your book - for free! … For the last year or so, we’ve been publishing examples of authors like Amanda Hocking making it big by self-publishing series of books for the Kindle. Before you rush to to that novel that’s been collecting dust in your desk drawer onto the Kindle platform, please note these words of caution. The overwhelming number of self-publishing digital authors end up in the same place as their print counterparts: oblivion. “We have less than 50 people who are making more than $50,000 per year. We have a lot who don’t sell a single book,” says Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.com, a Web site popular with self-publishers. “When I load all our numbers on a spreadsheet, it’s the typical power curve,” he says. “On the left, there’s a skinny area of the chart where people are knocking it out of the park. And then we have a very, very long tail off to the right, where some titles sell very few at all.” … So why is digital publishing becoming so popular with self-published authors? Because royalties paid for e-books range from 35 to 70 percent, compared to 15 percent or so on paperback and hardcover titles. In addition, self-published writers don’t have to pay an agent (typically another 15 percent bite out of their profits). Self-published writers can take home about $2 on a $2.99 ebook -  nearly double what they would earn on a $12.95 traditionally published paperback.
 

18. Self-published romance writer boosts quarterly revenue to $116,000
 

Neely Tucker of the Washington Post (May 6-7, 2011) relates the self-published success story  of romance novelist Nyree Belleville of Sonoma, Calif.
 

Belleville was dropped by her publisher when her  12 spicy romances didn’t sell strongly enough. Her top novel, penned under the name Bella Andre, earned $21,000 - but the others didn't do nearly as well.
 

One of the publishers of the 36-year-old wife and mother in 2010 gave her back the rights to her first two novels.

She decided to self-publish one of those, Authors in Ecstasy, on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader to see what would happen.
 

A few weeks later, she checked her account. She had sold 161 copies. She’d made $281.
 

She put her other reverted rights book online and figured out how to place both on other e-readers - the Nook, the Sony Reader, the iPad, Kobo. The next month, her royalties jumped to $474. She self-published a new e-book in July 2010. She made $3,539.
 

She got the rights to two more old novels, then hurriedly wrote another e-novel, Game for Love, about a bad-boy pro football player and his unexpected marriage. She put that online on Dec. 15, 2010.
 

Her earnings for that month were $19,315.
 

In January and February of this year, she e-published a trilogy of young-adult novels she’d written years earlier. She called the first one Seattle Girl and chose a new author name, Lucy Kevin, to distinguish it from the sexually explicit books written under her Andre pen name.
 

In the first quarter of this year, she sold 56,008 ebooks, producing income of $116,264.
 

19. Self-published books by Joe Konrath net $78,000 in six weeks
 

The success story of Chicago novelist Joe Konrath is also noted in the Washington Post article by Neely Tucker.

Konrath writes thrillers named after popular cocktails under the pen name J.A. Konrath, and horror novels under the pen name Jack Kilborn.
 

We noted in an article about him last month in the Southern Review that he was so busy writing and self-publishing that he had stopped giving publicity interviews, preferring to concentrate on making money.
 

Konrath started self-publishing his books online at cut-rate prices in the spring of 2009. That April, he made $700. By April 2010, he was making about $4,000 for the month.
 

A screen shot of his Kindle account for a period ending in late April of this year shows him netting $78,231.16 in six weeks.
 

One of the thrillers he wrote in 1999, titled The List, failed to find a publisher. He self-published it in 2009, in print and digital editions.
 

On March 24, the ebook was at No. 50 on the Kindle paid bestseller list, selling at $2.99, with 28 days on the list.

On the same day, the same book was offered in paperback at $13.95 on Amazon’s books page. It was ranked 102,526.
 

20. Marketing books: Only one book for sale in this bookstore
 

Andrew Kessler, an advertising agency creative director and author of Martian Summer: Robot Arms, Cowboy Spacemen, and My 90 Days With the Phoenix Mars Mission, has opened a bookstore in New York’s West Village. His book is about a NASA mission to Mars. According to an article in the New York Times by Elissa Gootman, it’s the only book for sale in the store. Stacks of the book are exhibited in the store window. And yes, there is separate shelving for “sale” items and “best-sellers” - but only Kessler’s book is displayed on the special shelves or anywhere else in the store.
 

21. How word of mouth made these books best-sellers
 

The old models for marketing books except for a handful of cases have fallen to new marketing techniques.
 

More and more, it’s being said these days that there are only two ways to generate sales of your book: write a good one, and then generate word of mouth.
 

A classic case of a book becoming a best-seller through word of mouth is The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, a book about the little things that make a difference in the marketplace.
 

When the book first appeared in 2000, it excited only modest comment. The reviews were scattered and lukewarm.

It was not until Gladwell, a spellbinding speaker, went out on the road to talk to professional groups across America that The Tipping Point "tipped.”
 

In a practical sense, Gladwell created his own word of mouth.
 

To generate a surprise bestseller, either the author or the publisher needs to create a community around the book and its author.
 

That’s what happened to two female-oriented books promoted by word-of-mouth, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells and Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss.
 

Ya-Ya Sisterhood first popped up on a bestseller list in northern California. In the days when such things were a novelty, it was a "book-group book.” Then readers started to come to Wells' readings. They didn't just buy the book for themselves - they bought it for their family and friends. Word about Ya-Ya Sisterhood spread nationwide. Wells spent a year on book tour, and sold millions of copies.
 

Eats, Shoots and Leaves, a global bestseller, appealed to a much larger, but more informal community: anyone who felt that the world is going to hell in a handcart and that, more to the point, believed that all their fears could be illustrated by the decline of English usage. Truss said her book was a "zero tolerance approach to punctuation". But it wasn't really about grammar and punctuation, it was about bourgeois fear. In this case, word of mouth equals the marriage of enthusiasm and anxiety.
 

It helps if the word of mouth communicates to readers that a book will help them achieve aspirations, nurture their beliefs or relieve their anxieties. Word of mouth of this nature has promoted the inspirational titles The Shack and 90 Minutes in Heaven into best-seller territory. That alsoappears to be the case with the marketing success of Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back by Lynn Vincent and Todd Burpo, the latter the evangelical pastor and father of a 4-year-old who purportedly died, went to heaven, and was then summoned back to Earth after talking with Jesus. The book is the story dictated by the son, now 12 years old, to his father Todd.
 

22. Books about heaven, hell popular on Amazon.com best-seller list
 

On Easter Sunday, two of the top three books on Amazon.com’s Religion and Spirituality best-seller list mapped the geography of the afterlife.

One was Heaven Is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, an account of a 4-year-old’s near-death experience as dictated to his pastor father.
 

The other was Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived, in which the evangelical preacher Rob Bell argues that hell might not exist.
 

The publishing industry knows that large majorities of Americans believe in God and heaven, miracles and prayer. But belief in hell lags well behind, and the fear of damnation seems to have evaporated.
 

Near-death stories are reliable sellers: There’s another book about a child’s return from paradise, The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven, just a little further down the Amazon rankings. But you’ll search the best-seller list in vain for The Investment Banker Who Came Back From Hell.
 

Doing away with hell, argues Russ Douthat, is a natural way for pastors and theologians to make their God seem more humane.
 

As Anthony Esolen writes, in the introduction to his translation of Dante’s Inferno, the idea of hell is crucial to Western humanism. It’s a way of asserting that “things have meaning” - that earthly life is more than just a series of unimportant events, and that “the use of one man’s free will, at one moment, can mean life or death ... salvation or damnation.” (Source: Ross Douthat, “The Case for Hell,” New York Times, April 24, 2011)
 

23. Milestones: Records, prizes and news of note in book publishing
 

A 500-year-old book worth $100,000 was discovered recently at an "Antiques Roadshow-style fundraiser" in Sandy, Utah. KSTU-TV reported that the man who donated $2 to find out how much a book he had inherited was worth learned the answer is more than $100,000. Said appraiser Ken Sanders: "A gentleman walked in and said I've got a really important book here and I'm sitting there rolling my eyes and thinking, 'yeah, sure you do.' And then he opens it up and it's a Nuremberg Chronicle from 1494… Outside of museums I've never seen one before in my life and I most assuredly didn't expect to find this book in Sandy, Utah today." The owner said he wanted to sell the book to a museum or library… The San Francisco Chronicle reports that Amazon.com in 2010  paid its CEO Jeff Bezos  "a paltry salary of $81,840, but the cost of his security detail came to $1.6 million for the year," a $100,000 drop from 2009.
 

24. Roth wins Man Booker International prize
 

Philip Roth has won the US$97,134 Man Booker International Prize, which is presented once every two years to a living author for a body of work published either originally in English or widely available in translation in the English language.
 

Roth will be honored at a formal dinner in London on June 28.

"For more than 50 years Philip Roth's books have stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience," said Rick Gekoski, chair of the judging panel. "His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally. His career is remarkable in that he starts at such a high level, and keeps getting better. In his 50s and 60s, when most novelists are in decline, he wrote a string of novels of the highest, enduring quality. Indeed, his most recent, Nemesis (2010), is as fresh, memorable, and alive with feeling as anything he has written. …"
 

25. 1,200 romance writers attend annual RT Booklovers Convention
 

Some 1,200 women attended the 28th annual RT Booklovers Convention, in Los Angeles in April. The annual event caters to the readers, writers, editors and agents of romantic fiction.
 

According to the Business of Consumer Book Publishing 2010, the romance genre saw 9,089 new titles and $1.36 billion in sales in 2009, the last year for which hard numbers are available. This makes the romance genre the single largest category in the consumer book market at 13.2 percent of sales. By comparison, religious-inspirational books, the second-largest category, rang up the $770 million in 2009 sales.

Of the two major annual gatherings, RT Booklovers (the RT stands for Romantic Times, and the event is hosted by RT Book Reviews magazine) is considered more of a "readers' convention" - as opposed to the Romance Writers of America annual conclave, which is more narrowly tailored to authors.

Among those offering advice to wannabe romance writers was author Kristen Lamb, who said "There are only two ways to sell: the first is to write a good book and the second is word of mouth. Today the author needs to do three things to achieve that word of mouth - blog, Twitter and (use) Facebook."

The prevailing new marketing device at the convention was a glossy collectible trading card depicting a character from the novel or bodice-ripping cover art on one side and a character close-up and details on the back.

One of the examples depicted on a card at the convention dwepicted Kit Frazier, 32, a character from Wicked Seduction by Jade Lee, with the description: "Sandy hair, light freckling, has a way with animals," and best line: "I must insist that you stop bleeding on the earl. It really isn't done."
 

 "This is the first convention that's had the trading cards," says author Joanna Bourne as she laid down cards for two of her novels on a conference room table - for The Forbidden Rose and The Black Hawk.

"We won't really know if they're a success until after the Romance Writers (of America) convention in June, but when I can give these to people, it helps make the characters transcend the book and feel all the more real." (Source: Adam Tschorn, Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2011; Lawrence K. Ho, Los Angeles Times, April 6, 2011)
 

26. News of chicanery, dishonesty and tort-feasing in the book business
 

The J.R.R. Tolkien estate has settled a dispute with Stephen Hillard, author of the upcoming book Mirkwood: A Novel About J.R.R. Tolkien, which "features Tolkien as a character and includes a critical analysis of Tolkien's books," the Hollywood Reporter writes, adding that the book "is not only fiction, but also an exercise in 'literary criticism,' as it is said to take issue with the lack of female characters in Tolkien's works." The Tolkien estate had sent Hilliard a cease-and-desist letter threatening a lawsuit, but the settlement permits the book, which the author is publishing with Amazon's BookSurge/CreateSpace platform, to be released "with a modified reference to Tolkien on the cover and will also include the disclaimer, 'This is a work of fiction which is neither endorsed nor connected with The J.R.R. Tolkien Estate or its publisher.'"
 

27. HuffPo  blogger sues AOL for $105 million on behalf of unpaid posters
 

A longtime Huffington Post blogger has filed a lawsuit against the site, its two co-founders and new owner AOL, seeking $105 million on behalf of himself and 9,000 other unpaid bloggers.
 

The suit is being led by Jonathan Tasini, a journalist and union organizer, who filed the complaint in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Tasini is seeking class-action status for the case.
 

Tasini says Arianna Huffington personally invited him to blog for the Huffington Post in 2005, shortly after the site launched. He subsequently wrote 216 unpaid posts for the site, though he stopped blogging after AOL agreed to buy it on Feb. 7.
 

AOL's $315 million Huffington Post purchase served as the catalyst for the lawsuit. Tasini says HuffPo's 9,000 unpaid bloggers deserve a large cut of the windfall.
 

"The value added by the content provided by (the unpaid bloggers) to TheHuffingtonPost.com's price was at least $105 million, none of which was shared," the legal complaint says.
 

Tasini himself goes much further in his comments about HuffPo and its founder: "It's hard to find a bigger example of hypocrisy. Arianna has made her name on standing up for the little guy - meanwhile, she is behaving exactly like Goldman Sachs and all the robber barons."
 

HuffPo bloggers, Tasini says, "are merely slaves on Arianna's plantation. We do all the work and she won't share a dime."
 

A Huffington Post spokesman said "the lawsuit is without merit."
 

He compared the site's unpaid bloggers with the "hundreds of people (who) go on TV shows to promote their views and ideas." He also pointed out bloggers can cross-post their work on other sites, and that the company does employ a full-time, paid staff as well.
 

For all his vitriol, Tasini says the lawsuit wasn't his idea. Rather, it was the brainchild of the two Kurzon Strauss lawyers who are now representing him.
 

"Speaking for myself only, I'm looking to set some standard for blogging as we move forward," Tasini says. "If we don't set standards now, we'll move into a spot where creators can't make a living."
 

Tasini was the lead plaintiff in the landmark 2001 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. vs. Tasini, which focused on publications' rights to license freelancers' work for distribution through electronic databases like LexisNexis. The case was decided in favor of the plaintiffs.
 

In the case against the Huffington Post, Tasini says he would be willing to settle out of court "if Arianna suggested something fair." (Source: Julianne Pepitone, CNN Money, April 12, 2011)
 

28. Georgia State University sued over e-reserves
 

A number of academic publishers are suing Georgia State University over its e-reserve practices, Ars Technica reports.
 

E-reserves are electronic compilations of course material that professors put together for students to download in circumstances where they would not be using enough material to make it worthwhile for the students to buy entire books.
 

Colleges tend to claim that e-reserves fall under fair use, whose doctrine explicitly mentions making multiple copies of material for classroom use. However, publishers hold that the extent of some of these course packs crosses over into outright copyright infringement.
 

The outcome of the Georgia State University case could potentially have a very far-reaching impact - e-reserves are widely used by all universities, and precedents set by this case could affect all of them.
 

29. ‘Three Cups of Tea’ author Mortenson sued for fraud
 

While Montana's attorney general looks into Greg Mortenson's dealings with his charity CAI, two state lawmakers - Rep. Michele Reinhart of Missoula and Rep. Jean Price of Great Falls - filed suit in a Missoula Federal Court against Mortenson, alleging fraud.
 

They claim they "purchased the book because of his heart-wrenching story which he said was true," says their attorney, Alexander Blewett. "If people had known all of this was fabricated, they would not have given the money."

The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status and have asked the judge to create a "constructive trust" to be "administered by a court-appointed charity that would direct it to schoolchildren in Afghanistan and Pakistan." The suit includes a RICO racketeering claim because some of the donations were made by mail. They are using that claim to seek triple damages.

Blewett says the suit is designed to elicit the truth from Mortenson: "We welcome the opportunity to let Mr. Mortenson testify under oath to all these things. To us, it seems overwhelmingly false and we will give him ample opportunity to explain away all of the falsehoods."

The Central Asia Institute did not comment on the filing.
 

Mortenson's planned heart surgery has been postponed. His physician wrote, "Mortenson is convalescing at home with CPAP,  oxygen and bed rest, allowed no electronics, and will undergo additional tests this week that will determine when his condition will allow for a safe procedure to repair the hole in his heart."
 

The CAI site addresses Mortenson's extensive use of private aircraft at the charity's expense with an omnibus three-part excuse: "Number one, Greg's schedule often presents difficult logistical scenarios that are nearly impossible to accomplish with commercial airlines. Generally he has to fly late at night to accommodate his hectic schedule, which in the past four years put him in an average 126 cities per year, plus international travel and overseas project visits. Number two is his health, which has been in decline for the past 18 months. And number three is security. Greg has received threats against his life, and commercial travel sometimes presents over-exposure to threatening elements."
 

30. SEC probing Amazon over Texas sales tax, IRS seeking $1.5 billion
 

In a regulatory filing, Amazon said the Securities and Exchange Commission is looking into its sales tax dispute with Texas.
 

Last September, Texas assessed $269 million from Amazon in uncollected sales tax, interest and penalties for the four years running from December 2005 to December 2009. Amazon has since threatened to pull its warehouse operations out of Texas.

"In March 2011, the SEC staff notified us of an inquiry concerning this assessment, and we are cooperating with the staff's inquiry," Amazon said.

Amazon also disclosed that the Internal Revenue Service recently sent Notices of Proposed Adjustment for 2005 and 2006 relating to the company's transfer pricing with its foreign subsidiaries. The IRS is proposing to increase Amazon's U.S. taxable income, which would result in about $1.5 billion in additional federal tax expenses, plus interest, for seven years beginning in 2005."

Amazon said it intends to "vigorously contest" the adjustments.
 

31. Chuckles: Finding humor amid the stacks and shelves
 

Too true to be funny? The Onion cast its satiric gaze on author readings with a recent article headlined "Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All Whether It's Just 3 People or a Crowd of 9 People." The Onion quotes its fictitious author of a novel entitled A Lighthouse Keeper, as saying, "Sometimes 7:30 comes around and only three people are there, one of whom is my agent," Massey said. "Well, rather than go through with the whole presentation I'd normally do for a group of six including my parents and a woman who appears to be mentally ill, I can make the reading into more of an intimate discussion where there's a lot more back-and-forth."… CBS has canceled “$h*! My Dad Says.” Author Justin Halpern broke the news to his father over the phone His father’s response: "Well, I liked it. It was kind of sh*tty at first, but I thought it got a lot better. You know what show I like? Cheers. That was a good show."
 

32. News from trade shows, book fairs and book festivals
 

The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which was held on April 30 and May 1, drew 140,000 people to the campus of the University of Southern California, Jacket Copy reported. "We are thrilled to see our vision for moving the festival to our new home downtown come together in a more robust way than we even imagined when we first started discussing the idea with USC," said Times publisher Eddy Hartenstein.
 

33. Major upcoming trade shows, book fairs and book festivals
 

May
 

May 23-26. BookExpo America, New York.  www.bookexpoamerica.com  

National Stationery Show,  New York.
 

June
 

June 24-29. American Library Association, Washington, DC. www.ala.org

June 27–30. ICRS - International Christian Retail Show,  St. Louis, Mo www.christianretailshow.com

Printers Row Book Fair, Chicago. http://www.chicagotribune.com/about/events/printersrow  

The Australian Booksellers Association's, Melbourne. The International New Age Trade Show West 

July

July 21-24. Comic-Con International, San Diego, Calif. The grandfather of all comics shows, which began in 1970, and capped its attendance at 125,000 three years ago.
 

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