Henry Baum

Nathan Bransford has a good post about the future of agenting/publishing in the digital world. As someone under 40 (I’m guessing) the bulk of his career as an agent is going to be in the age of ebooks, so he’s more progressive about how the agent process is going to be restructured. About digital publishing, he has this very good point:

No one sits around thinking, “You know what the problem with the Internet is? Too many web pages.” Would you even notice if suddenly there were a million more sites on the Internet? How would you even know?

JA Konrath (this site can’t seem to get enough of him recently) has an interesting and encouraging post listing 20 self-publishers who are as successful on the Kindle as writers from mainstream publishers.  These are:

Primal Wound by Ruth Francisco, ranked #688

Thin Blood by Vicki Tyley, ranked #14

Deed to Death by D.B. Henson, ranked #42

Toe Popper by Jonny Tangerine, ranked #1464

Kill & Cure by Steven Davison, ranked #72

The Shot to Die For by M.H. Sargent, ranked #231

The Elect by James Gilbert, ranked #756

Punctured by Rex Kusler, ranked #988

Final Price by J. Gregory

Today’s must-read.  Garrison Keillor signals the death of publishing and the birth of…something else:

And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a Web site. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris (sic – in the NY Times no less) and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood

This post about my novel potentially being pirated made me look into book piracy and freebooks and just how this will affect the future of self-publishing and publishing on the whole.  Check out this endlessly fascinating interview with a bittorrent book pirate. He justifies it this way:

1) With digital copies, what is “stolen” is not as clear as with physical copies. With physical copies, you can assign a cost to the physical product, and each unit costs x dollars to create. Therefore, if the product is stolen, it is easy to say that an object was stolen that

As someone who’s been critical of JA Konrath, who basically sees the only good self-publishers are the ones who make a living at it, it’s somewhat strange to come to his defense for this Publisher’s Weekly piece about his recent deal with Amazon Encore (covered here on SPR).  Nevermind the number crunching in the post, which is debunked in Konrath’s post, Publisher’s Weekly Epic Fail, what really irks me is this paragraph:

Ira Silverberg, at Sterling Lord, was more blunt about how uneventful Konrath’s move was. “Certain authors will feel they’re doing well in schemes like this,” he said.