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This is all over the web, but the best analysis I’ve seen is over at arstechnica. Starting in June, Amazon will offer a new royalty program for Kindle e-books: 70% of the retail price goes to the publisher, instead of the 35% in the current standard contract. From the article:

Amazon dropped a bomb on the publishing world Wednesday morning by announcing a new royalty program that will allow authors to earn 70 percent royalties from each e-book sold, but with a catch or two. The move will pay participating authors more per book than they typically earn from

Fragmentation of the book business has made it nearly impossible for writers to find publishers, unless, of course, they already have publishers who are willing to take chances on their new books. Publishers need to make money, and times are hard. As a result, conventional publication by major publishers has become nearly impossible for great numbers of aspiring writers who have no history of huge sales, or, quite possibly, no history of any sales at all. In an earlier post, The Dream of an Instant Book, I explored the promise of The Espresso Book Machine, a device that promises […]

For information and to request a copy of the novel this piece refers to, absolutely Free-Of-Charge, please visit

www.ktapproximate.blogspot.com

It has long been my belief that any and every opinion that can be held about a novel will be—that there is an artificiality in an author desiring to know whether their novel is “liked” or “disliked.”  In my heart, there has always been a desire to converse about my work, to know someone’s “thoughts” on it, their “opinion” being an attaché, unavoidably there, but not of grave relevance.  When I converse with friends or colleagues about some novel, it begins […]

Ars Technica’s Jon Stokes has an interesting article about upcoming e-readers that will be hyped next week at CES 2010:

All signs indicate that the e-reader is to CES 2010 what the razor-thin LED-backlit TV was to CES 2009—a technology whose time in the commercial spotlight is now at hand, and which will make a huge, multi-vendor push into the market in the coming year. A whole raft of e-reader devices and technologies will be on display at next week’s CES—were I to cover all of them, this article would run for many pages. This being the case, in this

Reprinted from my blog on book cover design.

Part 1: It Should Only Take Five Minutes

“It shouldn’t take more than five minutes or so. I saw a web designer do it once.”

Words that make any print designer cringe. I remember one client I had a few years ago who wanted seven or eight images combined to make a design and he told me it would take only a few minutes.

First, I had to find all these images. Just for the heck of it, you try a search on fotosearch.com, istockphoto.com, bigstockphoto.com or photos.com for some similar […]