Linked List – Novelr

Liveblogging the Barnes & Noble Special Announcement. The new Nook looks great: 2 months battery life, soft contoured back, $139. And B&N are taking a very aggressive stance against the Kindle. # (10)

Amazon just announced Thomas & Mercer, a new thriller-focused imprint:
Five bestselling and critically acclaimed authors will be the first novelists published under the Thomas & Mercer imprint. John Rector (Already Gone), co-authors J.A. Konrath and Blake Crouch (Stirred), Daniel M. Annechino (Resuscitation), and Kyle Mills (The Immortalists), will all be publishing new titles through Thomas & Mercer in 2011.
That makes five, along with romance imprint ‘Montlake Romance‘, announced on the 4th of May. # (0)

Gabriel Gadfly has started an initiative in response to the recent Alabama tornadoes: donate to Alabama disaster relief and he’ll write you a poem. He’s a little behind on writing, I think, but for the record: this is pure awesome. # (0)

It seems that a number of online booksellers have resorted to algorithmic auto-pricing. See, for instance, this story about an $23,698,655.93 book about flies on Amazon:
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly – a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists – consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).
Funny things happen when you let programs determine your book prices for you. # (1)

Isa’s just released a cool little tool called the thebestsellercode.com. Feel free to play around with it; it’ll be included in fluffyseme’s analytics package in the near future. # (9)

Marco Arment speculates about an Amazon iPad competitor:
… But it would cause a pretty big short-term headache for Apple that, if there’s a new and very inexpensive tablet alternative from Amazon, could pose a credible (although almost certainly not fatal) threat to the iPad’s marketshare. And Apple knows this.

I suspect the Kindle app will continue being mysteriously and indefinitely exempted from the in-app-purchase rules.
Better still if it uses a Pixel Qi screen. # (1)

Eric Snider, a freelance writer at AOL property Cinematical, resigned from his position a few days ago. The resulting rant is one of the funniest things I’ve read all week:
At first glance, AOL buying HuffPo might look like a good thing. Huffington is well-known for not paying her writers, who contribute work for free because it gives them a platform from which to make their voices heard. Perhaps AOL, as the new owner, would make HuffPo start paying its writers. Say what you will about AOL, but when you perform work for them, they pay you. They’re old-fashioned like that.
Yes: it gets funnier, and no, this doesn’t end well. # (0)

How I got a blank book to the top of the Amazon charts. Shed Simove and his 200-page, completely blank book titled What Every Man Thinks About Apart From Sex. # (3)

Chinese ‘web literature’ authors have been profitable for some time now:
People who signed up as writers on the site could publish their stories in serial form. If their works happened to attract a large group of readers, Qidian.com editors would call the writers and ask if they would like to sell their copyrights to the website. After they signed a contract, their works would be displayed in the site’s VIP section, where readers could read a certain number of chapters for free and then be charged for the rest of the novel. Later, the website would split the profit equally with the writers.
Bizarrely enough, I found out about this a couple of months back when I observed a few of my Chinese friends reading web novels in their spare time. “Are they any good?” I asked. “No,” My friend answered. “We just read them for stress relief.” (thx, SgL) # (6)

Tim O’Reilly on Piracy, Tinkering, and the Future of the Book:
Let’s say my goal is to sell 10,000 copies of something. And let’s say that if by putting DRM in it I sell 10,000 copies and I make my money, and if by having no DRM 100,000 copies go into circulation and I still sell 10,000 copies. Which of those is the better outcome? I think having 100,000 in circulation and selling 10,000 is way better than having just the 10,000 that are paid for and nobody else benefits. [...] People who don’t pay you generally wouldn’t have paid you anyway.
This is the kind of clear thinking that I wish we had more of. # (6)

Barry Eisler Explains Self-Publishing Decision:
Some people have mistakenly argued that, for my move to make financial sense, I’ll have to earn $142,000 a year for three years. But this is one time when you don’t want to be comparing apples to apples. Because the question isn’t whether I can make $425,000 in three years in self-publishing; the question is what happens regardless of when I hit that number. What happens whenever I hit that point is that I’ll have “beaten” the contract, and then I’ll go on beating it for the rest of my life. If I don’t earn out the legacy contract, the only money I’ll ever see from it is $142,000 per year for three years.
It’s an interesting corollary to Hocking’s traditional publishing decision. Hocking ‘doesn’t want to be a publisher’ and is willing to sacrifice some money to have that; Eisler is walking from a half-million publishing deal because he thinks he can make more on his own. # (4)