Linked List – Novelr

MCM is writing another novel in 3 days, this time at the Vooruit festival in Belgium! Watch him livewrite it here, or follow along with the #3D1D hashtag on Twitter. # (1)

Amanda Hocking Signs Four-Book Deal With St. Martin’s. Presumably for a couple million dollars. Worth thinking about: Hocking’s making less with this deal, but gets more time to write.
Update: she’s written a blog post about it. # (2)

Shmuel has put together a “Lies-Publishers-Tell Themselves-Bingo Card“. Includes such gems as:
With a new economic model, nobody will write books

Cheap books devalue everybody else’s work.
Also worth a look: James Bridle’s Stop Lying About What You Do, about publishers who say eBooks will never catch on and praise their Kindle in the same breath. # (1)

Here’s a beautiful little interactive book from the fine folks at the National Film Board of Canada. # (0)

Author Barry Eisler rejects $500,000 Publishing Advance to go Indie:
The decision for Eisler, at its core, was pretty simple. On the basis of what he’s learned from his friend Joe Konrath, who seems to be banking in the mid-six-figures self-publishing annually after a career as a non-bestselling author for established publishers, and what Eisler learned himself by self-publishing a short story, he figures he can earn more, much more, in the long run by publishing himself.
The move is purely economic. # (0)

Amazon adds ‘Real Page Numbers’ to Kindle eBooks:
We wanted to be able to display real page numbers that have value and are useful for those who need to cite a specific passage in a book for class, follow along with their friend in a book club, or simply point a friend to a favorite part of the book.
They’ve also found a way to distribute this new metadata to all previously purchased eBooks, so it matches up to the page numbers from a real book. I wonder how book editions are handled, though – three versions of the same book would have slightly different page numbers. # (0)

Mandy Brown on web reading:
Likewise the design of these pages has come to serve the needs of the advertisers instead of the readers. The basic principles of good reading design—whitespace, an appropriate measure, considered typography—are not only absent, they are actively violated. We design pages for clicks—for movement from place to place—neglecting the fact that reading is an act of stillness. We intentionally distract, polluting the visual space until it resembles less a library than Times Square. And to add insult to injury, we cover up these ills by saying people don’t read online—as if the design of a space played no part in determining its use.
One of the early design decisions we made at Pandamian was to prevent writers from adding ads to the sidebar. This can – and will! – change, when we implement theming, but there’s something to be said about standing up for the reader. # (6)

Kevin Kelly on 99 Cent eBooks:
I don’t think publishers are ready for how low book prices will go. It seems insane, dangerous, life threatening, but inevitable. I predict we’ll be there in 5 years, (before the marginal price drops to zero, but that is another story.)
But the real story: Konrath slashes the price of his ebook The List, and sees sales shoot up to 800 a day. # (4)

How The eBook Reader’s Bill of Rights Benefits Authors:
Ebooks should transcend platforms. What you buy on the iBookstore or the Kindle should be readable on the Nook or Kobo and vice versa. Ebooks should be platform neutral and portable. As an author, in order to reach the widest audience possible, your books should be able to travel wherever your audience wants them to be. You’ve put in the hours and the hard work; why should something like software or technology get between your prose and the reader?
Some context: Andrew Woodworth is a librarian. Last week, he posted the eBook Reader’s Bill of Rights. I don’t talk about it much, on Novelr, but there’s a struggle going on right now in the publishing industry with traditional publishers on one side and libraries on the other. The issue: the right for libraries to lend out eBooks. And the libraries are currently losing. # (1)

Amanda Hocking on the publishing industry:
Saying traditional publishing is dead right now is like declaring yourself the winner in the sixth inning of a baseball game when you have 2 points and the other team has 8 just because you scored all your points this inning, and they haven’t scored any since the first.
Also, note how she says that ‘people can’t grasp how much work I do’ (and how much of it isn’t writing). For what it’s worth: I’ll say this – Amanda Hocking is nice. Follow her on Twitter if you haven’t already. # (1)

I quite like this indie-focused book blog: IndieReader. They accept book review requests from indie authors, by the way, so I recommend that you go check that out. # (0)