eLCRW in the EU
Mon 20 May 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, LCRW, Weightless| Posted by: Gavin
Over at Weightless Michael has found a way — with help from our friends at Interzone — to make LCRW available as an ebook in both the EU and the UK using Payhip. I am very grateful to everyone that 1) there’s a solution and 2) it was implementable.
I am sorry we can’t send chocolate over with the e-subscriptions. I’d say one of these days, but I kind of hope we don’t all end up with food printers in our kitchens so I hope you can get a good snack wherever you are to go with the zine. Is it really an issue of LCRW, anyway, if there aren’t chocolatey fingerprints on it/the ereader?
Re: Formats
Thu 25 Jan 2024 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, reports, sales| Posted by: Gavin
I’ve updated my chart of the ratio of formats Small Beer titles (including chapbooks and LCRW) sell in.
Print books (in red on the chart) were 90% of sales in 2010 — we started selling ebooks in 2005 — and dropped to a low of 49% in 2014 (or: we sold a lot of ebooks that year).
The 2023 breakdown was 65.36% print and 34.64% ebooks. I’ve never tracked audio books, mostly because the half dozen audio book publishers all send statements at different times and they are somewhat hard to extract numbers from. I think audio sales would be about 2-3% of the total. Although I prefer print or audio, I’m format agnostic as a publisher, especially knowing how useful ebooks are for books such as ours where there are no large type editions. I’d like people to read Small Beer books and I know that people enjoy different types of books in different formats: for some fiction only works on audio or short stories only work in print, etc. Anyway, every year when I get to this point in Jul.-Dec. royalty calculations I like to stop and look at the format percentages, see if there’s anything I’m missing, any books I should be reminding people exist. Oh wait, all of them!
Venus of Chalk ebook
Fri 4 Mar 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Susan Stinson, Weightless Books| Posted by: Gavin
I’m happy to say that next month we’re adding another Susan Stinson novel, Venus of Chalk, to our list. First published in 2004 by Firebrand Books this will be the first ebook edition. Susan lives near us in Western Mass and to keep it really local here’s a word on it from another fabulous and famous local author, Lesléa Newman, author of Heather Has Two Mommies,
“Carline is brave, strong and beautiful, just like Susan Stinson’s writing. As a reader, I was fascinated by Carline’s journey; as a writer I was dazzled by the language in which it was told.”
And here’s more about the book:
In Susan Stinson’s shimmering second novel, three friends drive from Massachusetts to Texas to unload an old bus, and in the process become the selves they were meant to be.
Carline’s life is settled and happy: she has a great home with her partner, Lillian, and a job she loves as the editor of a respected pamphlet series, The Modern Homemaker. But after an unpleasant harassment experience in her home town, when her aunt calls from Texas she surprises herself as much as anyone and says yes to the opportunity to accompany two friends across the country in an old bus. Stinson’s always sensual and humorous writing tingles on the page and nothing is quite what’s expected as Carline sews her way across the country and makes notes for her new pamphlet, “How to Ride a Bus.”
Venus of Chalk was a finalist for the Lambda Literary and Benjamin Franklin awards, and a Top 10 Publishing Triangle lesbian book of the year.
It comes out April 5th and is available to preorder now — DRM-free of course! — on Weightless now and will be available at all the usual ebookstores.
Gravity Again
Tue 18 Jan 2022 - Filed under: Not a Journal., chuntering on, ebooks, Long Covid, Weightless Books| Posted by: Gavin
On January 1st of this year I hung up my space boots and Weightless Books became the sole property of my friend and cofounder, Michael J. DeLuca.
Michael and I began Weightless in late 2009. Weightless was nominally owned by me as I had the Small Beer business infrastructure in place so that I could pay sales tax and send out annual 1099s but it was an equal collaboration: we were each paid equally every quarter and we made decisions together. I admire Michael both for his work ethic (how American of me!) but also his wandering off to the woods, the way he and his wife are raising their kid, his way of moving through the world, his home brewing and baking, and although Weightless is a small niche website that could always be better, I have always enjoyed it as an excuse to work with him.
Where and Why Weightless
In 2009 Michael and I had been redoing the Small Beer Press website from a clunky hand-coded html site to an up-to-date (for its time) WordPress site and among the problems we ran into was that of selling both print and ebook formats simultaneously from the site. (Let’s not talk about the difficulty of trying to bring in years of my hand-coded zine pages over!)
We’d been selling ebooks on the old site since 2005 but the PayPal cart architecture made selling both formats complicated. As is still true, Am*zon was dominating ebook sales and part of their method was to remove or threaten to remove the buy button on a on a book’s page. I did not want to have all the Small Beer ebooks in one basket so I self-distributed them to Fictionwise, Google, and B&N as well as Am*zon — as then, they dominate the ebook market. However, if we had our own site we’d never need to worry that one company could make all of our books disappear.
When it comes to publishing, I always like seeing if I can do something myself so we decided to try building a website that could automate some of the ebook delivery work. Michael is the technological heart of the website and he coded it. At the start, we had some Small Beer interns who helped – shout out to Diana Cao and Felice Ling! — but over the years it has been Michael on the tech side and then both of us doing everything else: importing ebooks, sending them out, fixing our own and publisher errors, paying royalties, hunting down missing ebook formats, importing yet more ebooks, dealing with hosting failures or PayPal and WordPress blips where sales did not come through, &c., &c. In the weeks since the new year I’ve already found it odd not to be regularly checking the Weightless email to see if there are questions. We designed the site as one that we’d be happy to buy from — although no matter what we did, it would always have been better if we’d had more money to make it load faster — so:
- there are no pop-ups
- we never sold ads
- we never sold anyone’s information
- we only stocked DRM-free ebooks.
In early 2011, friends of ours who run Blind Eye Books published a huge ten-part serialized novel by Ginn Hale called The Rifter which was incredibly popular and it helped us realize how much people like subscriptions. We approached mostly sf&f publishers and some of them tried the site and left and some are still there. We found that genre (primarily science fiction, fantasy, & horror and to a small extent, mystery) ebooks generally outsold nongenre ebooks. We worked with big and small publishers although given the time constraints of two people working in the interstices of their lives we had to set limits to what we could bring on — some of the parts we’d hoped to automate had never quite worked — so after bringing on many small magazines (closer to my heart on paper than ebook, but still) we eventually closed to new publishers although since we are both interested in forefronting diverse voices in recent months we did manage to bring on khōréō and Constelación.
But Also
In the past 11 years Michael and I have done a lot of other things. Most of my time has been taken up with our kid or Small Beer Press and a few years ago Michael founded Reckoning, an annual journal of creative writing on environmental justice.
Then in 2018 a used and new bookshop came up for sale in the next town over, Easthampton, where our Small Beer office is. I met my wife, Kelly, while working at a bookshop in Boston and I love the diversity of viewpoints independent bookshops put out into the world. At Small Beer we can only publish 6-10 books a year. At a bookshop we could put hundreds of books in front of people.
Kelly and I had long played with the idea of running a bookshop — but it was play. I knew we couldn’t afford to buy or open one in Northampton and since I hope never to move house again it was safe to think it would never be more than play. Our bookstore could be four stories with an elevator; 10,000 sq ft on one floor; it could only sell books by 19th century left-handed Scots writers. Besides, although we’d both worked at a couple of bookshops, we didn’t know how to run one. But on inquiring, it turned out the bookshop was much quieter than we’d known, and therefore affordable, and in 2019 Kelly used part of her MacArthur grant to buy it.
Kelly’s a full-time writer as well as the art director and editor of many Small Beer books, so as we imagined how our lives would be if bought the shop (and while we bounced hundreds of possible names for it off one another), it became clear we could only do so if I spent a fair amount of time there — which I wanted to — and if we found people we could work with.
The bookshop, Book Moon, has been fun and I’m happy to say we found great people to work with — although the first few months of the pandemic were a grind and as I type two booksellers are out with Covid (fingers crossed) and we are back to being only open for Curbside Pickup again. But over the past two pandemic years I kept running into the problem of there being too little time or not enough me to do all I wanted and I realized that something had to go: Small Beer, Weightless, or Book Moon.
3, 2, 1, You’re Out!
During one of our regular discussions on the future of Weightless, Michael said he would be happy to run it himself. Even though I knew I had to leave, I didn’t jump at this quite as fast as I expected I would. Not surprisingly, I found it quite hard to give up something I’d helped start, worked on, and still enjoy. But it seemed better for the site if I stood down since Michael was re-energized and excited about future possibilities. Michael has built a strong community with Reckoning which made me think that perhaps he could grow Weightless, too. Besides, if needed, I can still pitch in.
I’ve found the hard part is not to think I have lots of free time so I should go start something else. So far that’s been somewhat easy as (sorry, writers) there’s a lot of Small Beer reading to catch up on, 1099s are due, and our next book, Richard Butner’s The Adventurists, is coming out soon.
So now I’m part of the great resignation. Michael has registered the business in Michigan, the PayPal and bank accounts are now his, the hosting and url registration has been transferred. Historically Weightless didn’t made tons of money. It wasn’t volunteering but it was more that the site was a service that we liked providing, a place for readers to find something interesting and not just be part of the datacloud Am*zon etc. are eating every day. The site pays does not pay anything resembling Michael’s actual coding rates so so I did not “cash out” my half of the business. I transferred it to Michael and walked away.
Thanks to everyone who has ever bought a book or subscribed to a magazine on Weightless. It was, believe or not, fun. It’s much better to have tried it, it did ok, than not try it. I strongly believe in the principles we founded the site on so Small Beer ebooks will still be distributed DRM-free on the site and I look forward to working with Michael for years to come.
2018 By the Numbers
Mon 4 Feb 2019 - Filed under: Not a Journal., Bestsellers, Books, ebooks, Publishing| Posted by: Gavin
While collecting info and working on 2018 taxes and royalties, I thought it would be fun (for me at least) to look at some 2018 sales numbers — or at least some relative numbers. This is still true:
Congratulations to my friend @cassieclare whose new book QUEEN OF AIR AND DARKNESS just sold more copies in one week than we’ve sold all year! (SO FAR! You never know, right?) What fun—can’t wait to read: https://t.co/olnLAe9NCa pic.twitter.com/vQy2Ac2Oxo
— Small Beer Press (@smallbeerpress) December 17, 2018
In terms of sales, 2018 seems to have been our best year yet — thank you authors, booksellers, and writers! And since 2017 when we raised LCRW pay rates to $0.03/word for fiction subscriptions have started going up again. Subscription choices R us.
What had been a resurgence of print sales in the last few years dropped off a little as ebooks rose to just less than a third of total sales. Here’s a chart comparing our print to ebook sales from 2010 to 2018. We’ve been selling ebooks since at least 2005 and you can see that in 2010 print still held about 90% of sales. That dropped to 50% by 2014 — which is why lots of people were very worried about the future. I’m glad to see the rebalancing that’s happened in the last couple of years. However, I don’t think too much can be made from this chart as Small Beer sales aren’t a good snapshot of publishing in general: our sales volumes are too low, publishing schedules too irregular, and too easily impacted by variations in the sales of one or two books.
Of those books sold, here are our 2018 Top 10 Bestsellers
- Sarah Rees Brennan · In Other Lands (2017)
- Kij Johnson · At the Mouth of the River of Bees (2012)
- Ursula K. Le Guin · Words Are My Matter (2016)
- * Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories
- * John Schoffstall · Half-Witch
- * Claire G. Coleman · Terra Nullius
- * Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia
- * Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster
- Nathan Ballingrud · North American Lake Monsters (2013)
- Kelly Link · Stranger Things Happen (2001)
Notes:
- This bestseller list is made up of net sales (gross sales minus returns) of our print and ebook editions.
- These are not NPD/Bookscan figures or sales from Consortium our distributor.
- This list does not include any ebooks that were included in Humble Bundle or StoryBundles.
- This list does not include copies sold to book clubs.
- I’ve put a * by the five 2018 titles that made this list: new books keepin’ the lights on!
- Hey, doubters: short story collections sell.
Our 2018 bestseller came out in 2017: Sarah Rees Brennan’s In Other Lands is a powerhouse. We have a paperback coming in September which I expect will be our 2019 bestseller.
Kij Johnson’s collection At the Mouth of the River of Bees came roaring back in at #2 due to thousands of copies being picked up to go with a textbook which contains her unforgettable story “Ponies.”
#3, ach.
Nathan Ballingrud’s North American Lake Monsters continues to do well — I imagine partly because of the upcoming film based on one of his stories (not included in this book) and partly because NALM has scared the heck out of a reader they then pass it on to scare the heck out of a friend.
And coming in at #10 is the first book we published and one of the main reasons we get to keep publishing books, Kelly’s perennially solid selling debut Stranger Things Happen.
I saw that in a previous post like this [2011 · 2012 · 2013 — I know I was too depressed in the last couple of years to do these] I’d also noted which books were included in the annual Locus Recommended Reading list, so here are our 2018 titles on the just-released list, alphabetically by title:
- Abbey Mei Otis · Alien Virus Love Disaster
- Vandana Singh · Ambiguity Machines & Other Stories
- Andy Duncan · An Agent of Utopia
- Maria Romasco Moore, “Dying Light,” (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet #37)
- John Schoffstall · Half-Witch
Did we really just publish 3 collections all beginning with A? Weird. And look at all that black and orange below.
Not everything we published made the list, but it was a good showing none the less. Congratulations to all the writers on the list, it is a great thing to be read. Feel free to vote for these books and any other faves in the Locus survey. And to those authors not on the list, next time.
Here’s our plan for 2019 and 2020, should we all survive, is looking good. Thanks for reading this and any (or all!) of the books and zines we published in 2018.
Final day of Humble Bundle
Tue 7 Jun 2016 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Humble Bundle| Posted by: Gavin
At 2 pm EST tomorrow the Intoxicating Extraordinary Small Beer Press Humble Bundle will expire and with it the chance to pay what you want for so many of our books will be gone, gone, gone.
We don’t do ebook sales very often but this one has a huge direct benefit to the authors, the press, and organizations we love: Worldreader and Franciscan Children’s who can be added under the Choose Your Own Charity:
Nook Daily Find
Mon 7 Oct 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Peter Dickinson, sale| Posted by: Gavin
Peter Dickinson’s Death of a Unicorn is the Nook Daily Find and is $2.99 today only at bn.com.
It has jumped up the charts throughout the day and now it is sitting pretty at #30 besides two of Nora Roberts’s books. Long may Lady MM rise!
ETA: #7!
It’s a Top Ten bestseller!
Death of a Unicorn ebook sale
Mon 23 Sep 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Peter Dickinson, sale| Posted by: Gavin
To celebrate the publication of our latest Peter Dickinson title (The Poison Oracle), we are putting the ebook of Death of a Unicorn on super sale this week: it’s 70% off, was $9.95, now only $2.99!
Get it here:
— Weightless
— Kobo
— iBooks
— Barnes & Noble
You can get it at all the usual places (we have sent the new price out to all the sites we can, some of them are slower to process the price change than others) and as always we recommend Weightless and your local bookshop (through Kobo) first.
The State of the Book in the Digital Age
Thu 21 Mar 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Gavin J. Grant, libraries, the future| Posted by: Gavin
I’m delighted to say that on Friday April 26th I’m on a panel at the Massachusetts Library Association conference—although I’m gutted I’ll miss the library cart drill teams on Wednesday. The conference runs from 4/24 – 26 at the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge and our (Western Mass. transplants!) panel is:
9:15 – 10:30am
The State of the Book in the Digital Age
What’s up with books these days? Books are ordered online, created on demand, and distributed in digital form to individuals and libraries. Many bookstores have closed in recent years, and publishers have had to drastically downsize, retool or go out of business. How have individuals and businesses responded to this new environment? Are books giving a last gasp or being reinvented? An author, a book artist, a publisher and a bookstore owner will give their thoughts on the changing environment for books. Co-presented by the Western Massachusetts Library Advocates
Speakers: Susan Stinson, Author, Writer in Residence at Forbes Library, Northampton; Daniel E. Kelm, Book Artist; Gavin J. Grant, Publisher, Small Beer Press; Nancy Felton, Co-owner, Broadside Bookshop.
Worldreader: Books for All
Tue 26 Feb 2013 - Filed under: Not a Journal., a better place, ebooks, the world| Posted by: Gavin
Just read the Worldreader Annual Report and was fascinated by the results of an external study looking into their impact:
“For girls, one year with Worldreader is like five years of regular schooling.”
This is amazing and an absolute world changer.
We’re very proud to be part of it. Publishers and authors, please donate your ebooks here, thank you!
Stranger Things … & Magic for Beginners on the Humble Bundle
Fri 19 Oct 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., DRM-free, ebooks, Kelly Link| Posted by: Gavin
Now with 5 extra books!
Please welcome the debut of a new kind of offering: the Humble eBook Bundle!
Here’s a brief primer on this sensational deal: for two weeks, you can pay whatever you want to get these six digital, DRM-free books: Pirate Cinema, Pump Six and Other Stories, Zoo City, Invasion: The Secret World Chronicle, Stranger Things Happen, and Magic for Beginners. If you choose to pay more than the average, you will also receive Old Man’s War and graphic novel Signal to Noise!
This is the first Humble ebook offering and is only available for two weeks,
so head over to the site and pick up your Humble eBook Bundle right now!
Contracts, contracts
Mon 9 Apr 2012 - Filed under: Not a Journal., bookshops, ebooks| Posted by: Gavin
Interesting Salon article on Am*zon’s sponsorship of many literary non-profits. Are they buying love? They’re definitely trying. $25,000 is a helluva donation to anyone never mind a small organization trying to get by on sales or membership fees. (The Brooklyn Book Fest recently asked if we’d like Small Beer to be profiled on their new sponsored-by-Amazon OnePage and we said no. I love the Brooklyn Book Fest, but that’s not a great fit for us.)
Keep in mind that books are a halo product for Amazon. They would much rather be thought of as a bookstore than a Walmart wannabe.
This part of the Salon article was great to hear:
For the first time, the “Big Six” publishers — HarperCollins, Random House, Hachette, Simon & Schuster, Penguin and Macmillan — have refused to sign Amazon’s latest annual contract. The main sticking point is exorbitant increases in “co-op promotional fees” for e-books that the publishers see as an illegal gouge by another name. One person familiar with the details of the proposed 2012 contracts that Amazon has submitted to major New York publishers described them as “stupifyingly draconian.” In some cases, he said, Amazon has raised promotional fees by 30 times their 2011 cost. In saying no, the big publishers are following in the footsteps of the Independent Publishing Group, a major indie distributor representing dozens of small presses that refused Amazon’s increases earlier this winter and soon saw the “Buy” buttons on more than 4,000 of their titles promptly delinked.
I am still hopeful that Amazon will overreach and disappear. Not going to happen, but it makes the horrible headlines about what they are doing to who easier to deal with.
What really makes me unhappy is that high street shops may be pushed out of business and all of our shopping choices will become the same: big box chain stores or Amazon. Which is a crap choice given that most of Amazon’s workers work in warehouses—with goals I could not meet if I were working there—and Fedex and UPS (and warehouse robot suppliers) will be the only winners.
And here’s the Boston Globe being much cheerier, so yay for them.
33% off everything on Weightless
Sat 31 Dec 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, sale, Weightless Books| Posted by: Gavin
It is the end of 2011 and I am very happy about it. Good-bye, old year, good-bye. Do not be coming back, thank you. Although there were lovely parts, it will not be missed. 2012 looks much brighter.
Anyway: we are celebrating with a one-day sale: 33% off all ebooks on weightlessbooks.com.
Get your LCRW sub here and Small Beer books here and tons of others here.
And, in case I don’t get to it tomorrow, Happy New Year!
Ebook sale: 50% off!
Fri 25 Nov 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, sale| Posted by: Gavin
We’re having an ebook sale! Here’s the why of it and here’s the what:
Small = 50% off all Small Beer Press and Big Mouth House titles!
WELCOME = 25% off ANYTHING!
Engines = 50% off Livia Llewellyn’s Engines of Desire: Tales of Love & Other Horrors
Enter the coupon exactly as above once you’ve filled your cart and you will receive your lovely discount!
Calendar, idiocy, limitations, 1 in 25, us & more
Thu 27 Jan 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Edward Gauvin, Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, LCRW 26, Small Beer Press| Posted by: Gavin
Do yourself a favor: order Swamplandia now.
Here’s a suggestion for next year’s calendar: Storytellers 2012: The Author Interview Calendar from Balladier Press. Locally made and full of interviews with good people including Lois Lowry, Gregory Maguire, Sara Paretsky, Robert Pinsky, and Shaun Tan.
I find it hard to believe that Nick Bilton is “the lead technology writer for the New York Times” because in this article he seems clueless about books and rights &c. Maybe it’s because I’m mired in them everyday. It’s funny: if he’d gone to a library, I’d be fine with this (ugh, teasing apart behaviours!) as they would have bought the books. At least pay your coffee rent if you’re going to sit there playing with the books for hours. (Via firebrand Pat Holt)
BTW Nick, yes, you are doing wrong. But as Nicola Griffith says readers are who we’re trying to reach and it frustrates me when I can’t make the customer happy. (Well, most of the time. I’ve worked retail: the customer is frequently right but sometimes completely wrong.) I’m completely frustrated because agents and writers won’t sell World English ebook rights even though no one else is going to buy those rights which means readers everywhere except in North America (hello Mexican readers, hello Brazil, hello Charles, & so on) will be left to either go without (go on, try it, you’ll love not reading that book . . . er, wait . . .) or pirating. Wonder which one they’ll choose?
Anyway, in happy news today, A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud and translated from the French by Edward Gauvin, is on the 25-title long list for the Best Translated Book Award. In March they throw 15 of those books out and “Winners will be announced on April 29th in New York City, as part of the PEN World Voices Festival.” Just in time, we have a post coming up from Edward about a recent conversation he had with Châteaureynaud about his career. Edward’s in Belgium reading and translating—can’t wait to see what he comes up with—and here he writes about the best fry joint in Brussels and to going to a comics signing with Ludovic Debeurme, Top Shelf are going to publish his book Lucille in the US this spring, and he will be at the PEN World Voices Festival. Maybe everyone will be there! Maybe we should go. See you there?
And there’s a great closely read review of LCRW 26 at SFF Portal.
You have to go see what Australian zinester Vanessa Berry did to her house when her book club read Magic for Beginners.
Hey look, there’s a profile of the press in one of our local papers, the Valley Advocate—except I am not in the Valley this week. Someone save me a copy! (Also, it got picked up by io9, nice!) I like that the writer takes the story wider at the end:
It’s an oft-heard story in the Valley: an idea that coalesces from the background noise of urban hipster climes comes to rest here. Such moves are often generated by practical concerns like lower rent and quality of life, but the accretion of cultural capital like that of Small Beer or a hundred more arts-driven enterprises has made the Valley a place like few others.
He’s right. You can hardly toss a caber down Northampton’s Main Street (as with Easthampton, Amherst, Hadley, Holyoke, etc.) without it bouncing off two artists (they make them strong out there), being photographed a couple of times, having a dance piece choreographed about it, at at last squishing a couple of writers.
Library of a global nomad by Karen Lord
Wed 26 Jan 2011 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Karen Lord| Posted by: Gavin
Library of a global nomad by Karen Lord
I inherited a love of travel from my father and a love of books from my mother, and it has been a challenge trying to balance the two. Books accumulate, and when they accumulate while I am away from home, I have a problem. They are heavy, shipping is costly, and you can only fit so many books into a suitcase before it becomes a health and safety issue for both you and the luggage handlers.
I tried to save the best, of course. Each time I went home I’d leave a few behind, even if that meant I wouldn’t see them for a year. I bought second hand books, reasoning that it would be less painful to give those up, but that ploy failed when I became emotionally attached to the familiar old covers of earlier editions. Some of the best could not be saved; textbooks trump fiction when choosing which doorstopper to transport. And some, best or not, I still gave away when I got home . . . say book three to a friend who had books one, two and four of a series (those were the days before the broad choice of online bookstores).
I dreamed of ebooks. I discovered Project Gutenberg, read texts on my Tungsten and imagined the day when I would be able to hold entire libraries of leisure reading, textbooks and research papers on a light, sturdy, paperback-sized screen. Of course I prefer ‘the real thing’. I have my page-flipping search technique down to a fine art and shun the common bookmark (real or virtual). Furthermore, I am a vigorous reader. I do not sit posed and polite with the book held gently open to preserve the spine from breaking. I roll on the floor with books. I eat with a book in one hand. I take books to places with water, sand and grit, places inimical to the delicate structures of electronic devices. But I will never be rich enough to afford to travel with a proper collection of deadtree books.
Things are improving—e-readers, formats and availability of titles—but my dream has adjusted slightly. I want both. I want a publisher to give me, the reader, a reasonable print and e-book package, the real and the virtual together. Imagine the possibilities! I could buy a e-book to read while in London and have the print version sent home for my library in Barbados. I could arrange for the book to be shipped to a friend, or to an after-school reading club. In fact, why don’t publishers adopt some literary charitable concern or outreach programme and encourage me to buy a package with the option to donate the print or audiobook portion towards the indoctrination of a new generation of literati?
I don’t know how this post went from book nostalgia to world domination, but there it is. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to research e-readers and bookcase design and create a plan of action and a timeline for making my dream come true.
Crossroads
Fictional Geography
Endings
Ghost in the Machine
LCRW the next
Thu 11 Nov 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, LCRW, Ted Chiang| Posted by: Gavin
LCRW 26 is at the printer. At some point soon we will have a mailing party. You bring the envelope-stuffing ability, we’ll bring the tea and biscuits and zines. (Also: added more subscription options.)
Meanwhile we just contacted five writers with variations on this email: Your Story Is Lovely! We would like to publish it (but not until next year). Sorry it took us so long to get back to you (since the stories were sent in January/February/July/September!). Much reading still to be done.
Also just sent another DMCA takedown notice—why is Ted Chiang’s book so popular with pirates? Sure, it’s excellent and was out of print for a while but now it’s available in all kinds of formats.
Then I posted on a free ebook trading site asking people not to add our books. So depressing and a little silly to post but I think it’s worthwhile now and then. I don’t think every illegal download is a lost sale (and I understand that readers abroad might have trouble getting their hands on books they want) but we try and go the extra mile to make our books available everywhere. Oh well.
Later today I’m hoping to take Ursula out for a walk. I was hoping to make it to a war memorial for Veterans/Remembrance Day but since I can’t drive with her in the car alone (there needs to be 2 people with her in a car) maybe we will just go to a local cemetery and have a wander. Right now she is fighting off 2 therapists and a nurse. Strong kid.
Scribd crazy
Mon 6 Sep 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Karen Joy Fowler, Kathe Koja, Scribd, Working Writer's Daily Planner| Posted by: Gavin
Ok, so, went a bit Scribd crazy the other night. Had to do something while watching the bairn sleep.
First I put up an excerpt from A Working Writer’s Daily Planner 2011. Last year I put up March, this year I decided to make it simple and put up January. Last year’s sample was very popular, hope this one is too. Then I added the ebook to Weightless—only $4.99!
Then I put up excerpts for two of our upcoming books:
Karen Joy Fowler, What I Didn’t See and Other Stories
—which is shipping, baby, shipping! And we’re still adding (mostly California) events to Karen’s schedule.
Kathe Koja, Under The Poppy
—and this one is at the printer and ships out in October. Events—KGB Bar, Ann Arbor, Detroit, WFC—being added here, too.
And! I added a handful of LCRWs to their ebook store—we sell much more at Weightless or RudeGorilla.com or Fictionwise than we have at Scribd, but still, it’s a good and easy place for people—there are tons of international readers who use it—to check things out. Besides, adding stuff was easy!
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 21 ebook
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 ebook
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 19 ebook
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 18 ebook
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 ebook
Old LCRWs getting lighter and cheaper
Tue 8 Jun 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, LCRW, Naomi Mitchison, Weightless Books| Posted by: Gavin
We’ve just added LCRW 16, LCRW 17 and LCRW 18 to Weightless and dropped the price of LCRW ebooks to $2.99! Woot! Cough! Exclamation!
Also of LCRW interest: a review of LCRW 24 from Ray Garraty in Russia (and in Russian).
More ebookery: we just added Part 2 of Astrid Amara’s The Archer’s Heart on Weightless. What are we talking about? Here, go get Part 1: serialized fiction, it’s Weightlessed!
Travel Light is now available as an ebook for the very first time. It is an awesome book that you should have read when you’re 10. In fact, if you are 10, read it now. If you are not 10, read it anyway. And, isn’t that the best title ever of a book to read as an ebook? Oh sure, our paperback has the gorgeous Kevin Huizenga cover but you know, travel light. Of course if you’re hauling around some huge ebook reader maybe that isn’t travelling so light.
At some point we will probably offload all our ebooks to Weightless—which is growing along nicely. (And we’re very happy that those 2 million iPad readers will be able to read PDFs on it now. We make pretty pages and want you to enjoy them as well as the stories on them.) Anyway, so tell us if you think the offloading of ebooks to the other site is s a good or bad idea.
Ebook price experiment
Tue 6 Apr 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Mockingbird, Publishing, Sean Stewart, Weightless Books| Posted by: Gavin
Just added a new DRM-free PDF ebook: Sean Stewart’s Mockingbird here and on Weightless for an introductory price of $5.95.
Once it goes live on other sites the price will have to rise to $9.95—otherwise they will drop the price to match ours and the author would get a pittance*. So get it cheap while you can! We also dropped the pb price on it (and a few other titles—including the Working Writer’s Daily Calendar which has dropped at least 25% in price as the year is 25% over!).
At $5.95 (call it $6) the author gets $3 a pop (yay!) from here/Weightless which is actually more than from Fictionwise or on the iPad/Kindle, etc., where the split goes:
Price: $10
Seller: 50% = $5
Publisher: 50% of 50% = $2.50
Author: 50% of 50% = $2.50
So the experiment is to see whether we can sell a decent number at $6 and maybe see if we should drop our prices on other ebooks. (Because after all, isn’t demand price elastic? So that demand should increase with lower prices? Well, so we are told and so we will experiment and see!)
* OK, that pittance would pretty much match the p-book rate! So maybe we will drop the price later. There’s always later, right?
Amazon rude? Surely not?
Sun 31 Jan 2010 - Filed under: Not a Journal., blind consumerism, ebooks, Publishing| Posted by: Gavin
Er, yes, they’re at it again. Yet another reason we don’t have Amazon links on our site: who wants to deal with people whose sense of fairplay is somewhere in the vicinity of might=right?
First we’d like to point out that while Amazon dropped the buy links for all the MacMillan US titles from their site this weekend all of those books are still available on Powells, Indiebound, bn.com, etc., etc.
Amazon has been ok for us with ebooks: they use DRM and the books are tied into one device so it doesn’t seem like the best way to buy a book, but others think differently. At the moment we give them an ebook price (say $15.95 on a new hardcover book) and they pay roughly half of that even if they sell the book at $9.99. No strong-arming there. (Yet? Maybe because we’re not attempting to charge $24?)
We price the ebook editions of new hardcovers at $15.95 then drop them to $9.95 if/when a paperback comes out. If anyone wants to argue about these prices and claim that there are no costs to making ebooks please feel free to come on over and do the work for free. We are a small press and to format and upload different files to Fictionwise/bn.com, Google, Follett, Amazon, Scribd, (& our new site this spring) etc., is not a quick task. Nor is the information gathering for royalties—a bit of a stinker, that. Although made somewhat easier with our nice generous 50/50 ebook royalties.
But back to the gorilla: Amazon sold a couple of thousand copies of our paper books last year—and we just don’t care. They’ve negotiated horribly high discounts with publishers and distributors so that we, for example, receive about 34%* of the retail price of a book sold on their site. (So $5.44 on a $16 paperback to pay the printer, freight, author, artist, ads, etc., etc. Yep, that math works out well.)
When indie bookstore orders from our distributor we receive about 40% of retail ($6.40 on that mythical $16 paperback). That 6%/$1 a book sure adds up—only a couple of thousand dollars over the year for us (although it would be nice…); it adds up to millions to larger publishers.
Amazon have a pretty typical huge corporation business model: make low low prices happen by twisting the supplier until they break. Then twist some more. Maybe they’re worried that won’t work any more? Maybe they’re worried about their closed-ecosystem ebook reader versus the Apple iPad/iBookstore/Nook/Que/every other reader? Maybe they’re just seeing what the other big houses will do once they see that Amazon is willing to be a weekend berserker? Maybe that’s just the way corporate capitalism is supposed to work? Blink.
(Via many sites! Esp. Gwenda, Kelly, NYT Bits, Scalzi, & more.)
* Since we’re not telling you the split between their discount, their mandatory marketing fee, the “free freight” (i.e. we pay to ship them books), and our distributor’s fee, we are not breaking the NDA’s we signed about discounts.
Ebook rights
Mon 14 Dec 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks| Posted by: Gavin
The NYTimes reported yesterday on Random House’s rights grab on their backlist.
We’d like to point out to authors and agents that our royalty rate on ebooks is 50% of the net.
On the somewhat typical $9.95 ebook Small Beer Press receives 50% of the retail, so call it $5. So the author receives $2.50. Not bad. That’s more than the 7.5-10% of retail that we can do on paperbacks and equivalent to 10% of retail on a $25 hardcover.
On the small percentage of ebooks sold directly from our site the math goes like this:
Retail: $9.95
Paypal: $0.59
Net: $9.36
Author receives: $4.68
Just saying.
Which NYC conference should we go to?
Sun 15 Nov 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, Publishing| Posted by: Gavin
There are two Future of Publishing/Ebooks are Fun/Wow, Look at That conferences on in New York in Jan/Feb and we are wondering which one is worth going to and why?
There’s the O’Reilly Tools of Change, Feb. 22-24, and there’s:
We’re working on an ebook store which will sell our books and some others and which should launch in time for everyone who buys the new Apple gadget to make it their homepage so we’ve been doing a little research and so on and if anyone thinks we should go to one or the other of these we’d love to know.
Planner Preview + $4.95 DRM-free PDF
Fri 23 Oct 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., downloads, ebooks, Working Writer's Daily Planner| Posted by: Gavin
We have just posted the month of March here as a preview of our Working Writer’s Daily Planner which is at the printer now. (2011’s will be earlier!)
The Planner is also now available as a DRM-free PDF (emailed within 24 hours of purchase — and usually sooner) for just $4.95.
We’re selling it as a nicely-bookmarked 2MB PDF (formatting makes it harder than other books to convert into other formats) which means you can print it at any size you want: letter-sized to put in a 3-ring binder, tiny to go on index cards, or 6″ x 9″ to replicate the printed edition.
We’d love to hear about different printing and use strategies and we’re always open to suggestions for what should go into next year’s edition. (Read the table of contents for this year’s Planner here.)
LCRW slipping into the fictionets
Thu 17 Sep 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., death and radishes, ebooks, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
LCRW 24 is available at last on Fictionwise.
Which also means it available on Barnes & Noble. Funny. Except, on bn.com it hasn’t quite appeared yet. You can get many old issues (LCRW 15, anyone?) so maybe #24 will pop up there one of these days.
Neither is it available on the Kindle.
Happily, it is still available on paper.
Read the new LCRW before it gets printed
Fri 10 Jul 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
Current Issue: Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet Number 24
Current location: at the printer.
Current availability: paper edition will mail out next week to subscribers and bookstores. However, the DRM-free PDF ebook is available now.
Additionally: we’ve dropped the price of the LCRW ebook to $4 from this issue on and also for the back issues (more of which should be available later this month). The price has been changed at Fictionwise, too, although that may take a little while to percolate through the system.
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US/Canada $5 |
International $8 |
Ebook $4 |
And what’s in this death and radishes issue? Familiar and unfamiliar names! A lack of radishes. A comic by Abby Denson.
As ever one of the aspects we are most pleased about is the number of authors we were previously unfamiliar with. We aren’t the fastest readers out there, but we read everything we’re sent and are regularly delighted to be able to bring new authors to the fore:
Fiction
Alexander Lamb, “Eleven Orchid Street”
Liz Williams, “Dusking”
Jasmine Hammer, “Tornado Juice”
J. W. M. Morgan, “Superfather”
Dicky Murphy, “The Magician’s Umbrella”
Alissa Nutting, “Leave the Dead to the Living”
Eve Tushnet, “A Story Like Mine”
Dennis Danvers, “The Broken Dream Factory”
Anya Groner, “The Magician’s Keeper”
Nonfiction
Gwenda Bond, “Dear Aunt Gwenda”
Poetry
Neile Graham, “Machrie Moore”
Marina Rubin, “Bordeaux, And Other Mysteries”
Comics
Abby Denson, “Heady’s Crush”
Cover
Nice pic of Small Beer books in the NYTimes
Sun 17 May 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks| Posted by: Gavin
The Times has a short piece on Scribd‘s latest maneuvers to become the place to go for reading offline text online and uses a rather lovely image of many of our books to illustrate that at least one publisher has most of their list on the site: check out Small Beer Press on Scribd:
Fictionwise gets wristleted
Wed 13 May 2009 - Filed under: Not a Journal., ebooks, LCRW| Posted by: Gavin
Looks like Fictionwise have caught up and added a bunch of our zines. (And some of them are available as DRM-free ebooks here.) Um, here’s a cut and paste including reviews (or, rather, ratings, where are the reviews? where’s the fun?). And, if you like the ebooks, this would be a good time to catch up on back issues as they all seem to be on sale.
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| 1 | Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 23 [MultiFormat] by Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link |
Words: 35532 – Reading Time: 101-142 min. |
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| 2 | Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 22 [MultiFormat] by Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link |
Words: 37657 – Reading Time: 107-150 min. |
3 Reader Ratings:
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| 3 | Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 21 [MultiFormat] by Gavin Grant & Kelly Link |
Words: 41372 – Reading Time: 118-165 min. |
4 Reader Ratings:
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| 4 | Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 15 [MultiFormat] by Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link |
Words: 39167 – Reading Time: 111-156 min. |
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| 5 | Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 [MultiFormat] by Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link |
Words: 40539 – Reading Time: 115-162 min. |
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| 6 | Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 18 [MultiFormat] by Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link |
Words: 39363 – Reading Time: 112-157 min. |
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| 7 | Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 19 [MultiFormat] by Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link |
Words: 35506 – Reading Time: 101-142 min. |
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| 8 | Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 [MultiFormat] by Gavin J. Grant & Kelly Link |
Words: 39850 – Reading Time: 113-159 min. |
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