JERRY D. SIMMONS

Perception in Publishing - Bestsellers are often created long before a book hits bookstores. The reason is "perception." When books are pre-sold far in advance of official publication date, the marketing approach is to create the "perception" a title is a bestseller. This enhances the buy from the retailer which in turn is supported by a widened marketing budget which if successful, creates a bestselling title.

For writers hoping to publish their manuscript, the quality of the writing is established in two ways: (1) your book's package: including cover, interior, price and category. (2) your publisher: the imprint on your book coupled with the package will establish the market perception for your book long before anyone has a chance to read a single page.

Separating yourself as an author and your published book is critical if you want any chance at selling copies. One way to accomplish this is publishing on your own using a professional group that can properly package your title and create a positive "perception" in the marketplace. For more information email jerry@writersreaders.com.

Will Books Be Napsterized? -

Excerpts from an article by Randall Stross for The New York Times

You can buy "The Lost Symbol," by Dan Brown, as an e-book for $9.99 at Amazon.com. Or you can don a pirate's cap and snatch a free copy from another web site.

Until now, few readers have preferred e-books to printed or audible versions, so the public availability of free-for-the-taking copies did not much matter. But e-books won't stay on the periphery of book publishing much longer. E-book hardware is on the verge of going mainstream. More dedicated e-readers are coming, with ever larger screens.

With the new devices in hand, will book buyers avert their eyes from the free copies only a few clicks away that have been uploaded without the copyright holder's permission? Mindful of what happened to the music industry at a similar transitional juncture, book publishers are about to discover whether their industry is different enough to be spared a similarly dismal fate.

The book industry has not received cheery news for a while. Publishers and authors alike have relied upon sales of general-interest hardcover books as the foundation of the business. The Association of American Publishers estimated that these hardcover sales in the United States declined 13 percent in 2008, versus the previous year.

"We are seeing lots of online piracy activities across all kinds of books -- pretty much every category is turning up," said Ed McCoyd, an executive director at the association. "What happens when 20 to 30 percent of book readers use digital as the primary mode of reading books? Piracy's a big concern."

We do know that people have been helping themselves to digital music without paying. When the music industry was "Napsterized" by free file-sharing, it suffered a blow from which it hasn't recovered. Since music sales peaked in 1999, the value of the industry's inflation-adjusted sales in the United States, even including sales from Apple's highly successful iTunes Music Store, has dropped by more than half, according to the Recording Industry Association of America.

A report earlier this year by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, based on multiple studies in 16 countries covering three years, estimated that 95 percent of music downloads "are unauthorized, with no payment to artists and producers."

Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with a file-hosting company based in Switzerland. Anyone can upload, and anyone can download; for light users, the service is free. The web site does not list the files -- a user must know the impossible-to-guess U.R.L. in order to download one.

But anyone who wants to make a file widely available simply publishes the U.R.L. and a description somewhere online, like a blog or a discussion forum, and Google and other search engines notice. No passwords protect the files.

Publishers and authors are about the only groups that go unmentioned. A spokesperson for the web site has advice for anyone unhappy that the company's users are distributing e-books without paying the copyright holders: Learn from the band Nine Inch Nails. It marketed itself "by giving away most of their content for free."

I will forward the suggestion along, as soon as authors can pack arenas full and pirated e-books can serve as concert fliers.

Randall Stross is an author based in Silicon Valley and a professor of business at San Jose State University.

Should Authors Be Concerned? - The easy, quick answer is NO. At least not yet. The industry is well aware and working hard to find a solution to pirated eBooks and digital downloads. As struggling writers trying to establish an audience the last thing you should worry about is having your material stolen. This problem is a much bigger concern for bestselling authors whose brand and content are being passed around for free.

I'm hopeful that by the time we reach our peak and readers number in the thousands, there will be a solution. In the meantime, we must continue to create new readers and build our audience before obscurity becomes the doom to all unpublished writers.

On-Demand Book Publishing and the Slush Pile's Revenge - Excerpts from an article by Brett Arends, Reporter for The Wall Street Journal

Jason Epstein, the book publishing legend, had a warning recently for the rest of his industry. You're toast.

Not in so many words, of course. But 81-year old Mr. Epstein, who was the editorial director of Random House for many decades, warned that new technology risked making traditional publishers obsolete. Authors, he said, can now publish their books themselves.

"We've come to the end of the Age of Gutenberg," he told a crowd at the Harvard Book Store in Cambridge, Mass. As a result of new technology, "anybody can be a publisher, anybody can be a writer. The traditional filters are now going to fail -- publishers, editors, critics and so on."

Publishers call "the slush pile" all those unwanted amateur manuscripts that used to flood into their offices. Now, goes Mr. Epstein's argument, the slush pile is getting its revenge. Authors can just go straight to the public.

Electronic book readers, like Amazon's Kindle and rivals, are getting better. Yes, paper is still easier to read, but for how much longer?

Small, independent bookstores like the one in Harvard need help to survive the big chains and the likes of Amazon. But the joy of a small bookstore isn't that you can download books from the Web. You can do that from home. It's that you can browse the shelves and discover all sorts of books you didn't know existed.

Bookstore Experience - Here we are in the 21st century and the bookstore experience is still the most predominant method of purchasing books. Not just bestsellers, but all categories of books. More books are sold, by far, in a retail bookseller than digitally or online. For now, consumers and readers of books enjoy the bookstore experience and the biggest concern about the future of book sales is how to reduce cost and waste while still maintaining that special feeling of shopping a bookstore.

Mr. Epstein, while a stalwart in the industry, is making his comments to support his stand alone book printer business. He's attempting to pump up sales for his machine in bookstores and other book retailers. The problem of course, is who wants to browse an electronic catalog and then wait ten minutes to have the book printed? This eliminates the look and feel of a printed book, which after all is what he is ultimately selling--the printed book.

I'm a believer that printed books will not go away, maybe diminished by a future generation that prefers downloads and reading on a machine. But the look and feel of a printed book is hard to envision becoming a dinosaur. We still have a long way to go before print is obsolete, especially when digital is a mere 2% of total sales.

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