Today’s tour stop is an interview with the delightful Mary Brebner, a YA writer and fellow educator with whom I love to discuss the epic fail that is the American education system.
Also up today (because my host is in Australia and it’s already tomorrow) is my post at Merrilee Faber’s blog about how writing short gets you the long end of the stick.
So Joe Konrath is having his 7th Jack Daniels book published directly by Amazon by their print imprint AmazonEncore. Up to this point, AE has published (apparently) reprints of self-published books by new authors, not original titles from known authors. Joe’s the first “name” author to do this. Apparently traditional publishers had a shot at this book this past year and turned it down. Talk about epic fail. Joe will continue to make waves (as well as money, hand over fist) because publishing can’t wake up and smell the e-ink. Joe, I tip my hat to you.
Now I have never heard of AmazonEncore. Yeah I know, I’m an ostrich. Get over it. So I went to google it and came across their description of themselves:
AmazonEncore is a new program whereby Amazon will use information such as customer reviews on Amazon.com to identify exceptional, overlooked books and authors with more potential than their sales may indicate. Amazon will then partner with the authors to re-introduce their books to readers through marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon.com Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.
Well now that’s interesting. So this is basically saying that if I manage to truly kick ass with sales and reviews of my e-books on Amazon, they might someday consider publishing me on a broader scale? While this is wildly out of the park to think about from my infantile sales numbers and reviews, that does seem to be what they’re doing with others. Smart, Amazon. Listen to your customers’ opinions about what they like. This is a radical notion for traditional publishing. I’ll be very very interested to see how this turns out.