Date: 2009-11-03 11:55 Subject: And the book is OUT... Security: Public Location: In my chair Tags: john-allen price, legacy books press, the war that changed the world

It's official - John-Allen Price's The War that Changed the World is now out and available for sale.  So far it's appeared on Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, and Barnes & Noble.

The book came out beautifully, I am pleased to say.  And, it's one of John's best.  And, as usual, there's a free online sample to be had.

So, download it and enjoy!

Date: 2009-11-03 13:18 Subject: Cory Doctorow's publishing "experiment"...and why he's setting himself up for failure Security: Public Location: In my chair Tags: cory doctorow, lulu, publishing

Getting The War that Changed the World ready finally brought me into contact with one of John-Allen Price's friends in the field, Michael A. Stackpole.  And, having a bit of time on my hands at last, I read a bit of Michael's blog, and came across an interesting experiment in my field of publishing.

Cory Doctorow is doing a proof of concept experiment with Print-on-Demand publishing to show that online free samples work.  Well, one of my immediate knee-jerk reactions is "no sh*t, Sherlock."  Free samples are one of the cores of my company's advertising strategy, and publishers big and small have been giving away samples of everything up to chapters of books to the full books themselves since the industry got started.  It works particularly well with e-books, since most people don't actually consume books electronically - this means that if they like what they read, they'll buy the printed copy of the book.  In my case, I use the first 50 pages or so of original books, and the full edition of e-books, with a nice message letting the reader know where they can buy a printed copy.  It doesn't bring in a huge amount of new sales, but it does help spread the word.

The big problem is that while his experiment essentially sets up a publishing company, up to and complete with a marketing strategy powered by a quite decent amount of money, he has proceeded to make one very serious methodological error that runs the risk of making him fall flat on his face.  I'll let him say it in his own words:

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Date: 2009-11-03 17:19 Subject: Cory Doctorow's experiment - Part II Security: Public Location: In my chair Tags: cory doctorow, publishing

In my last post, I covered some of the logistical issues of Cory Doctorow's proof of concept experiment with PoD publishing and e-books.  In this (shorter) post, I'm going to cover the marketing mistake he's making, one that may effectively shoot his sales in the foot on the reader side.

To review, in his article, Doctorow said:

"Now, lots of people have used POD as a way of avoiding a lot of sunk costs in publishing ventures. But I want to see how far I can push it. With my previous books, my readers have sent in typos as they discovered them and I've fixed the electronic texts immediately, storing up lists of changes for my publisher to incorporate in future printings. But POD means that I can fix typos as soon as they're reported, and what's more, I can add an acknowledgment to the reader who caught it on the page where the correction appears, as a footnote. I have a feeling that readers will happily buy a second copy of the book in order to have a printing in which their name appears."

So, let me pose a question.  Imagine that you're a Doctorow fan, and you want to buy his next book.  You're not a fanatic fan - you don't really care about whether you can get your name into one of the revisions.  But, you do know from the publicity that the book will be corrected as time goes on, so the copy that you could buy right upon release will have more errors than the copy you can buy two months later.  So, what do you do?

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