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Legal and media reporter for paidContent (@paidContent), Jeff John Roberts (@jeffjohnroberts), writes, “The book publishing industry, already facing disruption from Amazon and ebooks, will confront a new form of turbulence in 2013. Starting in January, publishers face the loss of their backlists as authors begin using the Copyright Act to reclaim works they assigned years ago.”

These so-called “termination rights”...let authors break contracts after 35 years....

The law in question is Section 203 of the 1978 Copyright Act which allows authors to cut away any contract after 35 years. Congress put it in place to protect young artists who signed away future best sellers for a pittance.

...[W]hat has been a drip-drip of old copyright cases could turn into a flood as nearly every book published after 1978 becomes eligible for termination.

The 1978 law also means a threat to the backlist of titles that are a cash cow for many publishers. The threat is amplified as a result of new digital distribution options for authors that were never conceived when the law was passed — these new options mean authors have more leverage to walk away from their publishers altogether.

Read this in full.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your books. Our international office is in St. Andrews, Scotland.

Learn about online marketing with SomersaultSocial.

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Laura June (@laura_june), features editor for The Verge (@verge), observes that “ebooks are apparently lousy with typos.”

Many of the typos — the letter "c" in place of what should be an "e" — appear to be the casualties of a hasty OCRing of some actual text of the work. OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a process of scanning a book and using software which recognizes the scanned words as words, rather than merely as images, converting the images into text files. Anyone who has ever used OCR software knows that the process is far from perfect and always demands a serious attention to detail in the copy editing phase, once scanning is done, because the software doesn’t "read" the text perfectly. This seems to be at least partially what is happening in my Kindle edition of Foucault’s Pendulum, and it’s unacceptable....

[P]ublishing is changing very fast, and to keep up with that pace, publishers are moving quickly to get their books into stores like Amazon and iBooks. That’s great, I want as much content available as possible. But I also demand, and believe that all readers should demand, the high quality that book publishers have always offered to their customers....

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you achieve editorial excellence in your published content.

Learn about online marketing with SomersaultSocial.

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Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, especially the Writing / Editing tab.

The above (humorous) Infographic by WritersMarket is in the Nov/Dec 2012 issue of Writer’s Digest (@WritersDigest).

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your digital and print content.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

During the Victorian Era in England, the trend of publishing the stories of novels in installments helped propel Charles Dickens to fame.

Publishing reporter Julie Bosman (@juliebosman) asks in The New York Times Media Decoder (@mediadecodernyt) blog, “Could serialized fiction finally force the ebook to evolve?”

Various ventures are trying to satisfy a common complaint about ebooks: that they are simply black-and-white digital reproductions of long-form print books, flat and unoriginal in their design and concept. One variation, what publishers call enhanced ebooks, with audio and video elements woven throughout the text, has largely fallen flat with readers.

But serialized fiction, where episodes are delivered to readers in scheduled installments much like episodes in a television series, has been the subject of an unusual amount of experimentation in publishing in recent months. In September, Amazon announced Kindle Serials, stories sold for $1.99 and published in short episodes that download onto the Kindle as the episodes are released....

In August, Byliner, a digital publisher, announced that it would begin a new digital imprint devoted to serialized fiction....

One of the most talked-about new experiments is taking serialized fiction a step further. It’s a novel called The Silent History that’s available on the Apple iPhone and iPad. It includes interactive, user-generated elements.

Read this in full.

Also see USA TODAY’s article, “Will 'The Silent History' change the way we read?”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you think through your mobile content effectiveness.

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In this Fast Company (@FastCompany) article, Ryan Holiday (@RyanHoliday) says authors are increasingly writing non-fiction books, not as a means unto themselves, but as a means to the end of being a professional introduction of themselves for speaking, consulting, and deal-making.

Faced with declining sales and the disappearance of book retailers like Borders, authors have diversified their income streams, and many make substantially more money through new business generated by a book, rather than from it.

Today, authors are in the idea-making business, not the book business. In short, this means that publishing a book is less about sales and much more about creating a brand. The real customers of books are no longer just readers but now include speaking agents, CEOs, investors, and startups....

Call it a business card, a resume, a billboard, or whatever you choose, but the short of it is that books are no longer just books. They are branding devices and credibility signals.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you communicate your brand message.

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The American Christian Fiction Writers (@ACFWTweets) conference (@ACFWConference) (#ACFW) is being held in Dallas, TX and Somersault (@smrsault) is here telling authors, agents, and publishers about

• our online dashboard for publishers and marketers, SomersaultNOW
• this blog as a telescope helping industry professionals “see around the corner” to prepare for the future of publishing
• and SomersaultSocial, our new program to educate authors and speakers in the strategic and effective use of social media marketing.

Congratulations to Allen Arnold, winner of the ACFW’s 2012 Lifetime Achievement Award “in recognition of his impact on the Christian fiction industry, its authors, and its readers.” He’s the former publisher and senior vice president of Thomas Nelson Fiction, having launched the Fiction group in 2004.

ACFW’s other awards are Julee Schwarzburg - Editor of the Year, Nicole Resciniti - Agent of the Year, Allison Pittman - Mentor of the Year, Genesis winners for the best unpublished Christian fiction projects, and the Carol Awards for the best Christian fiction published in the previous calendar year.

If you’re attending the conference, please come to our exhibit booth and say hi!

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In an opinion essay for The New York Times, author Andy Martin (@andymartinink) says settling on a book title is one of the hardest things to do – even if you spend all day thinking of names for other things. How do you summarize 50,000 or more words into five?

Perhaps the rule about titles is that there is no rule. Like everything else we write, a title is a bunch of words that are arbitrary, random, largely meaningless, and yet still striving to sound as indispensable as the opening notes of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony….

Read this in full.

Let Somersault (@smrsault) help you title (and market) your book(s).

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And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

For a humorous (and accurate) ☺ depiction of the publishing process from an author’s viewpoint (using animated GIF images), see this blog post by Nathan Bransford (@NathanBransford).

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