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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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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....

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

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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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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.

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In TIME magazine (@TIME), Katy Steinmetz (@katysteinmetz) reports, “In recent years, several neologisms have achieved widespread usage thanks to technology and social media.” Consider:

hat tip, n.: in online contexts, used as an acknowledgement that someone has brought a piece of information to the writer’s attention

tweeps, pl. n.: a person’s followers on the social networking site Twitter

lolz, pl. n.: an expression of fun, laughter, or amusement; used especially online.

All three of these are now found in the Oxford Dictionaries Online (@OxfordWords). Other additions highlight trends that have become widespread, such as photobombing–spoiling a photograph by suddenly appearing in the camera’s field of view as the picture is taken….

Our modern taste for word-shortening is also on display, with additions such as ridic, an abbreviation for ridiculous, and UI, an abbreviation for user interface. And the ODO gives those maniacally laughing villains the recognition they’ve sought these many years, with mwahahaha finally getting a nod.

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Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you select the right words in your writing craft and to connect you with readers.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, created especially for publishing and marketing professionals.

Because we at Somersault (@smrsault) love words, we thought you’d like to know Nigel Richards, 45, a New Zealand security analyst who lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, won the 2012 National SCRABBLE Championship in Orlando, FL, that concluded today, according to the North American SCRABBLE Players Association (@NASPA) tournament website. This is his 3rd consecutive title and 4th overall, both unprecedented achievements. He is also the reigning World Champion.

Both Richards and the runner-up, 1994 champion David Gibson of Spartanburg, SC, won 22 games (out of 31), but Richards had accumulated a better spread (+1579 vs. +1563, a difference of only 16 points) after winning the final game against Gibson by 177 points (475 to 298).

During the tournament, one contestant was disqualified for cheating.

Some of the most creative words played in the tournament were: ZADDICK (a virtuous person by Jewish religious standards), ERYTHEMA (a redness of the skin), ORPHIC (mystical), and WAWL (to cry like a cat).

Also see The New Yorker's poem, Reflections on a Winning Scrabble Board.

Contact Somersault to help you in your writing craft and to connect you with readers.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, created especially for publishing and marketing professionals.

Forbes (@Forbes) senior editor Deborah L. Jacobs (@djworking) offers insights she learned in successfully self-publishing her non-fiction book.

Digital technology has made it possible for anyone to publish a book….But turning that book into a successful commercial venture is far more challenging. For more than one year after self-publishing my book, Estate Planning Smarts, promoting it was practically my full-time job.

I didn’t take the decision to self-publish lightly. In fact, I turned down offers from two big publishers because I wasn’t happy with the money they offered. McGraw-Hill’s offer was missing a zero—and I told them so.

...The reason for publishers’ low offers was that statistics show estate planning books don’t sell well. I had a vision for a book that would prove them wrong, but the big companies would never have allocated the resources to produce it.

My business model involved going against the grain by spending money where big publishers are cutting corners: high-quality paper, two-color graphics, printing on a Web press, rather than print-on-demand. And while big publishers were cutting experienced staff, I retained top talent for editing and graphics, on a freelance basis. The goal was to produce a high-quality product that advisers would give to their clients and friends and family would share with each other.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you publish and market your content in this fast-changing digital age.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard;especially the Publishers tab that includes links to self-publishing services.