The Winners! More Money Than Brains

The winners of our More Brains Than Money contest are: Janet Butt and Ian McKechnie. Congratulations! You will be receiving copies of MORE MONEY THAN BRAINS in the mail. Thanks to everyone who participated, and the folks at McClelland & Stewart and Random House who helped us out.

Where We've Been

In case you were missing us (please tell us you were missing us, we are needy that way), we've been at Book Expo America 2010 in NY city. It is the big industry conference that goes on every year and it attracts just about everyone from the biggest to the smallest in the world of publishing. People are hawking their wares, sharing ideas, catching up with old friends and (this was news to me) getting drunk.

So what did we do, you ask?

We had meetings with literary scouts, agents that we work with and editors that we pitch projects to at Random House and Penguin (I even learned about their igloo).

We also attended a number of great sessions at the show. Including:
Bringing Your Authors to the Social Media Party....And Getting them to Stay

Building Online Reader Communities with an Eye on ROI

When Gutenberg Meets Zuckerberg

"I'll Never Pay Over $9.99 for E-Books!" and Similar Lies (this one was standing room only)

7x20x21 (a personal fave because Jennifer Egan spoke to a large crowd)

Are e-books Good For Authors (also Standing room only and very informative)

What can I say there was a lot to do and learn.

And finally I'll close up with some BEA 2010 thoughts from others.

Literary agent Janet Reid thinks "Small Publishing Will Save the World" while Digital Book World wonders if "BEA 2010 was a Win for Publishing" and Jonathan Galassi of FSG doesn't seem to like the "digital frontier" at all.

That was a busy week!

Aurora Awards

Winners of the 2010 Prix Aurora Awards were announced over the Victoria Day weekend at a the Canadian National Science Fiction Convention in Winnipeg. AMcD client, Yves Meynard picked up the prize for Best Novel in French. Congrats, Yves!

Here's the complete list of winners:

Best Novel in English: Robert J. Sawyer, Wake (Penguin Canada)
Best Novel in French: Laurent McAllister (the pen name for Jean-Louis Trudel and Yves Meynard), Suprématie (Bragelonne)
Best Short-Form Work in English: Eileen Bell, “Pawns Dreaming of Roses” (from Women of the Apocalypse)
Best Short-Form Work in French: Alain Bergeron, “Ors blancs” (from Solaris 117)
Best Work in English (Other): Eileen Bell, Roxanne Felix, Billie Milholland, and Ryan McFadden, Women of the Apocalypse (Absolute Xpress)
Best Work In French (Other): Joël Champetier, editor, Revue
Artistic Achievement: Dan O’Driscoll, cover of Steel Whispers (Bundoran Press)

Free Copies of MORE MONEY THAN BRAINS

In this week's FREE BOOKS installment, we'll be giving away two copies (one each) of MORE MONEY THAN BRAINS by LAURA PENNY. Simply send an email to info@mcdermidagency.com by Friday May 28 at noon EST with the subject line I'VE GOT MORE BRAINS THAN MONEY and you'll be entered for a chance to win.

CMAP

You aren't really supposed to know what CMAP means, I'm just playing on those annoying little etext acronyms we all use. CMAP means Common Misconceptions About Publishing, which is the title of a very good series of blog posts by a published author named Charles Stross. He now has nine posts, the most recent of which is about e-books, and I highly reccomend that authors and those who want to be authors read every one. They are full of level-headed facts about the publishing industry that you really should know.

CMAP #1 is here.

Seth Godin day

Apparently I don't have the clout to just go ahead and give days names but since I'm blogging about him I am just going to go ahead and call this "Seth Godin day." Any objections? Good then I'll continue.

Seth Godin is a modern marketing guru who is highly regarded by a number people in the publishing industry. He's got a lot to say about the future of publishing and his book TRIBES has become one of the seminal works for social media marketing people. I'm not sure I'm always comfortable with what Godin has to say (frankly Godin seems best at selling Godin) but I do think his ideas have to be considered and taken into account as we go further along the path of 21st Century publishing. So I've got a couple of Seth Godin links for you today.

The first is a brief interview where Godin discusses "What Book Publishers are doing Wrong." While the second links you to a video of Godin talking about "Rethinking the Publishing Industry." Finally you should check out Seth's insanely popular blog.

Told you it was Seth Godin day.

Contracts, Contracts, Contracts

Hey guess what? Today I'll be posting about contracts. I've got three interesting posts with advice for authors regarding their publishing contracts.

The first is a post from literary agent Rachelle Gardner's blog, titled "What's in a Publishing Contract". Its a good primer on what to expect in a publishing contract.

A self-described Stroppy Author, has a series (9 so far) of good posts titled "How to read a publishing contract." They are longer posts that go into detail about standard clauses in publishing contracts, and well worth the read.

Finally over at COPYLAW they have a great post titled "Is you publishing contract enhanced e-book and Ipad ready." A very important question to ask given the quick development of e-reading and e-readers.

Aren't contracts fun?!

Free and the Volcano

Wanted to point out three related links that have to do with giving books or content away free -- and reaping the rewards.

The first (and the inspiration for the post) is a recent article about Lonely Planet giving away their city guides for free for four days during the volcanic ash/travel nightmare (I ain't typing that volcano's name). As the article points out the response was overwhelming: 4 million downloads in 4 days and revenues rose during the period.

Then there is this interesting publication brought to us by the fine folks at O'Reilly (and brought to my attention by Sean Cranbury - thank you sir). It has the exciting title IMPACT OF P2P AND FREE DISTRIBUTION ON BOOK SALES and is a research report based on efforts by O'Reilly, Random House and other publishers to put real numbers behind digital distribution experiments.

Finally a brief article that suggests publishers online should charge for the right thing. That is because they are just replicating their offline models online they are charging at the wrong point.

Just another thing that digital publishing is causing us to re-think.