While at the Montrose Christian Writers Conference (MCWC), I caught up with Mary Sue Seymour from The Seymour Agency taking a break and rocking on the porch (a favorite hangout during the MCWC). Mary Sue talked about her role at this year’s conference, what type of books she’s looking to sign, the best way to contact her if you have a book proposal and her thoughts about the MCWC. Thanks for chatting with me Mary Sue!
Multiple news sources are reporting that Barnes & Noble, the bookseller with 720 stores and the recent Nook e-reader, is thinking about putting itself up for sale. (Full disclosure: B&N is my favorite book or any other kind of store. I’m a fan.)
Being a publicly traded company, B&N is constantly under pressure to try and make its stock performance attractive for investors. And it’s falling short. So one of the options is to put itself on the auction block. Possible buyers include the founder and chairman of the board Leonard Riggio who, it’s said, is looking at putting together an investment group to buy out the company and take it private.
Even though B&N still sells some 300 million books a year, we get these startling statistics about how the B&N behemoth as fallen from its high perch of just a few years ago:
Today, Barnes & Noble has a market capitalization of just under $950 million—even after a 25% run-up in after-hours trading Tuesday in the wake of the announcement. In comparison, chief competitor Amazon.com Inc. has a market cap of around $55 billion. In 2001, Barnes & Noble was worth $2.2 billion and Amazon $3.6 billion.*
Translation: Nine years ago B&N was worth $2.2B and Amazon was worth $3.6B. Today? B&N is worth $950M (less than half its previous value) and Amazon is worth, yikes, $55B! Need I say more? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you have a Nook, sell it on eBay now and buy a Kindle. If you haven’t yet purchased an e-reader, buy a new Kindle 3 for $139.
At the 2010 Montrose Christian Writers Conference (MCWC), I had the pleasure of meeting popular Christian fantasy author Bryan Davis and his lovely wife Susie. In fact, I had dinner with them (we sat at the same table) on the last evening of the conference. It was a treat for me to talk with both Bryan and Susie about writing, how they came to live in Tennessee, home schooling and even Harry Potter. Bryan is the author of the very popular Dragons in our Midst series, as well as Oracles of Fire and Echoes from the Edge, among others.
After dinner, I caught up with Bryan to ask him about the MCWC. This is what he said…
Contemporary and historical romance novelist Patricia Ryan recently had an online “chat” with TeleRead where she offered her insights and predictions about established authors turning to self-publishing via e-books. Since 1995, Ryan has authored 27 novels and novellas for the likes of Bantam, Berkley Prime Crime, Signet, NAL, Harlequin and and St. Martin’s. It’s a big deal when established authors like Ryan start trumpeting self-publishing with e-books. Here’s one small section of the interview I found enlightening:
PATRICIA, ON WHY SHE CHOSE SELF-PUBLISHING: If it’s already been traditionally published, as my books have, other traditional publishers aren’t generally interested in bringing them out again. E-publishers are, but when I looked into how long they keep the rights, what they’re paying, etc. etc., I decided self-publishing was the way to go, and it would appear I made the right decision. Lots of sales and blog buzz, and I didn’t do anything but send out an e-newsletter to my mailing list. Really, this is the wave of the future. Within the next year, I’m sure lots of authors will be publishing their backlist this way–which is good news for all us readers who love great books at cheap prices!
Once upon a time, not more than a year ago, Firefox was my favorite web browser. But then updates came along for Firefox that made it extremely slow on my old Windows XP machine. And I had troubles with some of the extensions (little helper programs that embed in the browser). Having no choice, because speed is such a critical issue, I changed to Google Chrome. And I haven’t looked back.
It seems I’m not the only one who came to the same conclusion about Firefox. From PC World via Yahoo! News:
Firefox is also so notoriously slow that on older systems, it’s almost unusable or it takes so long to open that you find yourself clicking the icon multiple times, thinking that your original launch didn’t take for some reason.
Chrome, however, is usable and responsive. Now you understand why Firefox might not survive the browser wars. Its extension model is annoying to use, it’s slow on older systems, it’s slower than Chrome on any system, and its extensions break other extensions.*
How about you? Which browser do you use? Tell me in the comments. If you care about speed, especially if you’re on a slower Internet connection, my advice is: Try Google Chrome.
CNET recently interviewed Ian Freed, Amazon vice president in charge of the Kindle. Among the interesting things he said was that Amazon sells 70-80 percent of all e-books sold. When asked about claims by Apple and Barnes & Noble that they have something like 20 percent of the market each, Freed said Amazon’s pretty sure about their own numbers and “something doesn’t add up” with the claims from others. I think he’s right. Let’s say Amazon has 75 percent of the market, Apple, maybe 8-10 percent, and everyone else the rest. I think that’s a pretty fair assessment of where things stand right now.
There was also this interesting question and answer on the topic of agency pricing and the price points for e-books in general:
CNET: Now that most publishers have shifted to the "agency model" and are setting their own [e-book] prices, how have the higher prices on many e-books impacted sales?
Freed: Happy to answer that. We have definitely seen a shift. We have data for the last 15 years on books. And since some of the publishers have decided to price their e-book above $9.99, we’ve definitely seen a shift of customers going to e-books that are $9.99 or less. The good news for them is that the selection of those books is very dramatic. We have about 630,000 books that are not public domain titles and of those 510,000 are sold for $9.99 or less. Of The New York Times best-sellers, 80 of them are $9.99 or less. So customers are voting with their pocketbook.*
I had the good fortune to meet and get to know Joan Esherick at the Montrose Christian Writers Conference (MCWC). Joan is a full-time freelance writer, a professional speaker and published author whose freelance work has appeared in a number of Christian periodicals including: Discipleship Journal, Pray!, Living with Teenagers, Today’s Christian Woman (now Kyria) and MOODY magazines. She’s written or contributed to twenty-five non-fiction books, including OUR MIGHTY FORTRESS: Finding Refuge in God (she gave me a copy!), and has developed curriculum, women’s Bible study material, and small group leader training material. Joan is a member of AWSA (Advanced Writers & Speakers Association), The Author’s Guild, and the Evangelical Press Association.
Joan also loves Labrador Retrievers (she writes an award-winning blog about them), and she’s just fun to be around. Thanks Joan, for taking a few minutes to speak with me about your writing career and about MCWC.
Multiple news sources are reporting that Barnes & Noble, the bookseller with 720 stores and the recent Nook e-reader, is thinking about putting itself up for sale. (Full disclosure: B&N is my favorite book or any other kind of store. I’m a fan.)
Bryan is the author of the very popular 
Contemporary and historical romance novelist 
Once upon a time, not more than a year ago,