April 2008: Iowa Class Battleships and Alaska Class Large Cruisers Conversion Projects 1942-1964: An Illustrated Technical Reference by Wayne Scarpaci - beautiful paintings of fantastical battleship makeovers that never occurred ... but should have!
wfzimmerman's review: "A comprehensive treatment of a unique subject with beautiful paintings by the author / illustrator. I'm very proud of this title."
wfzimmerman's review: "The latest in a series of consistently outstanding SF novels from Alastair Reynolds. I enjoyed this one a lot."Annoucing IOWA CLASS BATTLESHIP AND ALASKA CLASS LARGE CRUISERS CONVERSION PROJECTS: An Illustrated Technical Reference by Wayne Scarpaci. This beautifully illustrated book is the definitive and only book on its subject–a unique must-have for any battleship fan.
The book is available from Nimble Books via CreateSpace or via Amazon.com and will soon be available via Ingram (ISBN 1934840386).
Here are a few of the beautiful images included.
I am beginning a project of organizing my library and deciding what books to keep and what books I want to add. I am working my way through things methodically, beginning with the science fiction section and authors beginning with “A”. Here are my thoughts so far …
Adams, Douglas — there is a single-volume omnibus (is that redundant?) with his collected works. that would be a nice readers’ copy to own. Adams certainly had a huge influence on the history of SF … but not one of my personal favorites. Does it need to be in my collection? I can always get it from the library.
Anderson, Poul — I have a volume of collected stories. What I would like to have: a first of Tau Zero and (maybe) a complete run of the Flandry and van Rijn series.
Anthony, Piers — I’ll deal with his fantasy in a separate section. In the meantime, there is an argument to be made for Macroscope.
Asimov, Isaac — the first unqualified “must” in this section. I want the best possible editions of all the Foundation books. The Robot books are a lower priority. The End of Eternity might be higher than the Robot books.
Who else am I missing? more tk …
Things I have not seen explained yet in the press, or would like to see someone ask Amazon:
It looks to me as if Angela Hoy is emerging as the heroine of this story. Apart from having the courage to speak out in the first place, which was huge, she is doing the best job of covering all the developments on a rolling basis.
Amazon Explains POD Move; Ingram Raises Questions - 3/31/2008 1:56:00 PM - Publishers Weekly
In his statement, John Ingram said that while “the questions that are being raised about Amazon.com and its Booksurge division don’t directly relate to Ingram - either Lightning Source Inc. or Ingram Book Group - it clearly is alarming many of our publisher partners.” According to John Ingram, “publishers are telling us they feel Amazon.com’s actions are not appropriate.” John Ingram’s statement adds that the company has been unable to get a direct response from Amazon about its pod shift.
“We all live in a world where decisions are made about insourcing and outsourcing, and free choice is important,” the statement continues. “At Ingram Book and Lightning Source, we are going to work really hard to continue to be the compelling choice as publishers make their outsourcing decisions. Our breadth of distribution channels including the online retailers remains the same, and Ingram still provides one day turnaround in the fulfillment of orders for books including print on demand titles.”
Good for PW, getting Ingram to weigh in. LSI can still deliver every one of its 400,000 titles to Amazon in 24 hours.
The news story is really:
Amazon to readers: we’re removing a huge chunk of our catalog.
Open letter to interested parties:
We wanted to make sure those who are interested have an opportunity to understand what we’re changing with print on demand and why we’re doing so.
One question that we’ve seen is a simple one. Is Amazon requiring that print-on-demand books be printed inside Amazon’s own fulfillment centers, and if so why?
Yes.
Full bumpf available here
Amazon: you are a technology company. Do not make publishers reformat their entire backlist to conform to Booksurge specs. It is patently unreasonable to ask publishers to reformat thousands of books into Booksurge’s proprietary spec format. If you want to “own” POD, then man up and do the work. Or better yet, do a deal with LSI to put LSI machines in your fulfillment centers.
Amazon: what happened to your promise of being “the world’s greatest bookstore?”. Are you seriously telling your own customers that if a POD book takes 24 hours to ship to you, it is too hard for you to acquire it for your customers?
This is the latest in a series of periodic updates of the Nimble Books Marketing Playbook.
When I think about marketing books online, I often think of principal components analysis, which is a mathematical technique that is used to reduce the dimensionality of a data set. When you have a phenomenon that is described by a large number of factors, PCA is a tool for identifying the smaller number of variables that account for most of the variance. PCA is often surprisingly effective, sometimes reducing dimensionality from hundreds to single digits. The same concept works for marketing books online: although there are a great many variables, just a handful seem to explain most of the variation.
There are four major variables that you can influence before publication:
There are four major variables that you can influence after publication:
That’s it! This relative handful of activities seems to explain most of the variation in the efficiency of online marketing for Nimble Books.
In a future post, I will list just a few of the dozens of demonstrably cost-ineffective marketing tools that have been devised to separate authors and publishers from their money.
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