As you might have heard recently, in addition to search and advertising, we’re focused on a third key area of innovation: powerful applications that run on the web and that let you collaborate and communicate in new ways. Not only do we offer email, calendaring, and document creation and collaboration services (and more!) for individuals, but with Google Apps, businesses, schools and other organizations can customize these tools and use them as their own internal systems.

Here at Nimble Books we use Google Apps throughout the process of publishing. the “baked-in” collaboration features are a great help.

* Contracts are negotiated using Google Docs
* Sales and royalties are tracked and shared on a daily basis using a Google spreadsheet. (Those not familiar with publishing may not realize what a huge increase in transparency this is over the normal six-months-late cryptic royalty statement).
* When authors request review copies, they use a Google Spreadsheet to enter address info (this is a great advantage over the normal e-mail with a half-complete address!)
* When we do marketing campaigns, we import .csv contact lists into Google Mail and use tags to create a “loosely structured” mailing database. Free is a much better price than commercial contact management services which start around $2,000!

If you’re interested in learning more about how we publish, see Why Publish With Us.

Technorati Tags: Google Apps

Random House | Books | Hannibal Rising by Thomas Harris

ABOUT THIS BOOK

HE IS ONE OF THE MOST HAUNTING CHARACTERS
IN ALL OF LITERATURE.

AT LAST THE EVOLUTION OF HIS EVIL
IS REVEALED.

Hannibal Lecter emerges from the nightmare of the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck.

All the people who are getting exercised about the Simon & Schuster POD rights controversy would do better to direct their attention in this direction. To my mind, the popularity of books like this, that simply glorify evil, is a far more serious problem than a trifling Kabuki play about eminently negotiable rights.

Technorati Tags: Simon & Schuster, reversion, POD, Hannibal Rising, Thomas Harris

It could be a chilly Father’s Day for Oprah Winfrey ’s dad.

The talk queen tells us she’s “shocked” and “disappointed” that she had to hear it from the Daily News that her 74-year-old pop, Vernon, is writing a book about her.

Winfrey said she laughed recently when “one of my assistants said, ‘The Daily News is calling. They say they heard your father is writing a book about you.’ I said, ‘That’s impossible. I can assure them it’s not true.’

“But then my sister said, ‘I think you should call your father.’ I called him and it turned out he is writing a book. The worst part of it was him saying, ‘I meant to tell you I’ve been working on it.’ ”

Winfrey, 53, confided, “I was upset. I won’t say ‘devastated,’ but I was stunned.”

“The last person in the world to be doing a book about me is Vernon Winfrey,” she added. “The last person.”

Oprah was 14 and pregnant when she left her mother’s home in Milwaukee to live with her father in Nashville. Her baby died weeks after he was born. She has said before that she’s grateful to her father for helping her go on, for teaching her discipline and the importance of education.

Nevertheless, Vernon, who plans to call his book, “Things Unspoken,” was quoted as saying he should have been tougher on her, because Oprah was “out of hand and an unruly child.”

“I have a good relationship with him,” Oprah told us Sunday, when she received the Elie Wiesel Foundation Humanitarian Award at the Waldorf. Though she hasn’t seen Vernon since he accompanied her on a trip to Africa a few months ago,
she said, “We talk, we talk, we talk.”

That’s why “I would have preferred to have known my father was working on this. It would have been a nice gesture, a courtesy,” she said.

OK, Vern: you’re the dad. No matter how famous she gets, it’s your job to protect your daughter.

Technorati Tags: Oprah, Father’s Day