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Credible source, credible pub. About time!
Finally, some real news about THE SOLOMON KEY. According to the publisher, quoted in today’s Wall Street Journal, the release date has been set — but it is a secret. Which is progress! There was no release date at all before. There’s no new news about the content of the book (or any confirmation of the title), but the thrust still seems to be that the book will be set in Washington, D.C. and focus on those wacky Freemason Founding Fathers. I brought out my SOLOMON KEY pre-book/meta-book in 2005 (!) [asa]0975447998[/asa] and I have to say it has stood the test of time quite well. It has already made a pretty healthy profit, and among my forty titles in print ranks sixth in lifetime revenue per month. The content is still sound because book is far less speculative than most efforts in the pre-book genre. I cover Brown’s entire oeuvre, and I include a detailed analysis of Dan Brown’s work habits and narrative strategies, but I didn’t think it wise to go on speculative excursions into the occult and Freemasonry before seeing the published books. I stick closely to what Brown and his publishers have actually said about the book. Judge for yourself if you like my approach: take a look at the Table of Contents in Search Inside the Book mode. I’ve gotten better at covers since I published this book, but I’m reasonably satisfied with the dominant cover image: Kryptos in the CIA courtyard is still a pretty darned cool piece of Washington architecture, and it’s neat to look at and learn about. I would probably use a different font for the title type. Although the cover colors look clunky, they are keyed off the colors used in THE DA VINCI CODE, so I don’t think there was a principled basis for a better choice. I will update this book when THE SOLOMON KEY finally comes out, but I am not sure exactly what mechanism I will use — I may update this edition, or I may issue a separate thinner paperback. Either way, I will provide a PDF softcopy to previous purchasers, as stated in the book. (Simply send me proof of purchase using the email address in the book). I will update this post as publication nears. Until then, enjoy the anticipation! Cordially, Fred Zimmerman
wfzimmerman’s review: “An excellent complement to my SOLOMON KEY book. Greg is better on "arcana" than I am.” wfzimmerman’s review: “A science-fiction novel concerning stolen anti-matter that, oddly, is misclassified in bookstores as a standard thriller.” wfzimmerman’s review: “Rogak is a major supplier of instant books to the publishing industry. “ mental_floss magazine – Where Knowledge Junkies Get Their Fix f you’re a budding author, it looks like books outlining some sort of religious doctrine would be the way to go. Boy wizardry is another area rich with potential. [v. droll! /ed.] books, bestsellers A tv producer wrote to me asking my thoughts about what would be in THE SOLOMON KEY. As a starting point, she presented a good list of the “usual suspects” ranging from Masonry to the esoteric history of the U.S. capitol. This is how I responded to her:
wfzimmerman’s review: “A very good guide to some of the esoterica that may appear in Dan Brown’s next book. Greg Taylor knows his stuff! Four stars only because no one actually knows what Brown’s next book is about. I have no doubt that once it is out, Taylor will write a five-star guide!” wfzimmerman’s review: “This "anticipation" book will have been in print for at least three years before the real sequel to DA VINCI CODE comes out. But it is good value for money, with a very careful approach to the facts and an appendix containing Dan Brown’s witness statement in the London copyright trial.” Why Publish With Nimble Books?Nimble Books LLC is an innovative publisher of timely material on topics ranging from Harry Potter and Dan Brown to politics, business, science, and medicine. We use electronic publishing technology to reach markets that are moving too fast for the large publishing conglomerates to address. Because our marketing strategy is tightly focused on the Internet, we look for titles that respond well to keyword searching in on-line markets, or on-line promotion via blogging. Some of our recent projects include: GLOBALISTAN: HOW THE GLOBALIZED WORLD IS DISSOLVING INTO LIQUID WAR by Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar. We publish twelve titles per year and we are selective. We are looking for books that are substantially ahead of the curve in that they address emerging trends that are readily connected with large, literate on-line communities. We offer booksellers a short discount and fulfill orders via the Ingram distribution catalog using print-on-demand from Lightning Source. Your book will be available in most on-line booksellers including Amazon.com; the Amazon.com stores in the UK, France, Germany, and Japan; Barnesandnoble.com; Powell’s; and dozens of on-line resellers. Customers can special order the book in bookstores via Ingram, the market-leading distributor in the U.S. By offering a short discount and focusing on-line, we are taking a more lucrative slice of a smaller pie as compared to a traditional offset publisher which ships returnable books to bricks-and-mortar booksellers at a 55% discount. The downside for you is that we do not pay advances; the upside is that we pay a publishers compensation fee that works out like a higher-than-usual royalty of 15% or more of list price per book. We are true partners throughout the publication, distribution, and marketing of the book. It’s not a case of give us the manuscript and we’ll give you the check – it’s now that the manuscript is ready, let’s go make some money together! Here is an example of how the numbers work for a 200-page book selling for $19.94. Retail price: $19.94 Thus, your per-copy compensation is equivalent to a traditional royalty of 17.23%, which is well above most market rates. There is also a more subtle advantage in that we never discount our wholesale price of $14.96. Many publishers calculate royalties on the basis of final retail price, not list retail price, so if a book is remaindered and sold to booksellers with a suggested remaindered price of $4.99, you are only getting royalties on the $4.99, not on the $19.94. Our experience is that about 80% of our online sales come through Amazon.com, which means that you can use your expected Amazon sales rank as a rough indicator of your revenue opportunity. It’s important to note that Amazon’s algorithms diminish the visibility of short-discount books in some of Amazon’s inside-the-store marketing programs, such as “Buy X, Get Y,” and “Also Bought …” This means that your book’s sales will depend primarily on how many readers come to Amazon looking for your specific book or a book that is very close to your specific topic. The key thing to know about Amazon sales ranks is that the relationship between sales rank and unit sales on Amazon is an inverse logarithmic function, so a book that is ranked #1 sells about 30 times more than a book that is ranked #1000. The following table presents an estimate of the correlation between 30-day average Amazon sales rank (as measured by Titlez.com) and the net monthly author compensation for a $19.94/200 page book. Needless to say, this table is strictly an illustration and should in no way be considered binding. 30 day avg sales rank of … should result in projected net author compensation per month of about … 1000 => $1968 This model is based on Nimble Books sales data plus four different academic studies from 2001 to 2005 whose estimates of the relationship between Amazon unit sales and sales ranks all found r, or degrees of correlation, of .8 or higher; for details and citations, see this article on the Nimble Books website. The primary financial risks in this model are that any increase in printing costs or increase in the short discount rate would adversely affect both publisher and author net compensation. It’ What We Will Need From YouWe prefer that manuscripts be provided in Microsoft Word format. We will ask you to review chapters as they are copy-edited and formatted for production. We may also ask you for the name of experts in your field who may be willing to review the manuscript for technical accuracy. As the publication date approaches, we will help you set up a blog or website specifically devoted to your book. We expect you, as the domain expert for your topic, to take the lead on getting the word out about it to knowledgeable reviewers. As a way of stimulating reader interaction and gathering positive reviews, we offer readers free PDF updates for each book. We ask authors to offer at least one chapter update per year. How We PayWe get paid by our distributor, Lightning Source, 120 days after the end of each month in which your books are shipped. Accordingly, we pay you each month on a five-month delay from when your books sell. Thus, if we sell ten of your books in January 2006, we will pay your royalty in June 2006. In July 2006, you will receive February’s royalties, and so on. We prefer to pay via electronic means such as Paypal but will issue paper cheques if necessary. About Nimble BooksOur trusty Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines “nimble” as follows: 1: quick and light in motion: AGILE *nimble fingers* 2 a: marked by quick, alert, clever conception, comprehension, or resourcefulness *a nimble mind* b: RESPONSIVE, SENSITIVE *a nimble listener* And traces the etymology to the 14th Century: Middle English nimel, from Old English numol holding much, from niman to take; akin to Old High German neman to take, Greek nemein to distribute, manage, nomos pasture, nomos usage, custom, law The etymology is reminiscent of the old Biblical adage, “to whom much is given, much is expected” (Luke 12:48). Nimble Books seeks to honor that Christian principle by combining the spirit of nimbleness with the Biblical concept of abundance: we deliver what you need to know when you need to know it. I just checked this morning and my Amazon Short The Use of the Bible in The Da Vinci Code is back on Bestseller List, currently at number 24 after a weekend surge. If you haven’t read it yet, invest .49 cents to discover what Dan Brown’s novel really says about the twelve specific Bible passages he references.
While you’re tackling one of today’s tope cultural issues, check out another emerging controversy in my recent work, Misquotes in Misquoting Jesus. It’s a quick read, providing the quick facts necessary to evaluate the ideas presented in the N.Y. Times bestselling Misquoting Jesus by Dr. Bart Ehrman.
Send me an email with your thoughts on these books. I’d love to hear from you at dillon@dillonburroughs.org.
The secret’s out: `Da Vinci’ mania fading – Yahoo! News NEW YORK – It couldn’t last forever, right? Simmered by three years of lawsuits, religious debates and conspiracy theories, brought to a boil in May by the Hollywood movie, the craze for all things “Da Vinci Code” is finally fading, publishers and booksellers agree. No more “Da Vinci” spinoffs. Yay! I saw this coming two years ago when I published THE SOLOMON KEY AND BEYOND. Technorati Tags: dan brown, solomon, da vinci code The Amazon page for AMERICAN THEOCRACY UNPACKED is up and ready! Pre-order from Amazon, or direct from the publisher for $19.94 + $1.59 Media Mail.
When I began reading American Theocracy, the best-seller by Kevin Phillips, I felt almost immediately that this was an excellent and thought-provoking book that was so wrong about so many fundamental issues that it demanded a strong, immediate, and highly focused response. This book, American Theocracy Unpacked, takes advantage of electronic publishing technology to provide that “nimble” response, less than three months after I started reading Phillips’s book. In American Theocracy Unpacked, I take a close, almost paragraph-by-paragraph look at Phillips’s arguments. I am confident that the result is respectful but stimulating. I acknowledge and applaud his many important insights, but I also suggest a way forward that is less fearful of an “American theocracy,” and, indeed, more hopeful for America and the world. In the body of the book, I have used the informal, rather “bulletized” house style that Nimble Books has used to produce “living books” on subjects ranging from Harry Potter and Dan Brown to science, politics, technology, and medicine. READ THIS BOOK IF …
HOW THIS BOOK IS ORGANIZED AND WHAT IT CONTAINS This book follows the same structure as American Theocracy, with the addition of some introductory and interstitial comments. Technorati Tags: american theocracy, theocracy, phillips, kevin phillips The Da Vinci Code Movie Photos – Da Vinci Code Photos, Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou
Ouch.
Zing! Good one. courant.com | ‘DaVinci’ A Godsend To Book Industry Heckuva job, Brownie! Dan Brown’s novel “The DaVinci Code” – which suggests Jesus married Mary Magdalene, the Catholic Church suppressed that history (and women in general) and the Renaissance genius’s paintings hide clues to the whole story – is a publishing phenomenon. The author may be a false prophet, but his profits are for real, and Friday will mark the book’s second coming, so to speak: the film version starring Tom Hanks. The release of The Da Vinci Code movie is stirring the creative juices of the world’s reporters. Good one, Brownie!
Loon alert. Not that I shouldn’t take a glance or two in the mirror… URL to the Da Vinci Code trailer: Updated May 2006 with 60 pages of new material!
That’s the spirit! Here at What’s New for Book-Lovers, a service of Nimble Books LLC, we’ve been watching Google Book Search closely. We have 17 books live and more in the pipeline. We’ve tried a little bit of everything, from prototyping ad-supported books to “living books” that anticipate what’s new with Dan Brown and Harry Potter. We’re guessing that this blog opening means that GBS is about to launch its online access program. We’ve got 17 books ready to sell that way; we’ve marked them at the same price as our standard e-books available elsewhere. Our most optimistic assessment is that GBS’s online access program is going to be roughly the equivalent of adding another major e-book outlet on the scale of Amazon.com. Amazon e-books account for about 25% of Nimble Books’s revenue, so that’s nothing to sneeze at!
This sounds great! I want to get a look at it. Nimble Books LLC is an innovative publisher of timely material on topics ranging from Harry Potter and Dan Brown to politics, business, science, and medicine. We use electronic publishing technology to reach markets that are moving too fast for the large publishing conglomerates to address. Because our marketing strategy is tightly focused on the Internet, we look for titles that respond well to keyword searching in on-line markets, or on-line promotion via blogging. Some of our recent projects include: RED ZONE BLUES by Pepe Escobar THE JESUS FAMILY CONTROVERSY by Dillon Burroughs GLOBALISTAN: HOW THE GLOBALIZED WORLD IS DISSOLVING INTO LIQUID WAR by Asia Times correspondent Pepe Escobar. MISQUOTES IN MISQUOTING JESUS by Dillon Burroughs UNAUTHORIZED HARRY POTTER BOOK SEVEN NEWS We publish twelve titles per year and we are selective. We are looking for books that are substantially ahead of the curve in that they address emerging trends that are readily connected with large, literate on-line communities. DistributionWe fulfill orders via Ingram using print-on-demand from Lightning Source. Your book will be available in most on-line booksellers including Amazon.com; the Amazon.com stores in the UK, France, Germany, and Japan; Barnesandnoble.com; Powell’s; and dozens of on-line resellers. Customers can special order the book in bookstores via Ingram, the market-leading distributor in the U.S. We also ship direct to prepaid purchasers and provide a quantity discount. We are true partners throughout the publication, distribution, and marketing of the book. It’s not a case of give us the manuscript and we’ll give you the check – it’s now that the manuscript is ready, let’s go make some money together! Of course, we bear all costs; there are no author fees of any kind. Online SalesOur experience is that about 80% of our online sales come through Amazon.com, which means that you can use your expected Amazon sales rank as a rough indicator of your revenue opportunity. It’s important to note that Amazon’s algorithms diminish the visibility of short-discount books in some of Amazon’s inside-the-store marketing programs, such as “Buy X, Get Y,” and “Also Bought …” This means that your book’s sales will depend primarily on how many readers come to Amazon looking for your specific book or a book that is very close to your specific topic. The key thing to know about Amazon sales ranks is that the relationship between sales rank and unit sales on Amazon is an inverse logarithmic function, so a book that is ranked #1 sells about 30 times more than a book that is ranked #1000. Our business modelWe normally sell books to retailers at a “short discount” of approximately 25% and do not allow returns. This makes our books considerably more profitable per copy than traditional offset books which are sold at a 55% discount with the additional cost of returns. However, there is no guarantee that we will always be able to sell books on these terms, so our book contracts are written to allow us to set the discount, return terms, and price at our sole discretion. We pay authors 30% of net publisher compensation for the first 5,000 units sold, 35% for the next 5,000, and 40% for more than 10,000 units sold. Net publisher compensation is defined as (list price * wholesale discount) – printing cost. For a 25% discounted book, 30% of net publisher compensation usually works out to about a 17% royalty, considerably better than market rates. The following table presents an estimate of the correlation between 30-day average Amazon sales rank (as measured by Titlez.com) and the net monthly author compensation for a $19.94/200 page book. Needless to say, this table is strictly an illustration and should in no way be considered binding. 30 day avg sales rank of … should result in projected net author compensation per month of about … 1000 => $1968 This model is based on Nimble Books sales data plus four different academic studies from 2001 to 2005 whose estimates of the relationship between Amazon unit sales and sales ranks all found r, or degrees of correlation, of .8 or higher; for details and citations, see this article on the Nimble Books website. The primary financial risks in this model are that any increase in printing costs or increase in the short discount rate would adversely affect both publisher and author net compensation. Pros and ConsThe total theoretical revenue oportunity is less in our model than if you publish with a publisher that uses a traditional model (55%, returnable) for the simple reason that we are primarily addressing the online portion of the market, which is about 10% the size of the total market. However, if a book is successful enough, we do reserve the right to go to a second edition with the traditional model. Of course, the maximum potential for rights sales, etc. is just the same in our model as in the traditional model. In our model, both author and publisher assume less risk.
Both author and publisher can take creative aim at niche, hypothetical, or “bleeding-edge” markets. Both author and publisher can challenge the “big boys” by focusing online, where creative individuals can readily use successful blogs and websites to establish a category-leading presence. You have better visibility into sales: we provide monthly statements. You have an additional revenue stream: we pay every month. What We Will Need From YouWe prefer that manuscripts be provided in Microsoft Word format. We will ask you to review chapters as they are copy-edited and formatted for production. We may also ask you for the name of experts in your field who may be willing to review the manuscript for technical accuracy. As the publication date approaches, we will help you set up a blog or website specifically devoted to your book. We expect you, as the domain expert for your topic, to take the lead on getting the word out about it to knowledgeable reviewers. As a way of stimulating reader interaction and gathering positive reviews, we offer readers free PDF updates for each book. We ask authors to offer at least one chapter update per year. MarketingPlease review the Nimble Books Marketing Playbook, which has grown long enough it needs its own page. How We PayWe get paid by our distributor, Lightning Source, 120 days after the end of each month in which your books are shipped. Accordingly, we pay you each month on a five-month delay from when your books sell. Thus, if we sell ten of your books in January 2006, we will pay your royalty in May 2006. In June 2006, you will receive February ’s royalties, and so on. We prefer to pay via electronic means such as Paypal but will issue paper cheques if necessary. About Nimble BooksOur trusty Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary defines “nimble” as follows: 1: quick and light in motion: AGILE *nimble fingers* 2 a: marked by quick, alert, clever conception, comprehension, or resourcefulness *a nimble mind* b: RESPONSIVE, SENSITIVE *a nimble listener* And traces the etymology to the 14th Century: Middle English nimel, from Old English numol holding much, from niman to take; akin to Old High German neman to take, Greek nemein to distribute, manage, nomos pasture, nomos usage, custom, law The etymology is reminiscent of the old Biblical adage, “to whom much is given, much is expected” (Luke 12:48). Nimble Books seeks to honor that Christian principle by combining the spirit of nimbleness with the Biblical concept of abundance: we deliver what you need to know when you need to know it. |
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