This video isn’t all about Batman. It’s about Chip Kidd, one of the most fantastic book cover designers in the business. Even if you don’t know the name, you know the books. The video was produced for dwell.com, which happens to be a sweet magazine if you’re into the whole architecture and design thing.

Simon Owens has more on the story about Tor’s new site (ref’d by both Boing Boing and Futurismic), but I thought the teaser at the end of his post was really interesting (this is how we fall down the Internet Rabbit Hole)…

In an article published last week titled “The rise of the genre ezine: Will it ever find a profitable model?” I predicted that many companies would launch online publications to act as a form of branding for their products. I think this project with Tor supports my theory.

So, I clicked through to “the rise of the genre ezine” article and found a little history article about online science fiction ezines. Didn’t hurt that he started out with one of my favorite online sci-fi magazines – Event Horizon. Ellen Datlow’s story about the shuttering of SCIFICTION is heartbreaking. I really liked the forum they had over there, great community.

Simon goes on to profile several other sites and gives a mini lesson on the whole field of ezines and fiction magazines in general. Here is a quote by Nick Mamatas who is on slush patrol at Clarkesworld:

“I think it’s important to note that most fiction magazines in the print world are either university-backed non-profits, labors of love, or the least successful of a cross-subsidized bundle of properties that are kept around because fiction copy is much cheaper than non-fiction copy,” he said. “In the periodical trade in general, churn is also very high. Magazines come and go all the time, regardless of their subject, market, or demographic. The magazine business is ultimately the business of selling people disposable content. The challenge of the ezine isn’t all that much different than the challenge of any other magazine, except that if anyone knew what the “best bet” was, they likely wouldn’t try it out on SF ezines when they could launch another massive slick with 75% ad pages.”

What a fantastic article! Just had to break this out separately from the Tor announcement.

I just went back and read through the comments on Charlie Stross’ writers life post and found this gem by S.M. Stirling. I’ve quoted the whole thing, but I encourage you to read all the comments on the thread. They are funny, enlightening, and inspirational – and that’s just about all the other quotes by Stirling, everyone else had amazing things to add too. 😉

The economics of book publishing are tricky. Costs per copy go down tremendously as copies sold increase.

Now that it’s so much cheaper to reprint than it used to be (typesetting costs have plunged) this is even more true than it used to be, since you can respond quickly to reorders and don’t need to do as big an initial run, so there’s less risk of being stuck with a mass of unsold books.

After a certain point, it’s all gravy.

If a book sells 2500 copies, the publisher is barely breaking even, if that. That’s about $67,000 in receipts for a hardcover; subtract fixed overhead like editorial salaries, distribution costs, typesetting and printing costs, the cost of the cover art, the miserable $5000 or so they paid the poor schmuck who wrote it, and there’s not much left.

If it sells 30,000 copies, gross receipts suddenly go up to well over $800,000 but costs are up only modestly from the ones for the 2500 copy book. The author’s cut is now at the six-figure level and the publisher ain’t hurting either.

You become one of their major profit centers. At this point, they discover that they loved you all along; your calls are returned, you get consulted about the cover, they send you on expensive tours, the dinner your editor takes you to is suddenly $250-per-head even before they pop that bottle of Brut Champagne de la Grande Dame, and they start spending advertising money.

Oh, and they get anxious about you defecting to another house, scramble to lock you into multi-book contracts, and they put your advances up without even being asked.

And that’s at a mere 30K copies sold, about 35,000 shipped if you’ve got good sell-through.

Robert Jordan, by way of contrast, averages around 300,000 copies.

My contributor’s copy of NOT QUITE WHAT I WAS PLANNING arrived this week. Now I can say I’m a published writer! Whoopee!

Well, it’s only 6 words but I’m at the top of page… 🙂 Sorry! Not going to tell!

No, the title of the post isn’t my entry. I’m not going to tell you what I wrote. You’ll just have to get the book and find out for yourself.

LitPark has done a fine job of putting together an interview with the SMITHMAG folks. There’s even a cute video to see too. Drop on over and check it out.