AURIA CORTES

For those of you who don’t remember, Frey is the author of Million Little Pieces. A memoir selected for Oprah Book Club. Eventually the truth came out that Frey fabricated parts of his book. Oprah became upset and publically called him out on his deception on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

When I was writing my first book, this whole thing was going down. Though my book isn’t a memoir, it is me through and through because I’m offering my advice. And maybe for this reason I felt a kinship with Frey.

There were many things about the situation that left a bad taste in my mouth. Though I feel Frey contributed to his own situation, I always felt that he was ill advised by his agent and publisher.

Particulary, as Vanity Fair points out, Frey “on an “author’s questionnaire,” a memo used for marketing and publicity that authors fill out a few months prior to publication, he wrote, “I think of this book more a work of art or literature than I do a work of memoir or autobiography.”

Regardless, the book was marketed as a memoir by the publisher. That’s where the publisher went wrong. Once the book was published and before the allegations about the truthfulness of his memoir came to light, Frey stated his book was a honest, truthful account of events. That’s where he went wrong.

His new book, Bright Shiny Morning, recevied a $1.5 million advance and is set to be released in May. Frey was interviewed by Vanity Fair. It’s an interesting read.

The embedded video is of Nan Talese, Frey’s Million Little Pieces publisher, and her side of how events unfolded during the Oprah Winfrey Show.

This is how Linda’s contract worked: when she received her book deal, she received half of her advance at the signing of the contract and the other half when the project was submitted and accepted.

Though Linda received her advance in two payments, many publishers have implemented a three payment schedule - partial payment at the signing of the contract, delivery of the first draft, and the last when the book is published. This schedule means that it will take years before a writer receives her full advance. 

Let’s use Linda has an example to illustrate the point above.

1) She received a book contract in 2006
2) The book was submitted in 2007 
3) The book was published in 2008 

Under the three tier system, she would have received payment almost a full year AFTER she fullfilled her end of the contract. Yikes!

This is where an agent can help. He can negotiate the terms and push for the two-payment option. If he is unsuccessful, then he can negotiate the terms of payment for the three-payment option.

For example:

1) 45% at the signing of the contract
2) 45% when the first draft is submitted and accepted
3) 10% when the book is published

Many writers wonder what the purpose of an agent is besides their portofolio of contacts. Negotiations is a part of their job and a good agent is worth his 15% commission (that’s industry average).

(CNN) – A Lonely Planet author says he plagiarized or made up portions of the popular travel guidebooks and dealt drugs to supplement poor pay, an Australian newspaper reported Sunday.

Thomas Kohnstamm, who has written a book on his misadventures, also said he didn’t travel to Colombia to write the guidebook on the country because “they didn’t pay me enough,” The Daily Telegraph reported.

“I wrote the book in San Francisco [California],” he is quoted as saying in the Telegraph. “I got the information from a chick I was dating — an intern in the Colombian Consulate.”

The 32-year-old Seattle, Washington, native also claims he accepted free travel, which is a violation of the company’s policy.

Kohnstamm has worked on more than a dozen books for Lonely Planet, including its titles on Brazil, Colombia, the Caribbean, Venezuela, Chile and South America.

An e-mail from Lonely Planet said Kohnstamm’s book were being reviewed, the newspaper reported. “If we find that the content has been compromised, we’ll take urgent steps to fix it. Once we’ve got things right for travelers as quickly as we can, we’ll look at what we do and how we do it to ensure as best we can that this type of thing never happens again,” the e-mail said, according to the newspaper.

The book’s publisher, Piers Pickard, told the paper that an “urgent” review of Kohnstamm’s books did not reveal any inaccuracies.

The Lonely Planet series publishes 500 titles, updated every two to four years, and employs 300 authors, according to the company’s Web site. It sells more than 6 million guides a year, the newspaper reported.

Kohnstamm’s book, “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism,” is set for release next week.

On his MySpace page, Kohnstamm says the book “is about the decision to abandon Manhattan to try to make it as a travel writer and the good, the bad and the really surreal that I experienced on the road.” Source

WritersWeekly has reported that AuthorHouse/iUniverse and Lulu signed Amazon’s agreement to use Booksurge. The newsletter indicates that some POD printers charge customers for Amazon placement. As an example, WritersWeekly states, “AuthorHouse charges authors an extra $75 to submit their book to the Amazon Search Inside the Book Program. If an author has paid for that service, they would, of course, expect and demand that Amazon have their book available for direct purchase by Amazon customers (have the “buy” button turned on). Since AuthorHouse charged authors for that service, they may have inadvertently put themselves in a bind with the threat of having the “buy” buttons turned off.” Click HERE to read the full article.

For those of you following the Amazon.com vs POD situation (click here and here), I was just informed that Lulu wrote the following on their message board: “We would like to assure our users that Lulu continues to have a strong relationship with Amazon.com. As a result, the recent changes Amazon.com has announced should not adversely affect Lulu content listed within Amazon.com in any way.” 

Lulu didn’t comment further and provide details, but for those of you using or thinking of using a POD it won’t hurt to email them and inquire further. 

Btw, if your POD company continues to have a strong relationship with Amazon.com despite the recent announcement, please let me know in the comment section. I’m more than happy to post the information.

From the website: Paperspine is a subscription-based service for renting books. Pick out the books you want to read and we mail them to you based on availability. You decide which books you want to receive first by prioritizing them in your book Queue. It’s that easy!  When you’re done with the book, mail it back to us in our pre-paid mailing bags. When we receive the returned book, we’ll send out the next available book in your Queue. Sounds as though Paperspine has the same model as Netflix:   

• Create a list of books you want to read

• They mail you books from the list

• Keep the book as long as you want. No late fees.

• Return the books and they will send you more.

 Plans begin at $9.95 per month. I have to say that I like this idea. Especially for the winter months when I don’t want to leave the house.

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.

Is Amazon requiring that print-on-demand books be printed inside Amazon’s own fulfillment centers, and if so why?

Yes. Modern POD printing machines can print and bind a book in less than two hours. If the POD printing machines reside inside our own fulfillment centers, we can more quickly ship the POD book to customers — including in those cases where the POD book needs to be married together with another item. If a customer orders a POD item together with an item that we’re holding in inventory — a common case — we can quickly print and bind the POD item, pick the inventoried item, and ship the two together in one box, and we can do so quickly. If the POD item were to be printed at a third party, we’d have to wait for it to be transhipped to our fulfillment center before it could be married together with the inventoried item.

Speed of shipping is a key customer experience focus for us and it has been for many years. Amazon Prime is an example of a successful and growing program that is driving up our speed of shipment with customers. POD items printed inside our own fulfillment centers can make our Amazon Prime cutoff times. POD items printed outside cannot.

Simply put, we can provide a better, more timely customer experience if the POD titles are printed inside our own fulfillment centers. In addition, printing these titles in our own fulfillment centers saves transportation costs and transportation fuel.

Another question we’ve seen: Do I need to switch completely to having my POD titles printed at Amazon?

No, there is no request for exclusivity. Any publisher can use Amazon’s POD service just for those units that ship from Amazon and continue to use a different POD service provider for distribution through other channels.

Alternatively, you can use a different POD service provider for all your units. In that case, we ask that you pre-produce a small number of copies of each title (typically five copies), and send those to us in advance (Amazon Advantage Program-successfully used by thousands of big and small publishers). We will inventory those copies. That small cache of inventory allows us to provide the same rapid fulfillment capability to our customers that we would have if we were printing the titles ourselves on POD printing machines located inside our fulfillment centers. Unlike POD, this alternative is not completely “inventoryless.” However, as a practical matter, five copies is a small enough quantity that it is economically close to an inventoryless model.Might Amazon reconsider this new policy? Click here to read the rest of their open letter.

Click HERE for more industry news