First serial rights for magazine publication used to be the only way to go in book publishing. Think Dickens, Trollope (a great writer currently undergoing a revival) et al. I'm using "magazine" a little loosely here, many of the serials that publish stories and book excerpts are really newspapers or newsletters. The attraction for the writer is making some money up front, often before a book is even finished, and lining up potential book customers if the excerpt is well received..
Last week, basically on a lark, I e-mailed an unsolicited proposal to the editor of a highly specialized computer magazine suggesting they might be interested in the first serial rights to some technical material I've been working up. My pitch to them, since it's reference material and could be spread out over a year's worth of issues, is that it would help retain subscribers and give the magazine a long shelf life, which should be attractive to their advertisers. On my side, I'd get paid some cash and get a free promotion for the book, assuming I published one.
One of the dumbest moves I ever made in publishing was giving a niche magazine the rights to publish an excerpt from a book without making any stipulations as to the timing. They used it in the first available slot, which means it went out to their 100,000 plus readers a full year before the book was available. That's about tweleve months too long for the purposes of book promotion.
Selling first serial rights to a print magazine, or even donating them under some circumstances, can be a great way to promote your book and to build your resume as a writer. The only thing I'd be cautious about is making sure that if the magazine has an online version, the article is either linked to your website or included in their robots exclusion file. Otherwise, it may appear to be duplicate content and compete with the version on your own website, hampering future book promotion efforts.
People Of The Scroll
I'll be skipping my Friday post for Simchas Torah, the Jewish holiday marking the last reading from the Torah scroll, before we rewind it and start all over again. I don't know enough about scroll terminology to know whether a scroll stored on two wooden spindles has a special name, I just know it's not a codex. For my non-Jewish readers, the Torah scroll contains the five books of Moses, written on parchments sewn together in one long strip, a publishing technology that's been around for a couple thousand years. The rest of the Bible was also recorded on various scrolls, but relatively few are still published that way. The Scroll of Esther comes to mind. Since these scrolls have to be prepared by hand by a scribe following very strict rules, the end up costing tens of thousands of dollars. No print-on-demand need printers need apply.
While many readers know all this already, there's a physical aspect to the practice of Judaism that often goes unnoticed. It's the duty of Hagbah, the lifting of the Torah scroll, unrolled enough to show the portion that has been chanted out loud to the congregation, or is about to be chanted, in Sephardi shuls. Since the scroll is slowly rolled from one spindle to the other through the course of the year's reading, the weight leading up to Simchas Torah ends up all on the right hand of the Hagbah, and the following week, shifts all to the left hand. The person performing the act, the Hagbah, lifts the Torah off the readers desk raising the handles around shoulder height or higher, and turns around 180 degrees so the open section is visible to the congregation over his head. It's recommended to put a seam in the center of the open section as the seams are the strongest part of the scroll.
Depending on how quickly the congregation sings and how fast the Hagbah moves, the whole operation takes between 30 seconds and a minute. If something goes wrong and the Torah gets dropped, everybody present has to fast for 40 days. When the local congregation tried to sustain a morning Minyan (a quorum required for mourners prayers and public Torah reading) for a few years, I was usually the Hagbah because I'm too ignorant to do much of anything else. I dreaded Simchas Torah, intended to be one of the happiest days in the Jewish calendar, because I'm right-handed, and that left-handed lift that hadn't been tried for a year starts looming pretty large.
When I signed up, prior to my birth if I recall, I'd heard that Jews were the people of the book. I've come across plenty of Jews in town who read a lot of books and some of them are even in the publishing business. I just wish more of them had showed up for that morning Minyan. If you're ever attending services in a new place for the first time, and an old man teeters up and asks you if you're right-handed or left-handed, consult your calendar and answer appropriately.
While many readers know all this already, there's a physical aspect to the practice of Judaism that often goes unnoticed. It's the duty of Hagbah, the lifting of the Torah scroll, unrolled enough to show the portion that has been chanted out loud to the congregation, or is about to be chanted, in Sephardi shuls. Since the scroll is slowly rolled from one spindle to the other through the course of the year's reading, the weight leading up to Simchas Torah ends up all on the right hand of the Hagbah, and the following week, shifts all to the left hand. The person performing the act, the Hagbah, lifts the Torah off the readers desk raising the handles around shoulder height or higher, and turns around 180 degrees so the open section is visible to the congregation over his head. It's recommended to put a seam in the center of the open section as the seams are the strongest part of the scroll.
Depending on how quickly the congregation sings and how fast the Hagbah moves, the whole operation takes between 30 seconds and a minute. If something goes wrong and the Torah gets dropped, everybody present has to fast for 40 days. When the local congregation tried to sustain a morning Minyan (a quorum required for mourners prayers and public Torah reading) for a few years, I was usually the Hagbah because I'm too ignorant to do much of anything else. I dreaded Simchas Torah, intended to be one of the happiest days in the Jewish calendar, because I'm right-handed, and that left-handed lift that hadn't been tried for a year starts looming pretty large.
When I signed up, prior to my birth if I recall, I'd heard that Jews were the people of the book. I've come across plenty of Jews in town who read a lot of books and some of them are even in the publishing business. I just wish more of them had showed up for that morning Minyan. If you're ever attending services in a new place for the first time, and an old man teeters up and asks you if you're right-handed or left-handed, consult your calendar and answer appropriately.
Selling Boatloads Of Books
This (hopefully temporary) Amazon pricing glitch is a fine excuse to revist some thoughts about publishing and selling books. The connection is that the higher prices, about two dollar per book on average, haven't shown any tremendous impact on my Amazon sales yet, while direct mail order sales have picked up since I'm now the cheaper source. The problem is, I don't price my books based on an analysis of what the market will bear, I just go with the price I'd be happy paying for a similar book. I'm less concerned with the sales total than I am with having control over my happy price. Apparently, I'm pretty happy at $14.95, though I'm hoping to convince myself that I deserve better:-)
I just got around to sorting through a boatload of junk mail, and it included a flyer titled "Sell Books By The Truckload". The telephone seminar was scheduled for a couple weeks ago, so it looks like I missed out on becoming a millionaire, but the flyer itself was interesting. The pitch seems to imply that ANY self publisher can sell huge quantities of books to corporations who will give them away to employees. There's even a line about raising money for charities by forming some sort of alliance.
Here's the problem I have with it. I don't want to sell books by the anything-load. As much as I enjoy earning a living writing, giving corporations a cheap employee perk is not a personal goal of mine. Perhaps if I wrote motivational or feel good type books, I'd be happy to get them out there under any circumstance, and who cares if 95% of them end up in the company recycling bins without leaving the building. I can just picture a major corporation holding their annual company wide meeting (close circuit TV and Internet video), and the president speaking:
"And so, in lieu of a bonus this Christmas, we're giving you all free copies of Morris Rosenthal's book, 'How to feel good about earning less.' It's actually a book about self employment, and we thought it would help you review your career options over this holiday season. Since we purchased the book in large quantity, we earned the option to add our own subtitle, namely, 'The option is to earn nothing and lose your house.' Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all."
Some publishers make a living selling boatloads of phone books, it's just not for me. I know there are some literary publishers out there who look at my how-to titles as phone books, so I don't mean it as a put-down. I'm just pointing out that if your goal in publishing is more getting by than getting rich, there's no need to sell out at the first opportunity.
I just got around to sorting through a boatload of junk mail, and it included a flyer titled "Sell Books By The Truckload". The telephone seminar was scheduled for a couple weeks ago, so it looks like I missed out on becoming a millionaire, but the flyer itself was interesting. The pitch seems to imply that ANY self publisher can sell huge quantities of books to corporations who will give them away to employees. There's even a line about raising money for charities by forming some sort of alliance.
Here's the problem I have with it. I don't want to sell books by the anything-load. As much as I enjoy earning a living writing, giving corporations a cheap employee perk is not a personal goal of mine. Perhaps if I wrote motivational or feel good type books, I'd be happy to get them out there under any circumstance, and who cares if 95% of them end up in the company recycling bins without leaving the building. I can just picture a major corporation holding their annual company wide meeting (close circuit TV and Internet video), and the president speaking:
"And so, in lieu of a bonus this Christmas, we're giving you all free copies of Morris Rosenthal's book, 'How to feel good about earning less.' It's actually a book about self employment, and we thought it would help you review your career options over this holiday season. Since we purchased the book in large quantity, we earned the option to add our own subtitle, namely, 'The option is to earn nothing and lose your house.' Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all."
Some publishers make a living selling boatloads of phone books, it's just not for me. I know there are some literary publishers out there who look at my how-to titles as phone books, so I don't mean it as a put-down. I'm just pointing out that if your goal in publishing is more getting by than getting rich, there's no need to sell out at the first opportunity.