Remember Barry Eisler? He’s the bestselling thriller author who in March turned down a $500,000 deal with St. Martin’s Press in favor of self-publishing.

Last week, at Book Expo America, Eisler announced he’d just signed a deal for Amazon to publish his next book. The traditional publishing crowd sniffed their disapproval over his perceived turncoat behavior.

But as Eisler points out, the point wasn’t to self-publish. The point was to get the terms he wanted. Along came Amazon offering those terms, so he took them. In Eisler’s words:

“…it’s the terms that are important to me, not the means by which I achieve them. If these terms are a destination, self-publishing is undeniably an excellent vehicle for getting there. But it isn’t the only vehicle. And if another vehicle comes along that offers all these terms, plus a substantial advance, plus a retail wing that can reach millions of customers in my demographic… then, as a non-ideological businessman, I’m going to change rides.”

In a recent conversation with fellow author Joe Konrath, Eisler revealed some of the details that drew him to sign with Amazon:

• An advance “comparable” to that offered by St. Martin’s
• “Much better” digital royalties (one source says 70%)
• “Comparable” print royalties
• A three-month turnaround from submission to release
• Full control over the title and cover art
• No DRM on the e-book
• E-book released first, followed by paper

This deal shows that Amazon, as a publisher, is poised to cause major industry disruption, coming to market much faster and sharing royalties more equitably than traditional publishers, while bringing huge distribution and marketing muscle. Great news for authors, not so great for the old guard publishers.

The full conversation between Eisler & Konrath is a tremendously long but fascinating perspective on the current publishing industry and the changes that are occurring.

All of you know Amazon as a seller of books. What you may not have heard outside of book circles is that Amazon is moving into publisher territory. Over the past two years, it has launched several imprints. Three announcements have come in quick succession this month, showing that Amazon’s publishing program is picking up steam. All signs indicate the company is just getting started.

Amazon’s publishing debut came in May 2009, when it launched AmazonEncore and announced its first title, a previously self-published fantasy novel by 16-year-old Cayla Kluver. According to Jeff Belle, Vice President of Books for Amazon, the purpose of AmazonEncore was “to connect readers with great books that were overlooked the first time they were released.”

In May 2010, the company added AmazonCrossing, an imprint for translated works. Just as with AmazonEncore, Amazon announced its intention to monitor sales data to select the books it wanted to publish. Says Belle, “Our international customers have made us aware of exciting established and emerging voices from other cultures and countries that have not been translated for English-language readers.”

This past month, Amazon unveiled two genre imprints: Montlake for romance titles and Thomas & Mercer for mysteries and thrillers.

Now comes news that Amazon has hired Larry Kirshbaum, former CEO of the Time-Warner Book Group, to “assemble an editorial team that will develop and manage new Amazon imprints ‘with a focus on acquiring the highest quality books in literary and commercial fiction, YA, business and general non-fiction.’”

The careers page for Amazon Publishing currently shows 10 open positions ranging from Senior Acquisitions Editor to Publicity Manager. Very clearly, Amazon intends to continue developing imprints beyond the ones already launched, and it’s heartening to see business and non-fiction being specifically mentioned since so much of the current focus is on fiction.

What does all this mean for you as a non-fiction author?

To date, Amazon has not accepted manuscript submissions, instead using the power of its retail algorithms to cherry-pick existing books that are popular with readers but have so far not received widespread recognition or distribution. I can’t imagine its approach will change anytime soon. To open its doors to general submissions would flood the company with unimaginable numbers of unvetted manuscripts. Amazon’s retail data is its advantage over traditional publishers, who must assess manuscripts on gut instinct and best guess forecasts.

That means you won’t be able to actively pitch your book for Amazon to pick up. It does mean, however, that if you’re promoting your self-published book effectively, getting lots of positive reader feedback and achieving decent sales numbers, the Amazon eye might fall on you.

So far, there’s been very little available information about the terms Amazon offers as a publisher, so it’s unclear how an Amazon contract might stack up against a deal from a traditional publisher. More favorable? About the same? (If anyone knows details, please leave a comment.) Amazon’s press releases promise authors “marketing support and distribution into multiple channels and formats, such as the Amazon Books Store, Amazon Kindle Store, Audible.com, and national and independent bookstores via third-party wholesalers.”

Definitely a development to watch.

The blogosphere has been buzzing in the last month with news of two high-profile authors and their publishing choices.

On the one hand:
Barry Eisler, a bestselling thriller author, just turned down a $500,000 deal with his traditional publisher, opting to self-publish his next book instead.

On the other hand:
Amanda Hocking, an author who’s already made millions selling her self-published novels, has chosen to sign with a traditional publisher for a $2-million contract.

What gives? One successful author turns down a lucrative deal with an established house in order to self-publish, while a successful self-published author chooses to sign up with an established house. These seem like opposite strategies.

But both Eisler and Hocking have their well-considered reasons.

Hocking says it’s not about the money for her.

“Let’s be honest – if I self-published the Watersong series on my own, I could probably make $2 million within a year or two. Five years tops. I am fully aware that I stand a chance of losing money on this deal compared to what I could make self-publishing.”

Instead, Hocking’s looking for distribution muscle and mainstream exposure.

“Having large distribution is part of the reason why I wanted a deal, and part of that is having books in stores… I am getting an increasing number of emails from people who go into bookstores to buy my books for themselves or friends or family members, and not only does Barnes & Noble not carry my book, they can’t even order it for them. People are requesting my books, and they can’t get them.”

“I want to be a household name. I want to be the impulse buy that people make when they’re waiting in an airport because they know my name.”

Eisler feels ‘legacy publishers’ are out to lunch when it comes to the digital revolution. He wants the freedom to publish faster, charge what he considers optimum prices for e-books ($.99 to $4.99) and keep more of the revenue.

“I just don’t want to be part of an industry that doesn’t make sense, that’s fighting change rather than taking advantage of it. I want to make money by giving readers what they want, not by seeking ways to deny it to them.”

Hocking wants print books in bookstores. Eisler wants to focus on e-books.

Eisler says authors are leaving money on the table. Hocking says she doesn’t care about the money.

So who’s right?

They both are. Publishing with a traditional house has its benefits and its drawbacks. Same with self-publishing. One isn’t awful while the other is virtuous. It comes down to knowing what you want from your book and your writing career, having a realistic understanding of what each publishing route can offer, and choosing the one best suited to your goals.

Need help deciding? Try the 10-question quiz in our free Author’s Guide to Publishing Options. We profile both royalty publishing and self-publishing, along with the potentially tricky subsidy publishing model, laying out the pros and cons of each.

For a couple of months now, I’ve been mulling over the idea of Kindle Singles, the ‘shorter than a book’ format that Amazon launched.

Singles are meant to be 5,000 to 30,000 words, and you can tell from the way Amazon describes them that they expect Singles to work best for non-fiction topics. I haven’t heard much buzz about them in the content world, which seems strange to me. I thought experts and authors would be all over the opportunity.

Singles are faster and less expensive to create than a book. You can use them to serialize a book in progress, or experiment with content to gauge reader reaction. You can publish your special reports as Singles. And all along the way, you can generate revenue.

I didn’t really think of the Kindle as a platform for publishing articles, but the other day I came across a report from Kate Harper on how to write and sell articles through Amazon. She talks about articles of 3,000 words and up — even shorter than the suggested range for Singles.

Harper’s article (available through Amazon, of course, for $.99) is definitely worth checking out. It outlines everything you need to know to get started selling short-form material on Amazon and the Nook. Lots of attention is paid to formatting your content, but Harper also covers how to price your material, how long it should be, and how to describe your article so people know what they’re getting.

The success Harper has had selling articles confirms it: There’s a sweet spot between blog post and full-length book that non-fiction readers are hungry for, something long enough to fully explain an idea but fast enough to be consumed in under 30 minutes. In other words, short-format content is valuable.

I’m off now to take a look at what Highspot might package for Kindle reading. What’s your short format strategy?

One of the biggest challenges to not living in the United States is the additional wait time for all Apple technology releases. For some reason, we’re always a few months behind. So I’ve only had my iPad (64GM, 3G enabled) since June. During that time, I’ve realized a few key things about it.

1) Reading books on a backlit screen is challenging. Indoors, it’s fine. Outdoors, there’s glare that only gets worse in bright sunlight. The saving grace is reading at night in the dark — then the backlit screen is wonderful.

2) The iPad is very heavy compared to the other e-readers I’ve tried (Sony, Kobo, Nook, & Kindle). And heavy is the last thing you want in a portable reading device, as it reminds you too much of a p-book.

3) It’s totally fun to play free downloadable games on it. (Many hours of mindless distraction later, I still keep gravitating back to solitare.)

4) It holds a ton of music and video, and syncs my calendar, contacts, and multiple email accounts. Plus it can take notes and access web pages, not to mention the 200,000+ apps that do things I didn’t even know were missing from my life. The recent firmware upgrade has added some nice functionality.

The iPad was never meant to be an e-book reader only. The iBookstore is a good add-on for Apple, but it will never make them much money. The publishing industry doesn’t need to worry as much as the music industry did about iTunes (that was a game changer).

What the iPad really does is make laptops and mini-computers obsolete. It’s a completely new way to interact with information; iPod Touches were just the starting point. With the next generation of iPads coming next year, Apple is poised to dominate again. The other options in the market (Galaxy Tab, etc.) just reinforce that it isn’t about reading – it’s about portable connectivity and entertainment. Makes me feel all Star Trekker just thinking about it.

If you’re an author with an ebook, you should know about Smashwords. Smashwords calls itself an “ebook publishing and distribution platform.” It’s the distribution part that makes what the company does so valuable.

Upload your ebook to Smashwords and with one push of a button you can also put your book on:

• Kobo
• Nook
• Sony Reader
• iPad

Your book can also be made available in a Kindle format, though not directly through Amazon. Those are all five of the major e-readers on the market today. You don’t have to fuss with opening a publisher’s account at each one. Just one account with Smashwords and you’re in. Your book also becomes available for purchase through the Smashwords site itself. I’m not aware of any other company currently offering this kind of aggregated ebook distribution.

Smashwords pays 85% of your list price, minus a small credit card fee, on sales made directly through their site. On sales through most retailers (like Kobo and Apple), you earn 60% of your list price. Those are good numbers.

The one downside to Smashwords is its firm policy of taking ebooks as MS Word files only. It’s difficult to find ebook formatters who are skilled in creating a decent layout in Word, not to mention meeting some of the esoteric layout requirements that Smashwords imposes. Most ebook programmers work with ePUB files, which are essentially built using web code. (You can email Smashwords’ founder Mark Coker to be sent a short list of suppliers who can format ebooks in Word.)

Once you have your Word file in hand, though, you’ll be hard pressed to find an easier way to distribute your ebook.

E-readers have faced and overcome a number of issues in the past decade to get as far as they have:

• Technical limitations with the devices (creating the e-ink screens, getting size and weight down, engineering battery life)
• E-book format standardization (co-operation among publishers, much less tech companies, is rare)
• The perceived danger of lowering the price of books and thus their profitability
• A sense of tradition about “paper” books from publishers and readers
• A fear of piracy and bootlegging of books

The one issue that’s becoming more prominent by the day is the battle for market share among the various e-reader producers. Recent price wars have lowered e-reader technology prices by 75%. A first-generation Kindle would have set you back $450. Today, you can get a better version with more features for just $139. In order to stay competitive and maintain its price point of $149, the Kobo had to add wireless capability.

There are currently dozens of different e-readers on the market. This will change dramatically in the next year as price wars continue and the e-readers with fewer features or higher prices get muscled out. Already there have been casualties, such as the plasticLogic Que reader, which folded before it even launched. Expect to see many more e-reader brands die off.

Although the market for e-readers is growing at an astonishing rate (192% year-to-date and a record 172.4% in August over July of this year), it’s still a relatively small market worldwide with many competitors battling to add features while keeping prices low enough for the purchasing cycle to continue. There will be winners and there will be losers.

The overall war will be won by the companies that provide the best access to content AND the most flexibility to use that content. The Amazon Kindle has an early market lead and the clout to keep going. It just added a lending feature to compete with the Nook. More important, it recently launched — just in time for the Christmas buying season — a feature that allows people to give e-books as gifts, an e-reader functionality matched only by Kobo. If the Kobo can continue to grow, it has a good chance of being the number 2 e-reader, surpassing the Nook (see why here).

This year’s holiday season will be an important test. Come January, we should have a pretty good idea of how the e-reader market will shake out.

So e-books are taking over the world. Depending on who you ask, that’s either a good thing (readers who travel) or a very bad thing (publishers). Either way, the genie is out of the bottle for good. The big challenge is how to tap into the gift market.

If I purchase a p-book (you know, the traditional paper kind), I can read it myself, lend it to others, or give it away. There’s a lot of value in all three of those options. When I purchase an e-book, leaving aside the problem of being trapped on one type of e-reader, I can mainly just read it myself. That’s pretty limiting to the expansion of the market.

Barnes and Noble have tackled the lending issue with the Nook, which lets you lend an e-book to another Nook owner. While the book is out on loan, you get locked out of reading it yourself. But the loan feature has some major flaws, including the fact that you can only lend an e-book title once and there’s a two-week limit to the loan period. Who reads a loaned book in 2 weeks?

So far, no one has created a legal way for the general public to give e-books as gifts. There are ways to cheat to provide free copies to your friends, but that certainly isn’t happy news for either authors or publishers.

The illicit trading of music files is one of the ways that MP3s permanently transformed the music industry. In response, Apple started iTunes and legitimized the buying of music in single tracks. Now a whole “good” portion of the population is comfortable buying music online. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t solved the issue of giving music as a gift, other than offering the ubiquitous gift card. E-books suffer the same fate.

Trouble is, gift cards don’t create emotional connections to a personally selected item, like a particular book can. With books being a popular gift (and my favorite), this is a big issue to solve. Wish I knew how to crack this one. I’d be sitting pretty on the royalties.

UPDATE – Sep. 29, 2010: Just discovered that Apple iTunes offers this service for gifting songs, so hopefully they can lead the way with e-books as well!

UPDATE – Nov. 19, 2010: And now the two big main players (Kindle and Kobo) are both offering this option. Love it!

UPDATE – July 13, 2010 - Well, it’s happened already. Sony just broke the $100 e-reader barrier. Looks like there will be e-readers for everyone this holiday season! – R.S.

May 1st was a big day for the e-reader market. That’s when the Kobo, at $149, became the cheapest and most stripped down e-reader you could buy. Soon after, Borders started selling a competitive but cheaper reader, the Aluratek Libre for only $119.99. Now Barnes & Noble has a version of the Nook at $149, and Amazon Kindle promptly slashed its price to $189. Sony, not to be left out of the fun, has also dropped their prices. What’s really going on here? Is it simply competitive pricing, or something more?

Let’s look to the printer and toner pricing structure for a possible answer. Each day, printers are sold with more features, and at lower prices. The catch is the toner: It continues to be ridiculously expensive. I break out in hives when I have to buy toner cartridges for my colour printer. I even purchased a new printer once because it was cheaper than buying the toner! Don’t worry, I found the old one a new home at a recycling charity. Seems e-books are the new toner, and e-readers the new printers.

The first e-readers were expensive ($359 for the first Kindle), and e-books were cheap (typically about $9.99 per book). The publishers didn’t like it, but they had to live within a model where the retailer set the price. When Apple’s iPad launched this spring they forced a change that swept the industry, and now retailers have less discount wiggle room. Not surprisingly, e-books prices have shot up to the $12 range today.

The only lever left to support the rapid rise of digital book sales (and save the publishing industry) is for e-reader prices to continue to drop. Cheaper means much more accessible, and the number of people who own an e-reader will explode. Back to my printer and toner analogy, almost anyone can buy a colour printer these days, but the toner is a whole other story. We need to keep an eye on e-book pricing, and take bets on which e-readers will survive the price wars (the iRex has already filed for bankruptcy protection in the USA), and which ones will go down with last year’s colour printer models.

As Bette Davis/Margo Channing said in the movie, All About Eve, “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night!”

In the not-so-distant future, say 10 years from now, books will be sold in three main formats: e-books, cheap print-on-demand paper books, and specialty hard cover collector editions.

1) E-Books
Digital readers are becoming cheaper every day. The Kobo is priced affordably at $149 and the magic sub-$100 price point is coming very soon. At the same time, digital readers are also getting better: better screens, better graphics, color eInk options, wireless and Bluetooth capabilities, and more memory for more books. Although the iPad may not crush the Kindle, it introduces a different kind of experience complete with audio, video, and virtually anything else you want to add. The environmental/green angle of digital books is also a great selling point. Kobo (formerly Shortcovers) was created in 2008 for a digital book market that was expected to account for 5-10% of all book sales within five years. Now the estimate is as high as 95% in 10 years. Add it up and digital is the future of books.

2) Print-On-Demand Books
Some people will still want their “beach-proof” copy of a book or something they can mark up in the margins. Technology like the Espresso Book Machine has made it cheap and easy to print single copies of a book, available in minutes from your local bookstore (yes, they will still exist), Costco, or even the public library. The difference is that these books will be produced digitally, then output to a paper format for a small group of buyers. They still make vinyl records after all, so we won’t be done with paper for a long time.

3) Specialty Hard Cover Collector Editions
Back in the old days of publishing, there were two types of books published: inexpensive paperbacks meant for mass consumption, and leather-bound hard cover books that only institutions or the wealthy could afford. The latter were as much to be collected and displayed as to be read. Well, what goes around, comes around. J.K. Rowling may have single-handedly created the rebirth of the collector concept when she packaged Tales of Beedle the Bard for Christmas 2007, complete with jewel-encrusted cover and handwritten manuscript.

Collector books will have full-colour interiors, embossed covers, and other features that will make them feel like pre-Gutenberg illuminated manuscripts. They will be gifts for people who have everything or decor for people who want to be seen as having everything. They will not be meant for reading, just visual enjoyment. Remember the special edition of The DaVinci Code with all the beautiful pictures? Like that, only more so. Prices will be upwards of $75.

So where will you be in the transition? Leading the wave with your e-reader device or lugging around printed books? As I always tell my 85-year-old mother-in-law, how do you know you don’t like it if you haven’t tried it? Just like cell phones 15 years ago (who needs one of those?!?), e-readers are here to stay.