From Southern Review News:
 
Add D.B. Henson to authors finding success as self-publishers
 
D.B. Henson is among the growing list of successful self-published authors who have used self-publishing to break through the glass ceiling from self-publishing to traditional book publishing.
Henson, who lives in Nashville, worked as a real estate agent for 10 years and as the director of marketing for a construction company for seven years.
 
She self-published her debut mystery Deed to Death as an e-book in spring 2010 and sold more than 100,000 copies. Word-of-mouth helped spread the word about the novel, which was named a Best of 2010 Kindle Customer Favorite.
 
Today the book is available as a paperback from Touchstone, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.
 
Henson wrote about a world she knows in Deed to Death. In it, real estate agent Toni Matthews' fiancé, architect Scott Chadwick, falls to his death at one of his construction sites. Toni buries him on what was to be their wedding day. Scott's death is ruled a suicide but Toni isn't buying it. She sets out to discover the truth about Scott's death and soon finds herself a target for murder.
 
Apple cracks down on e-book sellers
 
Kobo customers are among those no longer able to buy e-books through the company's iPhone/iPad app.
Kobo has fallen in line with Apple's new rule that prohibits apps from offering direct sales of media content unless Apple can take a 30 percent share of those sales.
The policy, announced earlier this year, has affected Google Books, too, according to the Wall Street Journal, which added that the newspaper itself no longer sells subscriptions on its Apple app.
 
On its blog, Kobo reassured customers that the change affects purchasing only, which will now have to be done at Kobo.com. "Your books are safe!" Kobo wrote, noting that users "can continue to use the Kobo app to read them.”
 
Kobo's announcement was just the beginning of the end for integrated e-bookstores as Apple finally brought the hammer down on e-reader apps, enforcing its new in-app subscription rules that require app developers to strip out any links to external mechanisms for purchasing digital books or subscriptions," CNet added.
 
Amazon and Barnes & Noble also "updated their iOS e-reader apps" so customers will have to purchase e-books on the companies' websites, then sync their libraries via the apps.
 
B&N, Amazon, and Google Books have all taken pains to make it abundantly clear that you can only buy their e-books from the e-store 'through the Safari browser on their device or any computer' and have removed direct links to those stores from their Nook apps.
 
For a price, NetGalley distributes digital ARCs to reviewers
 
Publishers who traditionally promoted new title releases by sending out paper advance copies  - called galleys or advance review copies (ARCs)  - to reviewers, bloggers, booksellers, and libraries can now send them as digital e-book files through the NetGalley service.
 
“There’s a whole new social-media aspect of marketing books,’’ said Fran Toolan, president and founder of the publishing software company Firebrand Technologies, which owns NetGalley.
 
About 27,000 “professional readers’’ are registered at netgalley.com, more than four times than there were a year ago. Just over 100 publishers use the service, from big publishers like Random House Inc., HarperCollins Publishers, and Penguin Group to small indie houses, including a few that publish only e-books.
 
Seth Godin’s Amazon imprint bundles e-book with 200 free songs
 
Marketing guru Seth Godin created a new imprint, The Domino Project, in partnership with Amazon as a vehicle to experiment with pricing, promotion and other aspects of publishing.
 
The Domino Project’s latest title, Anything You Want by CD Baby founder Derek Sivers, aims to hook consumers with 200 free MP3s when they buy the book.
The book on July 1 was #28 on the paid Kindle bestseller list.
 
The Domino Project focuses on “manifestos” - “designed to be short and approachable by the majority of the population that doesn’t ordinarily seek out books as a source for information.” Anything You Want, a business/self-help book, is 88 pages long.
 
Domino Project e-books are available exclusively through the Amazon Kindle store. Amazon also distributes print versions of the books into bookstores, and sells them as digital audiobooks on Audible and as regular audiobooks.
 
One of the Domino Project’s goals is to experiment with pricing. The hardcover edition of Anything You Want is also available as a five-pack “for sharing” ($39.99) and 52-pack for organizations and events ($349.99). One hundred copies of the book were also available as a “very limited edition collectible,” and they’ve all sold out, Seth Godin told me.
Anyone who buys the book gets a free download code for over 200 songs from indie artists, selected by Sivers and available through his website. Sivers is also creating 10 animated videos to accompany the chapters of the book, and they’ll be available through his website for the next two weeks.
 
Of the four Domino Project titles released to date, Godin said, “every one made the Top 10 list …We have many more titles in the works and have no precise plans for how long the process goes on. Each time, we’re going to try to push one boundary or another. The main goal is to experiment in a way that will give the publishing industry confidence to start shifting and testing and getting books into the hands of people who want to read them.”
 
California State University opts for $49 e-book over biology textbook
 
Nature Publishing Group and California State University (CSU) have announced a three-year partnership that will eliminate paper textbooks from certain classes, and replace them with interactive e-books instead.
 
College textbooks are some of the most expensive pieces of disposable literature around. A book that a student uses for approximately four and a half months can cost as much as $200, and every semester, Cal State students spend upwards of $1,000 just on the textbooks.
 
According to a 2005 study by the Government Accountability Office of California, the average cost of a college textbook was rising six percent a year, or double the national rate of inflation.

Congress passed a law in 2008 (Public Law No: 110-315) that required textbook publishers to unbundle supplementary content (audio, DVD, software) from textbooks, and disclose the textbook pricing to school faculty, as well as describe what changes took place from edition to edition, so the faculty could effectively decide if the university bookstore had to buy a whole new series of books to sell to students each year.
 
The law forces a situation that made the use of e-textbooks the perfect solution. Technically they are 100 percent interactive content, so no unbundling is necessary, and there's no material cost for their annual revision.
 
The first e-textbook in the program will be Principles of Biology and will be used in the Introductory Biology class at CSU Los Angeles, Northridge, and Chico campuses beginning in September 2011. Each school will be testing a different licensing and access model. It will only cost $49 per student, and will include 175 interactive lessons.
Principles of Biology will be released to the general public on Sept. 1, 2011. (Source: Tim Conneally, BetaNews.com, May 24, 2011)
 
Books in bad taste:Kwame Kilpatrick book called ‘a pile of woo’
 
Convicted felon and former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick- who owes $860,000 in outstanding restitution debt - is attempting a dodge to channel royalties to his sister.
 
The day before he was to be re-incarcerated, he signed a contract that directed all proceeds from book sales to his sister and the publisher, Aktion Enterprises LLC, formed by Ayanna Kilpatrick Ferguson, and Creative Publishing Consultants, agreed on May 24, 2010, to split the proceeds of the book that was tentatively titled My Turn: The Rise, Fall and Revelation of Kwame Kilpatrick.
 
The next day, Kilpatrick was sentenced to 18 months to five years in prison for hiding assets that could have been used to help pay $1 million in restitution he owed the City of Detroit as part of a plea deal to end the 2008 text message scandal. He still owes about $860,000.
 
Judge David Groner had warned Kilpatrick to have his affairs in order before returning to his courtroom for sentencing on May 25, 2010.

Kilpatrick gets his legal advice from the comically incompetent Daniel Hajji.
Hajji told the Detroit Free Press the contract was "absolutely not" an attempt to avoid paying restitution. (Source: July 1, Detroit Free Press)
 
Marketing books: Authors and publishers turn to publicity stunts
 
For some authors and publishers, the answer has lately come from attention grabbing stunts, such as novelist Jennifer Belle's hiring of several dozen female actresses to ride the subways of New York and laugh uproariously while reading her book. The stunt got a lot of press, with ample coverage in New York media including the New York Times and New York Post, according to Publishing perspectives editor Ed Nawotka. A stunt by German publisher Eichborn  had promotional banners tied to flies (the living, buzzing kind), which were released at the Frankfurt Book Fair. American author Brad Meltzer  put together a funny YouTube video mostly featuring members of his own family giving his books poor reviews - including a small child's comment: "Interesting premise if you don't think about it too much."

Milestones: Records, prizes and news of note in book publishing
 
George R.R. Martin's A Dance With Dragons, book five in his epic "A Song of Ice and Fire' series, had the highest single and first-day sales of any new fiction title published this year: 298,000 copies in print, digital, and audio formats, publisher Random House announced. Sales of 170,000 hardcovers (26 percent of the 650,000 pre-publication printings); 110,000 e-books; and 18,000 audio books were reported sold. Sales were strengthened by a new fan base created by the HBO series based on Martin’s first book in the series, Game of Thrones. Print runs for hardcover, trade and mass-market copies of Martin's four previous volumes in his series: A Game of Thrones, A Clash of Kings, A Storm of Swords and A Feast for Crows totaled more than four million copies. There are 8.5 million copies in print and digital overall.
 
BEA 2011 attendance nearly flat with 2010, authors attending decline
 
BEA has released preliminary attendance figures for this year's show. The total was 21,664 people, almost even with last year's final tally of 21,919 people.
 
The falloff was slightly higher among "attendees" (as distinguished from exhibitors), who numbered 13,028 - a decline of six percent, or 844 people, from a year ago. The organizers say over 500 fewer authors were enrolled as attendees, accounting for much of that decline.

Overall, Reed's business at Javits grew with the inclusion of BlogWorld attendees, giving them a total of 23,067 people in the building.
 
This year's total provides a slightly mismatched comparison to last year, when the convention was reduced to two days of exhibits rather than three. Last year BEA gave up their dual counting system, in which they noted both total registrations and the number of people they could "verify" as actual attendees, in favor of a single tally of those who showed up.
 
Show organizers have also worked to focus on a smaller pool of the kind of attendees exhibitors are interested in addressing (primarily booksellers and librarians, along with true industry professionals).
 
BEA stopped breaking out the total number of "book buyers" in 2010.