Writers' Roundup

This morning’s Globe & Mail broke the story. Chapters/Indigo has aggressively entered the ebook market, offering 50,000 ebooks for sale from $4.99 to $19.99. These can be downloaded to your computer, your iphone, your iPod touch, Sony Reader etc.

You won’t find Canadian titles there — yet. Indigo has pitched its woo at the multinationals: Random House, HarperCollins, Harlequin, Simon & Shuster. Those publishers have already secured North American or worldwide epublishing rights.

Canadian publishers are lining up outside Indigo’s doors.  Here’s hoping they pack lunch. It could be a wait. Especially if you are a small literary press. Indigo wants “to prioritize what we think consumers are going to want Day 1 in both Canada and the U.S. – and that happens to be a lot of bestsellers and perennial bestsellers, plus core fiction and non-fiction.”

Core fiction and nonfiction? That’s Pilates talk for not the literary sort, dear. At least not right away.  “We need a month because we basically need to see how and what you read. Those recommendations will be based on your reading habits, your reading day … We’ll know exactly what you’re reading, how often, whether you’ve read the whole book that you’ve bought or not.” Sounds so … interactive, so holistic.

Big Indigo is watching you.

In the entire story I saw not one reference to the writers’ share of all this new money nor the possible impact on them of Indigo’s emergence as an ebook-marketing shape-shifter.

Hey look! Unpublished writers can submit a chapter from their novel or short story directly to Shortcovers and list it for free or for a fee of 99 cents. (I’m unclear who pays. The writer?)  Self-published writers can use this self-serve interface too.  The revenue split will be 70 % to the author, 30% to Shortcovers.

Ironically, self-published writers may get a sweeter cut from Shortcovers for their intellectual property than writers published professionally.