I love art fairs and street markets, spending the day wandering from booth to booth, catching photographers, painters, glassblowers, and sculptors arranging their pieces in aesthetic displays, hoping to catch the eye of a spontaneous shopper. I admire artists who choose this venue. It is raw and vulnerable. Anything can happen. Petty words might be tossed around carelessly as if the artist was not within earshot, making the compliments of true admirers all the more valuable.

In addition to street markets, artists have other options. Small galleries, coffee shops, restaurants and even hair salons display art for sale. For the rare few, a weekend exhibit in a prestigious gallery can turn a passion into a career. The Internet explodes with opportunity for artists who build clever websites and take advantage of social networking. Even animals are staking a claim in the world of art – elephants, horses, and dogs.

The doors are open to artists of all species who use a variety of mediums – paint, clay, bronze, glass, charcoal pencil and animation – to create, display and sell their art. We don’t even question the legitimacy of the concept. I would be appalled if a small enclave of people appointed themselves to review and reject or accept each piece submitted by an artist.

Yet that is what we have come to expect of the literary community (I ought to be ashamed of starting that sentence with yet, but I relish the freedom of breaking the rules).

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If you want to publish a book in print and have it appear in any credible catalogue, you will need an ISBN number – a unique 13-digit code that identifies your book from other books in the marketplace (including different formats of the same book in large print or in another language).

If you are looking for an ISBN number, go no further than R.R. Bowker for all your ISBN needs. Well, actually, you can’t go any further. Bowker is the only company allowed to sell ISBN numbers in the United States. The going rate for an ISBN at Bowker is $125, while the competition sells ISBNs for… wait a minute. There is no competition.

In addition to selling ISBN numbers, Bowker provides a variety of data services, including a yearly (public) report on the number of books published divided into a small list of categories. As is typical with a government-sanctioned monopoly, there is no motivation to produce a meaningful (public) report with useful categories. A pathetic category like home economics appears on the list but not politics. Juvenile literature isn’t even divided up into children’s, middle grade, and young adult. Both computers and technology are on the list separately, while sociology and economics are tallied together.

If you wish to see more detailed categories for books in print, you must buy directories from Grey House Publishing, a partner company and the only publisher allowed to print Bowker’s directories. Since the average person does not want to buy a monopoly-printed directory based on monopoly-gathered data, we’ll look at the report Bowker makes available to the public: (more…)

My new novel, “Hummel’s Cross,” is the story of a German fighter pilot who risks everything to help a family of Jews escape the Nazis during the height of the air war over Europe. It just went up for sale on Amazon, in hardcopy and Kindle (electronic) formats, and is already selling nicely. As riveting as the book is, another interesting tale is the manner in which “Hummel’s Cross” was published.

Democracy comes to publishing

Amazon recently announced that for every 100 hardcopy books they sell, they now sell 180 via download for their Kindle reader. This is a telling example of how yet another traditional media industry, in this case print publishing, is being turned on its head by the democratization of information that technology and the Internet have unleashed.

Catalyzed by the Kindle, the old model of getting a book published – an author submitting it to literary and publishing houses, and then collecting rejection letters – is becoming obsolete.  Any author with a story worth telling can publish their work on Amazon electronically, practically for free, and let the marketplace decide.  (more…)

You can probably date yourself by remembering how much comic books cost when you were a kid. Was it a dime, a quarter, a dollar? Can you believe they cost $4 now?

As the greenies would say, that’s unsustainable. Comic books used to be common. If you went in any kids house in the 50s or early 60s you would probably find some. Not so much anymore. Comics once sold everywhere magazines were sold. You could buy them in drug stores, supermarkets, seven-elevens, newsstands, even some liquor stores. But the so called “newsstand market” was a hostile place to comics publishers, and a shrinking one.

These days, it’s hard to find comics anywhere outside of the comic book store. That means that comics have become a “destination product.” It’s something you need to know where it’s sold, you have to physically go there and if you’re lucky, they might have what you’re looking for. However, most comics retailers order to sell out. So the odds are, you may be unlucky if you don’t come on “comics day,” the day the books come in from the distributor.

And that’s another problem with comics these days. There is only one distributor. When I got in the business in the mid 80s, there were around ten distributors. But over the years they all went under leaving Diamond Comics as the sole place publishers can distribute through to the “Direct Market,” as we call it. It’s like government run health care, if there’s only one place to go for your needs, you have to like their terms. (more…)