An excellent article today from PW. Here’s a snippet:
Traditional trade publishers have been testing the digital-first/digital-only publishing waters for more than two years now, and the pace is accelerating. This month alone, Penguin is reviving the Dutton Guilt Edged Mysteries line as a digital only imprint, Kensington has launched eKensington as an e-book only imprint, F+W Media is moving its Crimson Romance e-book imprint from a beta test to full launch coinciding with the rollout of its newest e-book subscription site, this one for romance books, while HarperCollins’s Impulse imprint will double its output from one digital title per week to two this fall and will add William Morrow and Harper Voyager to the Impulse line, which began with Avon.
While the publishers see the digital imprints as a way to publish new authors as well as to bring back once popular titles that have gone out of print, they insisted that they are publishing titles in the digital imprints with the same energy as titles in traditional imprints. “This is not a junior imprint,” said Lucia Macro, who manages Impulse at HC. “The same teams that work on print titles work on Impulse.” That includes the rights department; Avon has sold print and digital rights for He Kills Me, He Kills Me Not, plus a second title by Impulse debut author Lena Diaz to Germany. Approximately 80% of Impulse’s titles are original e-books, and the goal, as the imprint moves to embrace Voyager science fiction/fantasy and a variety of Morrow areas, is to keep the majority of titles e-originals, Macro said. The first Voyager title, The Asylum Interviews: Bronx, has just been released.
Publishers are acquiring both agented and unagented books, and while contracts vary from publisher to publisher, most call for no advances and a royalty rate of 25%–30% for the first 10,000 copies sold, then a 50% royalty on copies over the 10,000 threshold. Random House’s Loveswept, however, does pay advances, and Steve Zacharius, president of Kensington, said his company has a contract clause that provides for an advance if the company does decide to go ahead and publish a print edition.
Thanks to Michael von Glahn for the link.
