Guy LeCharles Gonzalez

Macmillan Authors Rally Fans in Battle with Amazon

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:February 5, 2010
Post category:Media
Post comments:1 Comment

Whether you agree with Macmillan's push for new terms of sale for their ebooks or not, one thing that's been particularly impressive is the extremely vocal support they've received from their authors, particularly those published by their sci-fi/fantasy imprint Tor/Forge. As the news broke last weekend, several Tor/Forge authors immediately reacted to Amazon's ceasing direct sales of their books by replacing Amazon's links on their sites and redirecting their fans to Barnes & Noble and IndieBound. Among them was Cherie Priest, whose popular steampunk novel, Boneshaker, was recently honored with a PNBA 2010 Book Award, and as of 12:45pm EST…

Generalization Fail

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:February 3, 2010
Post category:Media Personal
Post comments:0 Comments

When you’re ranting about the evils of “Big Publishing”, it helps to remember that for every My Life Outside the Ring, there’s also Boneshaker, and The Poetry of Pablo Neruda, and the entire First Second catalog! All of those happen to fall under the Macmillan umbrella. I’m not saying publishing isn’t all screwed up right now, because it damn sure is, but it’s also full of people who really do give a shit about good books and I know and work with a lot of them. We may not be running the companies from the top, but we’re sure as…

Shout-Outs: Lanier, Wendig and the Robots

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:January 24, 2010
Post category:Media Personal
Post comments:6 Comments

"The combination of hive mind and advertising has resulted in a new kind of social contract. The basic idea of this contract is that authors, journalists, musicians, and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind. Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion. Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising." Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget I'm knee-deep in final preparations for Digital Book World next week (look for the new website to relaunch by Tuesday, built by me!), but I wanted to give…

A Quick Note on the Fabled “iPod Moment”

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:January 16, 2010
Post category:Media
Post comments:2 Comments

The Pirate's Dilema (sic) by Browserd — The Pirate's Dilema by browserd

There are millions of books on amazon.com, and on average each will sell around 500 copies a year. The average American is reading just one book a year, and that number is falling. The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. Authors are lucky to be in a business where electronic copies aren’t considered substitutes for physical copies by most people who like reading books (for now at least).

–Matt Mason, The Pirate’s Dilemma

The op-ed I wrote for Publishing Perspectives earlier this week, “E” is for Experiment (Not E-books), got an unexpected amount of attention and I’m pretty sure it’s the most I’ve ever seen a post of mine fly around the Twitterverse. Writing for someone else’s site is much harder than blogging on your own, so full credit to Edward Nawotka for a great job of editing it, helping me bring forward my main points and carving away the extraneous content, most of which went into my previous post!

One of the comments I got on the article allowed me to elaborate a bit on one of the points I made, that “e-readers will never have their ‘iPod moment’ for one very simple reason: books are not music.”

Dan from BookLamp mildly disagreed with me, making a point about the potential benefits of cost-savings and discoverability afforded by eBooks and eReaders, making a subtle pitch for his own platform that purportedly “matches readers to books through an analysis of writing styles, similar to the way that Pandora.com matches music lovers to new music.”

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“E” is for Experiment (Not eBooks)

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:January 14, 2010
Post category:Media
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Much like TV, which quickly evolved from simply broadcasting radio programs into its own unique medium, there’s a line where something stops being a book and becomes…something else entirely — a completely new medium with its own rules, pros and cons. We’re not there yet, though.

Playing with the Kindle, Playing with the Future

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:January 12, 2010
Post category:Media Reviews
Post comments:6 Comments

A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past, he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

–Sidney J. Harris

It’s no secret that I’m not a big fan of eBooks or eReaders, but there’s no question they’re growing in popularity… at least amongst technology companies. While the hype coming out of last week’s Consumer Electronics Show was so over-the-top it’s difficult to take any of these new devices seriously, it does make you appreciate a bit more the huge advantages Amazon has with its Kindle.

Publishing Perspectives’ editor Edward Nawotka stirred up some controversy last week with his opinion that the current breed of eReaders were good enough, noting, “My septuagenarian mother is delighted with her first-generation Kindle.”

My thirty-something wife – an avid reader, elementary school teacher and generally a late-adopter – also enjoys her Kindle (a birthday gift from me in November 2008), mainly to read books she’s either unfamiliar with or unwilling to buy in hardcover. But it’s not going to become her primary reading option any time soon. Among her criticisms are the limited selection of books she wants to read; inelegant navigation and annotation functionality; and, in her words, “Everyone talks about portability, but what’s more portable than a book?”

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It’s Hard Out Here for a Pragmatic Optimist

Post author:Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
Post published:January 7, 2010
Post category:Media Personal
Post comments:3 Comments

“Publishing was never a business based on Wharton standards. It was a rich boy’s hobby.”

–Steve Wasserman (Kneerim & Williams)

Working in publishing isn’t for the meek. Neither is writing for that matter. They’re two things I’m really passionate about, though, and I’ve always counted myself lucky to work in the publishing industry, despite the ever-present danger of familiarity breeding contempt.

Over the past couple of years, though, it’s been particularly tough; like playing on a solid defense for a football team that has a terrible offense, constantly watching the QB get sacked, the RB get stuffed, WRs getting manhandled… and running on fumes by the 4th quarter as a result.

I consider myself a pragmatic idealist with an optimistic lean, but when you see colleagues and friends losing their jobs due to reasons beyond their control and underlying problems they didn’t create, it can be tough to feel good about the good things you’re involved in.

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