I might pay money for this.

Love it!
A battle of the books!

Thank for promoting my company, OR Books. Yeah, I wish. But I would pay money for this book. And to see that woman disappear from the national stage. She's an amateur. And she acts poorly. O'Really Good post.

With every defection from the coalition that put Obama in office Palin and her supporters are encouraged.

There is a piece on it (11-3) in today's NYTIMES "In Iowa, Euphoria Gives Way to Doubts About Obama," where a retired school nurse says she's had enough because he hasn't done enough, fast enough.

It sounds like she is afraid all her Republican friends who didn't decamp are going to think she has been made a fool of. It is, on the other hand, fools like this and those from the left who are now digging into their ideological pits who are the problem as much as the right wing fanatics.

They are the greater danger because they are less easily recognized, and have all their perfectly reasoned "logic" and self-righteousness, but beware--they are no less at fault.

One can hope... Hope for writers. Hope for readers. Hope that that crackhead will disappear and that people will stop embracing ingnorance as folksiness. God, I still have hope for a few of these things... R.

Lonnie, your fucking with us, right? Rouge is like make-up.
I thought Grandma was going ROGUE.

Main Entry: 1rouge
Pronunciation: \ˈrüzh, especially Southern ˈrüj\
Function: noun
Etymology: French, from Middle French, from rouge red, from Latin rubeus reddish — more at ruby
Date: 1751

1 : any of various cosmetics for coloring the cheeks or lips red

Friends in the publishing business tell me that now begins a really exciting time because:

-The industry has no where to go but up. Now that it's been decimated, the number of different business models for publishing that are rising from the ashes is limitless. There are lots of Mom and Pop publishers now. MY Mom is actually working with one on her next book.

-Big houses are starting to snap up real talent from smaller houses. My friend the poet just signed with FSG for his next book.

-Self publishing is no longer a dirty word. (or Looserville) There are companies that combine printing the book with distribution and retailing. I'm working with one of them right now on a book to tell the stories of the homeless at our local food pantry.

-On line companies that can fully engage both content providers and advertisers are starting to make money. So the rivers of talent that have been dammed up for so long can start to flow.

-The Walmart/target experiment of selling 10 books for 10 bucks apiece (the Palin book being one of them) won't last because loss leaders in retailing never last

-Independents---if they can establish a brand and a market, can make it.

All those forces mean that Going Rouge really does have a chance.

Hard times can bring great art.

Great post Lonnie!

This POD model is far from new, though - it's been going on for years. The issue is always the same: marketing and selling your book. This one has a much much better chance due to subject and contributors. It will get publicity (such as your blog), which is what you need. And she's a hot button topic, so it will probably sell reasonably well, esp as timed to come out to oppose her memoir.

But for most writers and books, POD is not a savior. Getting your book printed is the easy part. Getting people to even hear about it, much less buy it, is the extremely hard part. This book has advantages on that score that aren't applicable to the vast majority of books published, so even if it succeeds, it won't mean much for most writers, sadly.

@Ben Sen: always happy to see you stop by but I'm a little flummoxed by the content of your comment here. there's definitely a conversation to be had about the effect Obama's centrist approach to governing will have on mid-term election results - perhaps i'll get inspired to start it in another post.

@trig: methinks you may have been hoodwinked by what i see as a clever ploy by the Going Rouge cover design, which makes it appear this may be Palin's memoir when, in fact, it is the progressive collection of essays my post refers to. i would love to see the look on the face of any Palin supporter who picked up this item thinking it would contain Sarah's pearls of wacky wisdom.

@slikstone: no, the POD model is nothing new and you are right about Going Rouge having a lot going for it that makes its POD success more likely out of the gate. but i think the more POD successes that can be birthed in coming years, the more likely it will be that POD can be a viable alternative model to the big, corporate-controlled publishing houses. either way, a book ought to have merit before it attains success and having more than one route to success available to the worthy writer can only be a good thing in the long run.

Thanks for publicizing this! I will check this publisher (and this book in particular) out!

Ooops... Sorry LL. I read through this quickly before. It's a spinoff. duh...

Lonnie (who I remember back in the good old days used to answer me---how quick they forget when they move up!) and Silkstone. To give a couple of specific examples of POD as a reply to your dismissive comments. Old POD companies like I-Universe would simply print the book. New POD companies like Intermedia Publishing--have distribution agreements with Borders, Amazon and Barnes and Noble. So they do everything an old line publisher used to do. That's what changed.

@Chicago Guy: moved up? perhaps you know something i don't? in any event, i had no intention of snubbing you, my good brother - i just felt your initial comment stood well enough on its own and needed no embellishment from li'l o me. i'm much agreed with you on the potential of new-line POD options and while some of ms. silkstone's concerns about the format are notable, i'm less pessimistic about it all than she appears to be. now, if we can only get the Obama administration to pay attention to things lie Krugman's OpEd in the Times today and start funding some employment opportunities for us writers, we'll be rollin'!

Thanks Lonnie---I appreciate that. When I found out a month or so ago that POD could in fact not only get your book into Borders---but market the thing through every channel possible--I fell out of my chair. I had always believed that all POD could do was print the book leaving the writer with the important part left out---selling it!

Which is why I wanted to shout a big YES to a book like the one you are writing about. Because the nature of the business says that we are moving fast towards more and better books like this one.

Now I gotta go find Krugman. THAT I missed!

And yes---I predict good things are ahead for you. Call me psychic!

Ugh... that name... Uh-gain!!!! hehehehe You know I love you xoxoxox

My faith in the future of publishing can only be restored when I am published, quite successfully and with as little effort on my part as possible. I will accept no other evidence that publishing has a future, none.

Lonnie.
Thanks for this piece and for the kind service you offered in making the ordering information available.

I read a pre-review of this book and was grateful to see that the essays it contains are anything but simply satire. Seeing Naomi Klein’s name anywhere grabs my attention.

Thanks for putting the spotlight on a great subject.

Rated and appreciated.

I'm looking forward to the battle of the books; I'm thrilled for the future we writers are encountering. ~R~

I am vested in the process, and if I can stand on Sarah Palin's backside and ride her ass all the way to... well, where would you put her...? Thanks, LonBud. I needed that. ;-)

lonnie: the problem is that "we" lucked out in the last election because Obama was able to fool enough ideologues of the left by appealing to their naivete. They won't be so naive in the next election. It may actually become necessary to re-define liberalism but that only matters to a few. The rest only care if their bills are paid and what their friends think. It's best to think that when politicians are elected to office in this country rather than ideologues it's an accident.

This how it's done people! You fight freedom of speech you don't like with your own freedom of speech.

I practically started clapping when I first heard about this.

Going Rouge will do well because it's gotten lots of publicity. In fact I'm surprised that a mainstream publisher hasn't picked it up. POD is a bad idea -- too costly if the book does well. A 5000 copy print run would've been better. E-books are hard to sell. And if you're unknown, chances are you'll die a fast death. I've had some experience in this area -- I self-pubbed a novel some years ago. By spending all day for a year promoting it, I sold 4000 copies. Luckily, it was picked up by a mainstream publisher and fared better. There was no Kindle then (2001) but the word is that the best way to sell e-books for Kindle is to give them away for free. Alternative publishing has been around for years, but it's the rare book that makes it.

As someone who has both a hardcover book and CDs in print, I do not look forward to the digitized publishing and downloading of books. When I make personal appearances, I grimace every time a buyer smiles and assures me they're going to make copies of one of my CD's for all their friends. So far, no one has said the same about my book.

American publishing industry never be bleak. Where blind reader`s crops abundantly prosperous,how can publishing business bleak?I was in America in 2001 and visited Book expo in Chicago, I find out people buy any little bit sensational book without browsing. To buy any celebrates book people stand in Que. they read or not that is another matter but they buy blindly that is most important. If you know bit of manipulation you can make people fool forever.

Now to blow some holes in the balloons floated in this puff piece.

First, like so many other "best sellers" written by right-wing politicos, this is supported by pre-orders by rich Republicans. Those amazing sale figures come from mass purchases. Those books are not flying off the shelves into the hands of individual readers. They are sent directly for pulping into new paper.

Second, if you believe Palin wrote this book herself, you must have believed that John F. Kennedy really wrote "Profiles in Courage." At least Kennedy had respected historians ghost-write his book for him. Palin got Elephantman, or Zorkna, or one of the other low-level Republican operatives to hack this thing out.

Third, this is not a triumph for publishing. People don't read books any more. Writers are not paid anything any more. Publishing is shrinking as a business; this vanity-publishing project is the biggest release of the year?

If Isaac Asimov were alive today, he'd commit suicide. Because he would know that in this environment, Palin would put him in a concentration camp, or hunt him down from a helicopter like a wild wolf. And he'd be paid nothing for his robot stories or his annotated analysis of the Old Testament.

@tomreedtoon: thanks for commenting, but you're a little confused about a couple of things. Palin's memoir -- the actual writing of which, I would tend to agree with you, she had little to do with -- is the book being published by a mainstream, large conglomerate publisher. HarperCollins gave her a multimillion dollar advance last May, part of which she undoubtedly paid to San Diego ghostwriter Lynn Vincent to crank the thing out.

The book that's being published by POD and in e-book format is the collection of essays this post is about.

"New POD companies like Intermedia Publishing--have distribution agreements with Borders, Amazon and Barnes and Noble. So they do everything an old line publisher used to do. That's what changed."

Are they getting books reviewed in newspapers and magazines? Are they getting their authors on radio and TV? Because that's needed to sell most books. Mainstream media has so far scorned all POD published books, unless they become huge best-sellers -- at which point they are picked up by a regular publishing house in any case.

Getting your book in a bookstore is a good start, but it's not the be-all and end-all. Most new books spend about 60 days in a bookstore. If they're not selling by then, they're remaindered and then pulped. And those are books from major publishers which do publicity for their authors.

Oh, except many don't do that anymore. I know someone who sold her book to one of the "bigs", got a huge advance and still spent nearly $20k doing her own publicity. Her book did well, as these things go, but was not the best-seller that her publisher expected. All editors and agents will tell you now that you have to be your own marketing dept.

As for getting on Amazon, well, then how do you get noticed on Amazon? You're in a sea of just about every book ever published. It's worse than being in a bookstore. And even in bookstores, being on a shelf isn't as good as being on a display, which is something that major publishers pay extra money for (those end of row displays etc). It's a racket.

Getting into print, getting into bookstores, getting actual sales, selling well...it's all a continuum that gets increasingly narrow as you go along step by step. It's simple math: Hundreds of thousands of books are published every year. A few dozen become best-sellers. Even most books published by a major publishing house sell only a few thousand copies. Most self-published books sell less than 100 copies. Most published book authors make less than minimum wage for their work.

Think of the signal to noise ratio. People are inundated with media now and have many other choices than books. Even people who buy books have thousands to choose from. So what do they do? They buy ones that they see displayed and advertised all over, which are best-sellers, or they go with recommendations from friends, or read classics or best sellers from previous years, or read in their area of interest (biographies or whatever). And POD and self-publishing has in a way only made it worse, as it has multiplied the number of books being published considerably. Prospective readers are drowning in a sea of choices. How do you reach them?

People think the delivery system is the answer. It's not. It's all about marketing and publicity. People can't and won't buy what they don't know exists. You probably need at least a few hundred, maybe several hundred, people to hear about your book to just generate one sale. How do you reach, say, 300,000 people in order to sell 1,000 books, which would make you about $2,000?

Breaking through and achieving success as an unknown writer, even if you're with a major publisher, is still terribly hard. For every person you see who has done that, there are literally hundreds of thousands of writers that haven't.

Hopefully, people who can't tell the difference between "rouge" and "rogue" will buy this book and turn it into a bestseller. Lonnie, do you know if Sarah Palin's cover photo is the same one as shown here? That would be a trip!

I don't know what the cover of Palin's book is going to look like Lisa, but I'd be surprised if she or her publisher could come up with anything as subtle and perfect as the dark storm clouds and the lightning bolt we see on the cover here.

Yep. I was intrigued too when I got the notice from the Nation. I wish it were on newsstands though. I like the idea of someone buying it by mistake.

Good, informative stuff as always, Lon-man.

Lonnie: Excellent post and I will definitely order that Going Rouge book. Have you seen any of David Letterman's segment about things to do other than read Sarah Palin's new book? It's hysterical. (Rated earlier this morning)

Lonnie, I like the way your mind works. Bob is so right about you. If only we could both help Bob. ;)

I must add this. I am not just excited for what the future might be for writers, I am wildly excited about what is right now. I like to focus myself on the present. It is a gift. ;)

Thank you again for the lovely compliment you paid me on my big brother Bob's page. You are a fine gentleman and have what can only be described as true insight for picking a winner.

Thank you.

Hope

I didn't read this blog. But I have a really good Sarah Palin voice. Thanks for commenting on my blog, I don't feel alone in cyberspace! Haha. Keep on keepin on dude!

i am REALLY late to the party, but just stumbled upon this (saw you commenting elsewhere lonnie, wondered what you had been up to).

i hope this book does sell well, though with the distribution model, i doubt it will. so far, i had not heard of it except through this post, and i doubt many people will.

i agree 100% with everything silkstone said. silk, you nailed it, top to bottom.

i am very happy for POD. i think it will help extend the life of some books a bit, allow readers to get otherwise out-of-print books, and in a few extremely rare cases, create self-published hits, which the big publishers will then pick up.

but for the most part, i think the glee of seeing it as a major new route for writer is misplaced. silk got it just right:

"People think the delivery system is the answer. It's not. It's all about marketing and publicity. People can't and won't buy what they don't know exists."