New Book Emphasizes Virtue of Conformity in Apache Culture

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PINETOP–

LAKESIDE, Ariz. (PRWEB) May 30, 2015 — “In nearly all cultures, stories and rules serve as moral compass to guide the youth on their true passage to adulthood,” historian and author Judith W. Vicario says. The Apache tribe is no different. Mothers and fathers can speak to their children, admonishing them about respect and traditions. Adherence to the rules dictates survival. But there always comes one person who will challenge the tribal authority and customs. Such is the story of “Apaches – Legend of the Crown Dancers” (published by Xlibris). In this compelling fiction, Vicario weaves a story that demonstrates the terrible repercussions of selfish pursuits in a society that thrives so much on consensus.

Set in the ancient landscape of Cibecue, Arizona, “Apaches” chronicles the story of a young girl who seeks to break the norms and traditions of her culture. She broke the rules without considering the possible consequences of her action to herself and to her people. The spirits of the creator, the Crown Dancers or the Gaan are not to be disrespected and upon learning what the girl did, they decide to conclude the matter through a severe punishment. The account that followed illustrates a rich detail of what happens when you defy traditions.

“There is an endless appeal of examples on how following the morals of a society pertains to daily living. This book provides such exemplification, calling into mind the daily accounts of children and adults who believe they can or are entitled to commit any number of crimes against society just because they ‘want’ something.”

Pulsating with vivid descriptions of the culture, “Apaches” does not only incite moral guidance for children but also provide useful facts for those seeking in-depth knowledge of the Apache culture.

“Apaches – Legend of the Crown Dancers”


By Judith W. Vicario


Hardcover | 8.5x11in | 34 pages | ISBN 9781503555761


Softcover | 8.5x11in | 34 pages | ISBN 9781503555778


E-Book | 34 pages | ISBN 9781503555785


Available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble

About the Author


Judith A. Vicario graduated from California State University at Los Angeles with a bachelor’s degree in history and went on to receive a teaching credential. She taught school in Glendale, California for several years and decided to return to Arizona. Rather than continue a teaching career, she took a job with the White Mountain Apache Tribe as editor of the Fort Apache Scout, tribal newspaper. During her time with the Tribe, Vicario readily took the opportunity to write about all facets of daily Apache life, as well as exploring Apache culture and traditions. The Fort Apache Scout newspaper maintained subscribers all over the world. Vicario lives in Pinetop, Arizona, about three miles from the reservation.

Xlibris Publishing, an Author Solutions, LLC imprint, is a self-publishing services provider created in 1997 by authors, for authors. By focusing on the needs of creative writers and artists and adopting the latest print-on-demand publishing technology and strategies, we provide expert publishing services with direct and personal access to quality publication in hardcover, trade paperback, custom leather-bound and full-color formats. To date, Xlibris has helped to publish more than 60,000 titles. For more information, visit xlibris.com or call 1-888-795-4274 to receive a free publishing guide. Follow us @XlibrisPub on Twitter for the latest news.


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US University Presses Prioritizing Social Media Engagement

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American university presses are harnessing social media for scholarly engagement and remain focused on meeting the challenge of long-term preservation.

By John W. Warren

John Warren

University press representatives from the US, Canada, and abroad ascended to Denver, Colorado for the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) 2015 Annual Meeting, June 18–20, on a high that probably had little to do with the marijuana dispensary across the 16th Street Mall from the host hotel Sheraton Denver. Despite the reality that many presses are necessarily accepting the mantra that “flat is the new up”—particularly for small to medium presses that the AAUP terms Tier 1, 2, and 3 — the mood in Denver was upbeat.

AAUP’s membership is a collegial and supportive group of professionals truly concerned with the creation, production, and dissemination of scholarship. The meeting’s theme “Connect, Collaborate” was not an empty platitude. The meeting’s positive mood can also be attributed to spirit of innovation embraced by many presses, the feeling that while scholarship and the academy are changing, university presses are willing and able to evolve and help drive developments, even if the precise path from here to there is still opaque.

Youth and Twitter

Attendees numbered approximately 650 press professionals, perhaps not surprisingly skewed somewhat toward the higher echelons of university press organizations, as well as publishing consultants and numerous vendors. The AAUP instituted, for the first time, a formal mentorship program at the annual meeting, offering young professionals, such as Clara Totten, Digital Editor at Georgetown University Press, the opportunity to learn about publishing careers from an experienced member like Matt McAdam, Senior Acquisitions Editor at Johns Hopkins University Press. Whether or not the mentor/mentee relationship building led directly to the popular Twitter hashtag #aaup15pickuplines is hard to discern. One attendee commented to me that she was thrilled to have the opportunity to attend but disappointed to find few editorial assistants like her at the meeting. 

The pace of tweeting among attendees was fast and furious. A lively session entitled “Scholarship in 140 Characters? Using Social Media in Acquisitions,” chaired by McAdam, showed as a backdrop the meeting’s live twitter feed #AAUP15 and demonstrated that panelists like Greg Britton, Johns Hopkins University Press Editorial Director, and Director of University of Georgia Press Lisa Bayer, could deftly tweet while serving as panelists. Britton discussed how authors can be found and wooed via their twitter feeds as well as how authors have chosen to publish with JHUP due, at least in part, to JHUP staff’s active use of social media. An audience member asked the not unreasonable question if, after we’ve been told for so long that sites like Facebook and Twitter are verboten at the workplace, it’s now expected to use them as part of our jobs? McAdam half-jokingly answered that if Britton walks into his office he better have Tweetdeck open or else.

Long-term Preservation

University presses, like libraries, share a concern for long-term preservation of published works and digital assets. Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist Vint Cerf, famous among other things for co-designing TCP/IP protocols at ARPANET and known as one of the “Fathers of the Internet,” delivered a thought-provoking plenary session in an interview format moderated by Alphonse MacDonald, Director of Marketing and Technology at National Academies Press. Cerf discussed the importance of a “digital velum” system for the preservation of online content, but his comments couldn’t quite wiggle out of a tangled paradox: We shouldn’t (and can’t) preserve everything; we don’t know what will be useful in the future; and we don’t want digital objects and data to be preserved by accident, as has been the case throughout much of the course of history. (Even the potted plant on the plenary podium had its own twitter feed and plenty of wry comments on the proceedings, digital commentary that should indubitably be saved for future historians of scholarly publishing.)

John W. Warren is Head of Mason Publishing Group & George Mason University Press and adjunct professor in George Washington University’s master of professional studies in publishing program. He is the author of several articles about publishing, including the recent “Zen and the Art of Metadata Maintenance” in the Journal of Electronic Publishing.

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Publishing Turns to YouTube for Salvation

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As YouTube stars start to publish books they are bringing their millions of fans into bookstores, giving the book business an unlikely windfall.

By Dennis Abrams

At the Los Angeles Times Jacket Copy, Carolyn Kellogg asked the question: “Will a book of witticisms for PewDiePie’s ‘bros’ lift publishing’s bottom line?

Who or what, you might ask, is a PewDiePie?

His real name is Felix Kjellberg, he’s a video gamer with a “legion of fans he calls ‘bros.’”

And “legion” might be a bit of an understatement. He’s got 37 million subscribers to his YouTube channel. That’s right. 37 million.

And now, he’s written a book. This Book Loves You is a “collection of aphorisms, bits of wisdom-slash-jokes, paired with photos and others visuals.” It’s set to be released in October in the UK, Germany, Norway, Sweden and France, and in the U.S. from Razorbill; part of PenguinRandomHouse.

Ben Schrank, president and publisher of Razorbill said in a statement, “Razorbill and Penguin US are excited to bring the words of PewDiePie to the American people in book form. And with more subscribers than Taylor Swift and One Direction combined, Felix is without question one of the most influential stars of this generation.”

If PewDiePie makes it big, he won’t be the first YouTuber to hit the bestselling lists. Grace Helbig, with 2.4 million subscribers, saw her book Grace’s Guide: The Art of Pretending to Be a Grown-Up on the lists. And the UK’s Zoella’s (Zoe Sugg) Girl Online sold 78,000 copies in its first week, making it England’s fastest-selling novel of 2014. (That it was later revealed to have been ghostwritten might or might not be beside the point.)

And there’s I Hate Myselfie, Shawn Dawson’s collections of essays that hit U.S. bestseller lists in March, which publisher Atria claimed was the “fastest-selling book of any YouTube Star.” And there’s also Mamrie Hart’s You Deserve a Drink, another YouTube star, whose “boozy memoir” hit the bestseller lists in May.

As Kellogg wrote:

“What these YouTube stars share is an ability to connect with fans, usually teens but also older readers, who often can prove elusive to traditional publishers. The robust YA market has shown that young readers can be extraordinarily devoted, once they connect to an author. Or, publishing hopes, to a YouTube star.

“The bigger question for publishing, though, is if these projects are helping to create lifelong readers — people who’ll want to buy more books — or if they’re just looking for a physical manifestation of that one YouTube favorite they can have on a shelf for a while.”

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Marketing Subscriptions Prompts Amazon’s Royalty Payment Pivot

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Kindle Unlimited is one of the reasons Amazon is now favoring long-form writers over short-form, writes M.P. Rey

After offering indie short form authors favorable royalty rates, Amazon has pivoted to favor long-form in order to attract bestsellers and bolster sales of Unlimited subscriptions.

Editorial by M. P. Rey

I knew it would happen.

In a sense, we all knew it would. Didn’t we?

The golden age for short-story writers had to come to an end. Earning royalties of $ 1.30+ a copy for a story, however short, could not last forever. And indeed the come-back-to-reality punch hit many writers a couple of days ago when we all received a message from Amazon. Simply put, the party will end July 1st when the new Amazon Select policy kicks in. Writers that lend exclusivity to Amazon making their stories available for the Kindle Unlimited subscription program will be paid by page reads and no longer by borrowed units “to align the interests of the authors and the readers,” as the e-mail explains.

LOL.

How do I feel about this?

In principle I like this, even though it might have a devastating effect on my current income. I like it for three reasons.

1. It was indeed unfair that longer books did not earn more than short stories under Select.


2. The old policy did prompt writers into serializing their fiction even when not necessary (guilty as charged – my story Naked Night Love was supposed to be published as a novel, but came out as a serial, for example).


3. I like the idea that quality books get better financial treatment. (Now, I’m not sure that reader engagement is the right way to access the quality of a book, but that’s another story.)

The new policy looks like a step forward on all these counts. It doesn’t pay longer pieces of writing tout-court. It pays them more if they are read in their entirety. This is an unprecedented shift in the publishing market and will have profound implications in the style, content and focus of most ebooks.

At the very least this should kill most of the scam and junk books published daily on Amazon to game the system by taking advantage of the low (10%) reading threshold required for royalties to be paid. And that’s a really good thing. Personally this will make me want to engage more with writing longer pieces of fiction, just like many other writers will probably do. So, in a sense, mission accomplished, Amazon — less shorts from me from now on, or at least not until I know how much you’re going to pay per page and how many pages my readers actually read of my stories. (I’d better start stocking up on antidepressant before July 1st.)

However there’s much more than meets the eye.

Do I think Amazon is playing nice?

Not so much. For many reasons. Changing policy with just two-week notice is not nice, for example. Clearly they didn’t want to give competitors too much advantage. But some of us could have taken measures to limit the impact. Find a day job, if nothing else. Not disclosing the actual expected royalty per page is pretty uncool too. That would have empowered writers to make decisions, rather than gamble on their destiny and wonder if the $ 0.10 per page example Amazon gave in its notorious email is even close to reality. (Most people expect something in the range $ 0.01-0.03 instead).

In any case the big exodus has started. Rumor has it Amazon is letting people withdraw their titles from Select if they get in contact directly. I’m not a lawyer, but it sounds obvious that you can secede from a contract if one of the parts changes the terms at whim. And Select is a contract that lends exclusivity.

To Sell Amazon Unlimited, They Needed Shorts

So, some people are opting out. Let’s face it. Amazon is not the best hub for short-story writers. The royalty scheme with a 35% share for anything priced less than $ 2.99 is pretty unfair to short-story writers. It is difficult to sell shorts at $ 2.99 or more. Lower prices would earn you a tiny cut in royalties. Other retailers pay around 60% royalties, and that’s a lot better for short-fiction writers, but at the moment their market share is limited.

At the moment, because many things may happen now that the new policy kicks in. However, it seems unlikely to me that Amazon will let big sellers of short fiction leave that easily. Readers need to perceive they are spending much more than $ 9.99 per month to want to subscribe to Kindle Unlimited. And considering that the amount of stuff they can read in a month is limited, the best way for Amazon is to have serialized short/midsize fiction. For this reason I expect to see fairly high royalties per page that would make top short-story writers stay in the program. (I’m an optimist.)

From my point of view, attracting short-fiction writers and keeping them was obviously the reason why Select paid, until now, royalties independent from length. Amazon needed to attract a lot of short-story writers to launch Unlimited. The boom of short-story serials was prompted by this policy. It was mutually beneficial, good for indie writers (especially short-story writers that were penalized by the 35% royalty cut) and good for the publisher to get subscriptions.

It was especially good for indie writers that were trying to break into the market and didn’t have someone (a wife, a husband, a significant other…) supporting them financially while they wrote their first or second masterpiece. Serialized short fiction is exactly what many writers did in the past to navigate the uncertain waters of the publishing world. Ever heard of Dickens, Dostoevsky, or Dumas? Now it’ll be an awful lot harder to get started as an indie or becoming a successful one.

Kindle Unlimited royalty Rates had been consistent at about $ 1.35 for the past few months, a sum that as of July will longer be relevant. (Source: http://www.fonerbooks.com/selfpublishing/)

An Effort to Clean Up the Storefront

However, besides cutting on the sudden outpouring of short-fiction and serialized novels and make things harder for short-fiction authors, the new policy will have much more profound effects.

An insane amount of books are now available on Amazon, but — let’s face it — most of them are unsuccessful and a large part are pure junk. Now that the store is in place thanks to the relentless publicity of tens of thousands of indie writers trying to sell their stories, Amazon is, in my view, more and more concerned in cleaning up its store of the unsuccessful books and the unsuccessful authors. It’s understandable. From a entrepreneurial point of view that’s what any bookstore would do. You don’t want your best-selling books and potential best-selling authors lay undiscovered in the back of the store. You want to bring them to the eyes of the public. You want to get rid of the unsuccessful and earn lots of money with the successful.

Amazon knows perfectly well that it is not going to make huge profits with a smorgasbord of barely read indie books. They already gave the unsuccessful a platform with free access. But the actual money is elsewhere. Publishing houses earn the majority of their income from just few titles — the bestselling ones. And Amazon is aligning. The small democratic hub for indies is now growing into a publishing giant that wants to challenge and possibly gobble up the big established publishing houses. It wants the real deal: bestselling authors under exclusivity.

Clearly no one in their right mind can think that the new change in policy is just out of kindness to the long form story writers (who, by the way, were justly upset because of the Select royalty scheme). Just like the old scheme was put in place to launch a subscription system and attract readers that spend a lot monthly ( i.e. read lots of short fiction per month), this change now reflects, in my view, a well-planned corporate strategy that aims at attracting big sellers and possibly big names into Kindle Direct Publishing and lend Amazon exclusivity.

It’s About Attracting Bestsellers to Amazon Exclusively

Lots of indie authors who are relieved by the new royalty system might wake up to a not-so-rosy future. Some may have not understood that a pay-per-page systems will lure into Select power writers and the space for not-so-well-established indies will get smaller and smaller. Yup — some might be getting more for their 400-page masterpiece enrolled in Select (assuming people read it cover to cover), but the borrows will go down dramatically if more and more household names sign into the program. And that’s exactly where the program is aiming at now from my point of view: take some bestseller writers from big publishing houses and get them to publish directly into Select. Or at least force big publishing houses to subscribe their titles to Select.

A clue of this is in the very high (10 cents per page) royalty one can derive from the example used by Amazon to describe its new royalty scheme. I don’t think these numbers are too far from reality. Probably Amazon will be happy to pay close to that, maybe in the range of 5–6 cents, at least initially. Big writers would earn a fortune if payed by page reads, especially those with long backlists of massive novels. What’s in for Amazon? Exclusivity. Amazon will be eroding the market from other publishers through exclusivity. Actual sales will make up for the generosity towards Select writers that can write major page-turners. Exclusivity will cement the dominant position of Amazon in the digital market and possibly in the global publishing market.

If this happens, some will certainly gain from the pay-per-page new scheme. Most will lose.

Suggestions on good antidepressants?

A keen observer of human sexuality, M. P. Rey loves to touch the raw nerves of society, exploring different facets of human behavior, sexuality, feelings and love. Most of his short stories and novellas climbed the best-seller charts of LGBT Fiction, LGBT Romance and Gay Erotica on Amazon.His titles include: Confessions of a Kinky Cop (2012); A Gay Kinky Game (2012); The Man at the Window (2012); The Photographer (2012); Best Friends, Best Lovers (2013); What Men Won’t Tell You (2013); Three Men, One Bed (2013); Office Mates (2013); Sid & Monroe (2014). He has recently published two new serials: The Total Owner (2015) and Naked Night Love (2015).

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Amazon will pay some authors for every page you read instead of every book you download

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Amazon is introducing a new system that completely upends the way authors and publishers make money from their books. Starting next month, the company will pay authors based on the number of pages people read from their books — not the number of copies sold.

Of course, the change is limited in scope — at least for now. The new system adjusts how authors receive royalties for books listed on the Amazon Lending Library (included with every Prime subscription) or Kindle Unlimited, both of which let users read for free. Specifically, the rules apply to authors enrolled in Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select program, which provides an easy outlet for authors to self-publish their books. It’s not clear how or if the new system will…

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Save Your Time Use News Publisher ?Generate Massive Traffic and publish news

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There are numerous people who are starting online business and this is because they want to generate massive online income. For this purpose, there are numerous tools that are utilized for magnetizing traffic to your website. One of the widely used tools is News Publisher. If you are intending to optimize traffic to your website then you need to publish news on different websites that abruptly attract a huge audience to your website and is efficiently done by News Publisher. The most important aspect of this tool is that you don’t need to take the overhead to publish news; it just automatically submits your news to top 100 business and news websites. This phenomenon of submission proves lucrative and resultantly boosts your business.

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As the competition is very hard and to keep your website at the top positions in search engines rankings, you strongly need to utilize this tool to retain your position in top ranks. You need to publish news stuffed with those keywords that are searched most and you will be done. This tool actually gives you the freedom of making unlimited accounts and you can do submit news and press releases as much as you can. It means that you don’t have the limited vision. Just do publish news and attract the readers to your website using http://products.softsolutionslimited.com/news_publisher/index.htm

The author has artistically mentioned the worth of News Publisher in the field of internet marketing to publish news which is excellent tool for publish news .

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Is This the “Golden Age” for Chinese Web Authors?

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Chinese “web literature” sites are turning some amateur web authors wealthy through a variety of tools that enable fans to reward their favorite writers.

By Dennis Abrams

At ChinaDaily USA, Xu Jing examined the explosive growth of Chinese internet literature, noting that some writers are currently earning more than 10 million yuan ($ 1.6 million) per year.

A title by Bu Feiyan who has published some 25 books.

And while the nation has seen rapid growth and development in online literature sites, many writers began by publishing their work on online forums. Bu Feiyan, an author and Chinese literature lecturer at Renmin University, told ChinaDaily that initially, she was just writing for fun when she started on tianya.cn, now China’s largest internet forum.

“I was a common college student in 2002,” she told Xu. “[One day] I made up a wuxia (martial arts) story in my mind, but none of my classmates wanted to hear it, so I decided to write it down on the Internet. A very simple intention, but soon, I was surprised that so many people liked my work. About four months later, a publisher left a message on my blog and asked if I wanted to publish my work.”

To date she has published 25 books.

“To some degree,” she said, “[the] internet changed my life. Before my works attracted attention from publishers, while now they earn dashang (reward) from my fans. Web-writers now have more chance to become rich, if they have enough talent, effort and fans.”

And having fans is key, Xu reports. “According to a new remuneration system of China Reading Limited, the biggest internet literature website in China, web-writers can receive up to 50 percent subscription revenue sharing.”

Rewarding Your Favorite Writers

Bu Feiyan attracts legions of fans to her signings.

Most websites also include a “reward function,” which allows readers to award their favorite authors money or “props” which they can exchange for cash.

Some sites also encourage what is called “fan economy” through monthly rankings of popular web-writers, determined by readers’ votes. The wrinkle to this is that readers pay to vote, and the more they pay, the higher the ranking for their favorite author.

In fact, there are now so many web-writers in China (in the millions) that they are now “ranked,” both by their earnings and number of fans.

On the lowest level is the ordinary writer, also “known as poor guy (or poor guy writer).” They have a limited number of fans, and their work is seldom recommended to others. Their annual income is around 1,000 yuan.

Next up are the Xiaoshen (low rank god) writers with a fan base of more than 100,000 and annual earnings of more than 100,000 yuan ($ 16,100).

One step further up the ladder are the dashen (super god) class of writers with earnings of more than 1 million yuan ($ 161,200) with fans counted in the millions as well.

At the very top of the tier are the 20-30 webwriters known as platinum authors or zhigaoshen (the Supreme God) class of writers. The 2014 Chinese web-writers list ranks Tangjiasanshao first, with earnings of 50 million yuan (around $ 8.06 million) per year from royalties, while second and third on the list both raked in more than 25 million yuan ($ 4.03 million) each.

Of course, seeing the money that can be made, piracy and plagiarism has become a danger for web-authors. “Some readers pay to read the works but then share them with other internet users for free. Some writers ‘imitate’ the plot in ordinary writers’ works or mix different novel elements together into their own works.”

Platinum author Maoni told ChinaDaily:

“So many people are engaged in online writing, but only a few do a good job. If you want to be a top commercial writer, you need talent as well as diligence. There is no shortcut to fame and fortune.”

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Empowering Billions in Developing Markets to Publish Online

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With free open web tools, billions of new users in developing markets now have the ability to publish online, says Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation.

Interview by Octavio Kulesz

Mark Surman (Photo: CC Joi Ito, Flickr)

It is undeniable that the mobile Web can help to reduce the digital divide. Developments in this field have allowed greater access to web content in numerous countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. But what happens when it comes to creation and participation? How do we promote an open mobile web in which local users can be active players, rather than passive consumers? To discuss these issues, which are of vital importance for the publishing world, we talked to Mark Surman, Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation.

PP: The mobile web is revolutionizing the way digital content is accessed in the developing world. How will this affect the lives of the hundreds of millions of inhabitants of the global South, not only in terms of access but also in creativity?

Mark Surman: The mobile web is allowing billions of new users to come online — by 2025, there will be five billion individuals online, many exclusively through their smartphones. But access alone isn’t the answer. To positively affect the lives of individuals in developing countries, we need to couple access with web literacy. When these users are able to create local content in their own language — like web pages and apps — it can lead to amazing social and economic opportunity.

Numerous international foundations are promoting initiatives to facilitate access to digital publications in resource-poor countries, either through free connectivity (Internet.org), donation of ebooks (Worldreader) or Zero Rating Services (Wikipedia Zero). What is your assessment of these types of projects?

There are many well-intentioned initiatives happening, but again: Mozilla believes access must be paired with web literacy education and open source tools that invite creativity and participation. That’s how you empower new users.

In a recent paper, you defined local content as “the canary in the coal mine,” that is to say, as a good indicator of the health of the domestic digital ecosystem. How might the production of local digital publications be encouraged in developing countries?

First, we need to promote the open Web in developing countries. Many individuals believe Facebook is the extent of the Internet — this locks individuals in a closed system where they must play by a specific set of rules. But when we successfully break down digital monopolies, individuals can play by their own rules online, not the rules of a select few companies. Then, anything becomes possible.

We can also encourage the production of local digital publications by deploying independent, open source tools for creating. Intuitive tools can allow users to create in minutes, even if they lack coding skills. It’s also key to localize these tools for a broad set of languages, like Bengali, Swahili, Hindi and others.

What are the main projects of the Mozilla Foundation in developing countries?

We’re launching Webmaker this summer, a free, open source and mobile content creation platform that allows users to build (and share) apps, web pages and other media in minutes. It’s a low-bar entry — even first-time smartphone users can become inventors. And Webmaker is localized in several languages.

We’re also expanding our teaching network to include Mozilla Clubs, which allow pockets of mentors and learners around the globe to get together and teach and build the Web. Details on Clubs, and our other web literacy initiatives, are at https://teach.mozilla.org/.

Since the emergence of the Web (and in particular of the mobile web), the book industry has undergone profound changes. Given your knowledge of the world of the Web, how do you see the future of the publishing industry at the global level?

Publishing has become increasingly democratic, and that trend will continue. Billions more users are coming online and discovering the open web — which means countless new authors now have a platform and audience to tell their story.

This article about digital publishing in China appears courtesy of Alliance Lab, on whose website it originally appeared.

Octavio Kulesz holds a degree in Philosophy from the University of Buenos Aires. He has worked in the publishing world since the year 2000, when he created the publishing house Libros del Zorzal, together with his brother Leopoldo. In 2007 he founded the publishing company Teseo, geared to the publication of academic texts in print on demand and e-book format. He is the author of the report “Digital Publishing in Developing Countries” (2011), commissioned by the Prince Claus Fund and the International Alliance of Independent Publishers.

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And Other Stories to Publish Only Women for a Year

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Publisher Stefan Tobler of And Other Stories in the UK has committed to a year of publishing only books by women, in response to “gender bias” towards men.

By Dennis Abrams

Stefan Tobler, publisher of And Other Stories

In a recent issue of The Guardian, author Kamilia Shamsie called for a year of “publishing women to redress gender bias” in the literary world.

The gender bias is obvious: Less than 40% of the books submitted for the Booker prize over the last five years were written by women; more prize-winning novels feature male versus female lead characters, the status given to male authors and reviewers…the list goes on.

Shamsie wrote: “At this point, I’m going to assume that the only people who really doubt that there is a gender bias are those who stick with the idea that men are better writers and better critics. Enough. Across the board, enough…I would argue that it is time for everyone, male and female, to sign up to a concerted campaign to redress the inequality…Why not have a year of publishing women: 2018, the centenary of women over the age of 30 getting the vote in the UK, seems appropriate.”

And now, The Guardian reports, And Other Stories has become the first publisher to take Shamsie up on her challenge. “I think we can do it,” publisher Stefan Tobler told the Guardian’s Allison Flood. “And if we don’t do it, what is going to change?”

While And Other Stories is a small publisher, releasing just 10 to 12 new titles a year, as Tobler told the paper, “We’ve realized for a while that we’ve published more men than women. This year we’ve done seven books by men and four by women…We have a wide range of people helping us with our choices, and our editors are women…and yet somehow we still publish more books by men than women.”

Sophie Lewis, a senior editor at And Other Stories, said that while would initially involve rescheduling pub dates for male authors’ books and “digging harder” than usual to find “really good women’s writing,” the main goal she hopes to accomplish is “to examine the selection and promotion process, the production of their books from commissioning to reader’s bedside.”

“By taking on the challenge we will expose our systems and the paths of recommendation and investigation that brings books to us, and we will end up becoming a kind of small-scale model for a much bigger inquiry about why women’s writing is consistently sidelined or secondary, the poor cousin rather than the equal of men’s writing,” she told Flood.

Lewis wrote in the Independent:

“It’s time to ask why it is that our women editors and the many women translators and agents and publishers are urging us to publish men more often than women. Because it’s not just us – this is happening across the publishing industry. But why? Could it be to do with the way in which creative writing courses are being approached? Or going back further, literature classes at school? Through our acquisitions meetings and campaign planning – which will be solely focused on obtaining and promoting female writing – we’ll be able to examine these issues, and have a chance to better understand women’s routes to publication in so much more detail.”

Tobler added that he hoped that “other publishers would join in,” but literary agent Clare Alexander, who praised Shamsie for “purposefully being an agent provocateur,” thought it was doubtful that any of the UK’s larger publishers would take her up on her challenge.

Read the rest of the article here.

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