We’ve put together a package of four Dean Koontz limited edition books, plus a bonus unvorrected proof that we think is a fnatastic deal for any Koontz fan or collector out there. Here’s what we’ve got for you:

Seize The Night
Cemetery Dance Publications
Deluxe Edition, Traycased, RR
Signed by Dean Koontz and Phil Parks
Prestine traycased edition, published in 1998 by Cemetery Dance Publications. Dust jacket and full-color interior illustrations by Phil Parks. A beautiful collector’s edition.

Strange Highways
Cemetery Dance Publications
Deluxe Signed Edition, Slipcased, 561
Beautifully done collector’s edition with interior illustrations and dustjacket by Phil Parks. Prestine condition. Published in 1995. Signed by both Dean Koontz and Phil Parks

False Memory
Cemetery Dance Publications
Deluxe Signed Edition, Slipcased, 145
Beautifully done collector’s edition with interior illustrations and dustjacket by Phil Parks. Prestine condition. Published in 1999. Signed by both Dean Koontz and Phil Parks

Fear Nothing
Cemetery Dance Publications
Deluxe Signed Edition, Slipcased, PC
Beautifully done collector’s edition with interior illustrations and dustjacket by Phil Parks. Prestine condition. Published in 1998. Signed by both Dean Koontz and Phil Parks

Bonus: Fear Nothing Uncorrected Proof
Bantam Books
Signed, uncorrected proofs of the Bantam Books edition of Dean Koontz’s Fear Nothing. Prestine condition. Collector’s item.

The total value of this package is over $575. But the first person to step forward to claim it can pick it up for only $325 + @0 shipping.

Interested? All you have to do is drop us a note: Contact Us

Here’s how it would most likely work:

You’d sign up to receive the notifications. And everyday we’d send you a relatively short email listing that day’s post titles and perhaps a short paragraph where warranted explaining the substance of the post. We’d also need to include some sort of relevant ad just to help keep the expense down.

And we’d most likely have you select either an html format, which can include images and looks much more professional, or a straight text format.

So, let us know if this is something you’re interested in receiving and if there are enough positive responses we’ll give it a go.

Thanks!

by Alan Beatts
Borderlands Books

At the beginning of last month the United States Department of Justice announced that it was bringing suit against five of the six major U.S. publishers as well as Apple for violating anti-trust regulations, specifically prohibitions on collusion and price-fixing as described in Section 1 of the Sherman Act. The complaint brought by the DOJ in essence says that Apple and five publishers (Macmillan, Penguin, Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster) conspired to force adoption of the agency model for sales of ebooks on the retail industry with the aim and effect of raising prices for consumers and reducing competition. Under the agency model, which was adopted by all five of these publishers over a period of six weeks in early 2010, the publishers set prices and the retailers (Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, et al) cannot offer the book at a lower price.

I’ve been following the discussion about the suit since the news broke and it is interesting that the general tenor of the response has not been particularly in favor of the suit. Specifically, there are a few things that seem to be generally acknowledged by most of the commentators, regardless of industry affiliation or political stripe.

1. It seems very unlikely that the suit will be successful against Apple. Since representatives from Apple were not present at the meetings between publishers where the collusion allegedly took place, and Apple is neither in the same business as the publishers nor does it dominate the ebook market, in the view of a number of legal scholars it seems unlikely that the court will find against Apple.

More here: eBook Antitrust Suit

2. The suit is probably not consistent with the spirit of the law, even if it is within the letter of it. In the simplest terms, the Sherman Act, along with subsequent anti-trust and antimonopoly laws, was put in place to encourage competition by stopping groups of companies in the same industry from conspiring to either fix prices at an inflated level or to prevent competitors from entering the field. The actions of the publishers and Apple were designed to accomplish two things -

A. To allow the publishers to individually resist Amazon’s potential ability to set an industry-wide price for ebooks.

B. To let Apple enter the ebook market on an even footing with Amazon (which in early 2010 controlled 90% of all ebook sales).

Neither item would tend to reduce competition; rather they would both tend to encourage it, a contention that is supported by the current proportion of ebook sales which is now spread among Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble, with Amazon still well in the lead. On the other hand, a return to wholesale pricing would benefit Amazon more than any other business, which would seem to help Amazon exert more control over the ebook market.

More here: DOJ Lawsuit Bad For eBooks

3. There don’t seem to be many indications that there was any price-fixing per se. The agreement reached among the publishers was what the sales model would be, not what the price of the books would be. Given that the costs of producing a book are pretty much the same for all six of the major publishers, regardless of the author or the book, it doesn’t require price-fixing for the publishers to arrive at the same general price for ebooks. Without the element of actual price-fixing, the case is much weaker.

More here: Not Proven – The DOJ Suit Against Apple

Of course, over the past weeks I’ve run across a number of impassioned letters decrying the DOJ’s action, notably one from Macmillan’s CEO, John Sargent and another from Scott Turow, author and president of the Author’s Guild. But there were some surprises as well, like Charlie Stross’ nice and concise explanation of the “interesting” (read as “scary and bad”) thing about Amazon’s position in publishing

But probably the most surprising thing to me was that I haven’t run into one article or reputable blog post that is damming of either the publishers or Apple. That isn’t to say that they aren’t out there (I’m sure that they are) but it’s intriguing that the reaction overall seems to be pretty one-sided. Whether the tenor of the reaction will have much effect on the outcome of the suit, I don’t know, but it looks better for Macmillan and Penguin, not to mention Apple, than it did when the suit was first announced.

If you’re interested in more information about the whole thing, here are a few links that are informative.

• The text of The Sherman Act
• The actual complaint, courtesy of Scribd
• An excellent point-by-point analysis of the suit from The Verge
• Details of the settlement that three publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster) reached with DOJ from Wired

It’s been a tough two weeks and it isn’t over yet, but at lest things seem to be trending in a positive directtion. How often I’ll be posting here over the next week or two, I cannot say. Getting up to get something to eat requires a long recuperative nap and then some serious coaxing before I can repeat the process all over again. Throwing Hellnotes into the mix will, I imagine, only add to the length of those recuperative naps. But on the positive side, I do believe I’m gradually getting stronger.

So, dear reader, for now I make no promises except this one: I will do my honest best to get things up and rolling again on these pages, recuperative naps or not. You may come across more errors than you’ve grown to expect here, but it won’t be because I’ve been lazy or careless or lowered my standards. It will simply be because the clarity of my thoughts is still returning and such things take time.

Thank you for returning to these pages to check on Hellnotes.

Dave

Why Best Sellers Matter
by Alan Beatts

The New York Times Best Seller list has been produced every week since 1942. Even with massive influence on book buying habits by Amazon, a Stanford Business School analysis strongly suggests that most book buyers look to the Times list for book purchase suggestions. Although the effect of getting a book on that list is not huge for well-established authors, it can make the career of a new or previously mid-list author. Making the list leads directly to larger advance payments, bigger print runs, and greater publicity expenditures for later books, not to mention much higher sales numbers for the current book and the consequent greater royalty payments.

Short of prestigious awards like the Pulitzer or Nobel Prize, there is probably nothing that can have a greater instant effect on an author’s future and income.

The exact details of how placement calculation is performed for the Times list is a trade secret, kept by the News Surveys department of that paper. Even the staff of the Book Reviews section, which publishes the list, doesn’t know how it is calculated. In general however, each week sales figures are collected from a selection of independent and chain bookstores (of which Borderlands is one), along with other sales outlets such as drug stores, supermarkets and gift shops. Wholesalers are also included but the figures are weighted so that the final figure is based more on books sold to actual readers, rather than the number of books shipped to stores (which might languish on the shelves for a month or more before being returned). A result is the Times list’s reputation as one of the best, if not the best, measures of a book’s immediate popularity.

Please note the words “immediate popularity.” Many, many books sell a huge number of copies over the course of their time in print and yet never end up on the Best Seller list because the sales are spread out over months or years. As the name suggests, the list measures what sold best in a specific week. Like many scales, it’s useful as long as you understand what it is meant to measure. It helps to look at the Times List this way – any book on the list has sold a lot of copies – but not all books that sell a lot of copies end up on the list. It all depends on how many copies of the book sell in a short period of time, usually during the all-important first week that the book is on sale.

Which is a major portion of why the concept of a “strict lay-down date” exists. Most book buyers have never heard of lay-down dates, but some of you probably remember hearing about how the later Harry Potter books were shipped to bookstores with an explicit, legally binding agreement that the seals on the boxes wouldn’t be broken until 12:01 AM on the day that it was supposed to go on sale. That was an extreme example of a lay-down date. In the case of Harry Potter, the restriction on sales before the date was more of a marketing gimmick than an actual attempt to ensure that all the sales would take place during the first week of reporting to the Times. After all, by the middle book, there was no doubt that it would hit the bestseller lists. But it was an extension of the basic goal of publishers for mid-list and potential best-selling titles – get as many sales as possible in the first week so that the book has the best chance of getting on the list.

All of this might seem like silly marketing games and, for the publishers, perhaps it is (though remember – most book buyers at least look at the Times list every week or are made aware of the results through other channels). But for an author? It’s no game because of how seriously the publishers themselves take that list.

For years at Borderlands we’ve taken on-sale or lay-down dates pretty casually. Books come in. We inventory them and put ‘em on the shelves. If they’re out a little early, who cares? Unless, of course, the publisher went to extraordinary lengths to enforce the date. In which case we’d play along.

In part I felt that our attitude was justified in a large part because of the habits of big retailers, chain bookstores and Amazon. The chains made it a habit to do the same thing we do – as soon as books arrive, they go on the shelves. Unless the publisher, blah, blah, blah. Likewise Walmart and the other non-book retailers. And, many of those companies would get their books shipped directly from the printer, rather than going through the intermediary step of the publisher’s warehouse, because their orders were so large. Which meant they had the book in stock as much as a week before we did.

And Amazon would often list a book as being for sale (as opposed to available for pre-order) a month before it even had shipped from the printer. Customers would order the book, get told that it was “back-ordered” (despite it not having ever arrived in Amazon’s warehouse), and patiently wait for it to ship.

In light of all that, it seemed only reasonable to me that I play the game the same way. As far as I saw it, no one was getting hurt. However, based on what I’ve told you about how the New York Times Best Seller list works, you can see how offering books for sale early has an effect on the chance of it being accurately represented on that list.

But recently something happened to an author who is both a friend of mine and a strong supporter of the store that changed my mind.

Their book, which stood a chance of getting on the Times list, was offered for sale at Amazon more than two weeks before the lay-down date. The author noticed this and got in touch with both their publisher and Amazon requesting that it be removed until the right date. Neither the author nor their publisher had any success in having the book removed until, finally and through back channels that I can’t detail, the book was taken off sale. It wasn’t set to be pre-ordered (which is what the status should properly have been), but at least people could no longer buy it.

But, before that happened, a virtual flood of emails arrived in the author’s in-box from a legion of very, very angry readers who preferred ebooks. It seems that they had noticed that the print version of the book was on sale, whereas the ebook was not going to be available until the (correct) on-sale date. The conclusion that these people had come to was that the author was deliberately delaying the ebook to force people to buy the physical copy. In addition to the laughable assumption that an author has any control over when and where their books are available, these ebook fans had completely missed the point. But that didn’t stop them from writing some really nasty things, including but not limited to a comprehensive survey of obscene pronouns and a range of physical threats.

But the whole thing wasn’t done yet. At almost exactly 5 pm, East Coast time on the following Friday, the book was put back up for sale at Amazon. I suppose that it’s possible that the timing was an accident but it seems strange to me that the status change happened right at the beginning of the weekend when no-one would be in the office at the publisher to do anything about it for over 48 hours.

Once again the author tried to get something done without success. Even the back-channel route that had worked previously wasn’t fruitful. Then, on the following Monday afternoon, the publisher’s calls had an effect and the book was pulled again.

It will be hard to tell how this all plays out until the Times Best Seller list comes out the week after the book’s proper on-sale date. But all those orders in advance of the on-sale date are certain to have an effect, if not on whether the book makes the list, then at least on the position that it gets.

After seeing all of this happen, I realized that putting a book on sale early can have an effect. So we’re not going to do it here any longer. Granted, it may cost us some sales, but we see ourselves as being part of a larger community of readers, writers and publishers. It behooves us to play by the rules and not take action that hurts the other members of the community.

Wouldn’t it be nice if some of the largest and most influential members of the bookselling community thought the same way?