Rocky Mountain News to Shutter

According to Poynter, tomorrow will be the last edition.

Online Literary Magazines

Looking for potential markets for fiction, but given up on the usual suspects? Esquire has a piece on great online literary magazines. Who knows? Maybe there's a market waiting for one of those short stories or poems you've not been sending out.

Money and Blogging

Dan Lyons write a piece in Newsweek about how you can't make money with a blog. The money may be small if you're trying to collect advertising dollars, but there is a different way to look at it. I'd strongly suggest reading How I made over $2 million with this blog by Dave Winer. He's no con or shill. Ever hear of RSS? He invented it. He's been a major Mac software developer, a research fellow at Harvard, and general tech heavyweight who has also made his share of cash along the way. Winer's been blogging for years and understands this medium like few others. His point is that he's made a large pile of cash indirectly because of his blog, and because that's how he wanted to talk to his customers. It's worth the read.

Check Google Books for Your Out of Print Titles

As you probably remember, Google settled the lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and some publishers over Google Books, which displays up to 20% of the contents of out of print books online. Now you can sign up. Some notes:

• To be eligible, your work must be in their system.


• A full book gets you $60 plus the majority of revenue from ads placed around the display of the book.


• An "insert" gets paid only part of a fee. The definition of an insert is "any text and other material, such as forewords, essays, poems, quotations, letters, song lyrics, children’s Book illustrations, sheet music, charts, and graphs, if independently protected by U.S. copyright, contained in a Book, a government work or a public domain book published on or before January 5, 2009 and, if U.S. works, registered (alone or as part of another work) with the U.S. Copyright Office. Inserts do not include pictorial content (except for children’s Book illustrations), or any public domain or government works."


• If you want, you can also opt out of the settlement or file an objection or indicate that you plan to be at the fairness hearing, but you'd have to do it by May 5, 2009.


• Claims have to be filed by January 5, 2010.

Time to go check for your name and what might be up on the system. I just found out that the ASJA Guide to Freelance Writing, for which I suuppled the business planning chapter when I was still a member of the organization, is on there, so I'll be filing my claim, after thoroughly reviewing the settlement itself.

But if you do plan to get your little chunk of change, check the dates - if interested parties can file objections by May 5, there is the possibility that the settlement could be challenged. In any case, clearly no one is going to see any money until some time next year at the soonest.

Interesting Article on Amazon and Kindle

BusinessWeek has an article on the Kindle 2 that is interesting because of the business issues, including the following:

• Analysts think that the Kindle is already turning a profit, which is impressive.


• Really increasing the Kindle's popularity would require dropping the price, but that would threaten Amazon's relationships with publishers - suggesting that Amazon is far from able to simply dictate terms, even with the large slice of the book selling business it represents.


• Amazon also makes more money on paper books than on e-books. One analyst guesses that the margins are 5 percent to 10 percent higher. That surprised me. I would have expected higher margins on the e-books.


• Jeff Bezos has said that e-books are now 10 percent of book unit sales, which means that their numbers are feeling increasing pressure. I'm not sure that I believe this figure, though perhaps the Kindle owners do buy that many titles.


• An analyst suggests that the Kindle makes sense only for a small percentage of the buying public, because most people wouldn't get more than five books a year, making the device too expensive.


• The iPhone may become the iPod of books, as Google creates a version of its online book search for the device.

About.com Gets Hit With Staff, Freelancer Pay Cuts

About.com, part of The New York Times -- which isn't having a jolly financial time, as I've mentioned -- is cutting just under ten percent of its staff. That's quickly becoming an old story for media companies. However, apparently About is also cutting the pay for its guides, the people that create the content. Page view rates will supposedly drop by 7.5 percent and the monthly guarantee goes from $725 to $675. Given that the money didn't seem that great in the first place, I wouldn't be surprised to see another wave of "help wanted" postings by the site.

Nine Sources of Trade Magazine Lists

For those who don't realize it, trade magazines can be a great regular part of a freelancer's income. They always need copy and many pay reasonable amounts for articles. It is best to have knowledge of the industry in question, or at least to be able to show your fit for a particular topic pitch. Here are some resources for finding trade magazines in given industries -- all found in the space of minutes by doing some straightforward web searches:

• TradePub.com -- The site provides subscription services for business-to-business (b-to-b) publications. But it also gives you the name of publications and lists them by industry, so it's a great research tool.
• Free Trade Magazine Source -- This is another subscription stop.
• Yahoo's Media Directory -- Yahoo's directory, or categorization of links by topic, is one of the best. You can look by topic and see what publications are listed. It's not exhaustive, and you'll find consumer-targeted titles as well as b-to-b, but still useful. You can even go right to the trade magazine section of the directory.
• TechExpo Directory -- These are touted as science and technology trades, but there also seem to be more general industry titles as well.
• Amazon's Trade Magazine Listings -- Amazon sells magazine subscriptions and has an entire category of professional and trade titles. On the left you'll see links by topics. Not all the topics have associated titles, but many do.
• About.com
-- The link in this case takes you to a Google search page that looks for the term "trade magazines" on About.com. It won't all be a fit, but many of the entries will be lists of trade magazines put together by people who cover various topics on About.

• HighBeam Research -- You may hate how they try to sell your articles when you're getting nada for it, so make them pay in a different way by turning their lists of trade journals into a marketing mine.
• Encyclopedia.com -- For some reason, the reference site, which republishes many trade magazine articles, has them listed in reverse alphabetical order.
• Magazines.com -- A site for ordering magazines, you can browse by title or by category.