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Steal This Book. "The big publishing houses just don't get it," says Warren Adler, author of "The War of the Roses," explaining why he's emailing chapters of his latest book "to anyone who asks," for free, as reported by Claudia H. Deutsch in The New York Times (8/21/05). "Print publishing has had a great, 500-year run," says Warren, "but the print book is morphing into the screen book." Warren believes that "portable electronic readers will soon do to paper books what the Walkman and the iPod did to boomboxes." And if you don't agree, well, you know you "can always just print the chapter out." Says Warren: "The main thing is, give readers a new book for free, and they might go back and buy some of the former books."
Warren has a total of 27 of them. And next month, "he will begin selling all his past novels on flash memory cards, readable on e-book players" on his website, warrenadler.com. Whether Warren's new view of publishing will work for authors who didn't write "The War of the Roses" is a good question, though. Yes, it's true that the web "with its limitless capacity for blogs and whole books that can be electronically whisked from place to place, means people can pretty well publish what they want." But the downside is that "the competition for readers, already intense, will become maddingly so." But the best news, he says, is that it's no longer necessary for writers to "make it past the gatekeepers at publishing houses to be published," the way he did to get his first novel, "Options," published in 1973, when he was 45.
Warren says the only reason he got that book deal was that he agreed to publicize another of the publisher's novels for free. These days, he notes, outfits like iUniverse.com will not only publish your book and give it distribution via Amazon, et. al., but also help with editing and even deciding which genre is best for your work. If you do end up with a traditional book deal, Warren's advice is to "negotiate like an entrepreneur." For example, get "the right to record your own books ... And don't automatically give the publisher options on a second book," because, he says, "if that first book does well, you can negotiate a better contract on the second." Finally, says Warren, remember that rejection by publishers does not mean you're a failure: "In the end," he says, "as in all things, luck trumps talent."
Tim Manners, editor
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