Yaldah mailing address still valid

Dear Friends,

Due to a clerical error at the post office, Yaldah's PO box was erroneously closed and all mail returned marked "UTF - unable to find." This unfortunately happened while I was out of state with my mother during the last few weeks of her life, so I did not discover the problem until just recently.

If you have sent anything to Yaldah Publishing's PO Box and it has been returned to you, please resend and rest assured the box address is still valid.

Thank you for your understanding in this matter

Update on website/email status

Okay, we have progress!

Our website has been successfully transferred to a new host. We are just waiting at this point for all of the settings to be verified and the site to go live. Thank goodness for backups!

When we lost our previous host, we also lost our email. If anyone sent email to us in the past week or so, please resend it, as we didn't get it.

Our email should now be up and running. Or at least all tests so far have gone through rather than bouncing back.

Thanks for your patience!

Website temporarily down

The Yaldah Publishing website is temporarily down due to a faulty power supply. We are working on moving to a new host and should be back up shortly. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience.

A Shabbos-Related Reading Poll

In addition to being a publisher, I try my best to fill quite a lot of other roles. At the top of my list is being a mom.

In that role of mom, and with my love of books in general and Jewish books in particular, I have started bringing Jewish kids' books for my children to look at when they need to be with me and there's no childcare in shul. (A big thanks to my friend Rachel for putting together two of my passions and suggesting what should have been obvious to me.)

So for my Jewish readers, that got me thinking: do you or your children read something other than the Torah while in shul? If so, what subjects?

I'll throw out a few possibilities, but feel free to be original with your answers:

1. Only Torah for me on Shabbos; anything else is narishkeit.
2. Anything related to the Torah, which would be, really, anything.
3. Something with a Jewish theme or author, from Colossal Boy to the Myron Bolitar series (Harlan Coben) to The Rabbi's Cat.
4. Only Jewish non-fiction; I don't want to be entertained.
5. There are Jewish kids' books out there?
6. I can't tell you; I'm the rabbi/rabbi's spouse/rabbi's kid.

What are you or your kids going to be reading on Shabbos?

Book Readers by the Numbers

Zogby.com, a polling company, in conjunction with Random House, recently released an interesting study about American book buyers and readers. Here are a few of the more interesting tidbits grouped by category:

Ebooks
82% preferred printed books to other technology, with women preferring print slightly more than men.

Bookstores
81% go to the bookstore with a specific book in mind, but nearly as many—77%—will make unplanned purchases.

Book Choices
Nearly half, at 48%, choose a book first by its subject.

(Personal note: this is where the "Jewish Fiction" subject comes in. If it gets shelved with Religious Fiction, the vast majority of which is Christian, it gets lost. Same might go for when it's mainstreamed into general fiction. If you're looking for Jewish fiction, where do you go?)

Next up, author (24%), title, and word of mouth.

Influences to Buy
The much-touted word of mouth (WOM) influences 60% of people to buy a book; almost half (49%) base their purchases on reviews.

I find this bit about reviews fascinating, as there are fewer and fewer channels for reviews, especially in print, but more and more online. I just find it interesting that regular folks and not just book buyers and others in the industry are reading those reviews.

Cover Story
More than half (52%) judge a book by its cover, but those 65 and older are less likely to do so (34%) than those under 30 (66%).

Author's Fan Club
A whopping 89% will look for other books from an author they like.

Used Book Sales
57% keep the books they buy. 34% loan or give them away. Only 3% sell their books when done.

Authors and publishers have often lamented how they see no royalties or profits on used book sales, yet no such complaint exists on books loaned or given away, including by libraries. This statistic makes for an interesting counter-argument.

Competition With Books
23% of people are spending more time reading and 30% are reading less. Of those reading less, most are choosing to spend their time online (65%), watching TV (35%), or playing video games (18%).

You can read the full results at Zogby News.

World Wild Web

I took a class last year at PMA-U (think college for publishers) on publisher's websites and came home with pages upon pages of notes quickly scribbled with a dying pen while sitting in a cramped conference chair. But ever since then, I've wanted—some might say needed—to redesign and update the Yaldah site.

Now finally I have the time, energy, resources, and drive to get it done. Or in the process of getting done. Some fifteen hours have been put into it so far, though I think it might be completed with only another ten or so. It's too bad I don't get paid by the hour. (Wait, do I get paid at all? Hm...)

I suppose I could have had it done in less time, but the designer in me wants all the various text and images and such to line up just so with a pleasing but not ostentatious amount of white space. Times like this I start to wonder if perhaps I'm in the wrong business, but then I remember how much more excited I am at the prospect of getting the next book in print and I know I'm where I belong.

Weird But Interesting in the Publishing Biz

The Yaldah blog has been on hiatus for a while but is now back. While I'd like to blame it on the Hollywood writers' strike, the reality is much more mundane.

I had thought that this blog would be a good way to put a human face (eg: mine) on the business of publishing, kind of a behind-the-scenes sneek peek, if you will. I still like that idea, but when not much is happening behind the scenes, what do you put on the blog?

Then it ocurred to me (I'm a little slow sometimes) that all the news and scandals and changes and interesting-but-weird happenings in the publishing biz leave me with some questions and opinions and comments of my own. What better place to give them voice than here? At least all those non-publishing people in my life will maybe stop being so frustrated with my excitement over such scintillating topics as ISBN-13 and running covert reconnaissance at BEA (yes, I did that last year. I'll have to share the story sometime.)

So where are we now?

Much has happened this past year in the publishing industry, even for small indies like Yaldah.

• Amazon.com has come under fire from publishers as large as Random House for possibly illegal monopolization of listing eligibility for short-run books. I'll have more on this shortly.
  
• Amazon has also released the Kindle, an ebook reader that could either be the literary version of the iPod or a catastrophic iFlop. Which one it is remains to be seen.
  
• The International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF) has worked to create EPUB, a "file extension of an XML format designed specifically for reflowing digital books and publications," according to Book Business. This is welcome news to those of us considering offering ebooks but not wanting to have to either choose which format (Adobe, Microsoft, Amazon, etc.) or having to offer them all.
  
  I am thinking about offering ebook versions of our print books, but have waited until the industry standardized itself. That time may have now come. What do you think? Are ebooks the wave of the future?
  
• Branding, viral marketing, customer management, and "going green"—all of which sound like they could be uncomfortable, if not painful—are hot topics. I am pleased to learn that I did the branding thing before I even knew that's what it was. In an age where it seems everyone has a blog, a social networking site, a website, or some other avenue into the global digital world, branding is becoming one major way to stand out. But I have to wonder, once we all have . . . branded ourselves? . . . (that really does sound painful) will we really stand out anymore or will we have to look for yet another tool?
  
• More and more publishers, from small to ginormous, are taking a hard look at the traditional large print runs, warehousing, returns, and even advances against royalties to authors. While it never made sense to us indies, it appears that big publishers are questioning the process of giving an author a competetive advance, printing a large print run, watching the book do okay but not great, then taking a hit on returns from retailers and never recouping the initial cost, much less having the author earn their full advance.
  

  HarperCollins is creating a new group that appears to be modeling itself after what the indie presses have been doing for years, according to the New York Times.

It's a strange business we're in, but it's certainly not boring.

A Tired Hello from New York

As in life, things didn't quite go according to plan. I am blogging about my experiences (briefly for now) here at PMA-U/BEA, but I'm not able to post on both this blog and the Midwest Independent Publishers Association (MIPA) blog.

So please join me over at the MIPA blog for now, and I'll have more detailed entries here when I get back home to my regular computer.

MIPA blog:
http://mipa-blog.blogspot.com

See you there!