April Katherine Press Review!

It is officially spring!  We can't speak for the rest of you, but the fact that, here in New England, the snow is gone, the sun is out, the trees have buds on them has put us in a great mood.  It's almost time for sundresses and sandals, barbeques and sangria, lazy walks after dinner in the fading orange sunlight, not to mention trips to the beach and swimming in friends' pools.  There's so much to look forward to!

Here at The Katherine Press Review, we have a couple of great new pieces to ring in the new season.  Pamela Lewis reminisces about her first experiences with Barbie in "Barbie on My Mind...Again".  Brittanie Bradley frets poetically over a lover in "Anxiety".  Lastly, Carol E. Ayer serves up some pretty classic chick lit with the humerous and charming "What's Cookin'".

As always, if you missed any of last month's great pieces (or if you just want to read them again), they're available on our homepage.  We hope that wherever you are, you're enjoying as great weather as we are.  Happy spring and happy reading from us at Katherine Press!

Is "Silence Golden"?

Katherine Press would like to welcome Sarah Jones as our first guest Blogger.

Is “Silence Golden”?  With the price of gold at an all time high, has the commodity of silence increased in value too?  Is it such a rarity that we have to seek it out?  The world continues to flash, beep, and scream around me.  Each place I go seems to provide the environment necessary to fill the air with the cacophony of busyness.  I was in the Mecca of developing minds today, Toys ‘R Us.  The attack on my senses was overwhelming-flashing lights, dancing stuffed animals, animated voices singing classic children’s tunes in their electronic cadence.  All these amusements cued up by small impulsive hands and then left, sadly, seconds later when the hands seek a new distraction.  I find myself in fight or flight mode standing bewildered in the aisles of this microcosm of the future.  I decide to leave the store lest my mind transitions to “fight” mode and I become the YouTube sensation of a woman losing it in Toys ‘R Us.  No doubt, a ten year old would whip out his/her phone to record my meltdown and post it with a link in the margins for a cat attacking the same toy I had taken my wrath out against.  It is a challenge and an oddity to be in silence.  I encourage everyone to take 10 minutes and sit without television, radio, computers, or conversation blaring in the background.  The feeling is disarming, yet precious, like gold.  You may find that the value of your time has just gone up. 

Sarah Jones

DOJ antitrust suit against Apple

Last week, the Department of Justice announced that it may bring an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and several of the largest book publishers over possible price-fixing.  If you're not familiar with the case, the details get a little bit into the nitty-gritty of the way that the publishing industry has traditionally operated.  From the linked article:

"Apple is said to have helped push book publishers away from their traditional pricing model — publishers would typically charge distributors about half the cover price for an eBook — and into an “agency model,” which would let publishers set the end-user price of an eBook and Apple would take a 30% commission on each sale. This new model is said to have made it difficult for booksellers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble to compete, because they would regularly discount the prices of new books and trim margins in an effort to promote sales."

I will admit that, on the one hand, a DOJ lawsuit that brings ebooks back down to impulse-buy territory would be welcome for me as a reader (if you're a Kindle or Nook user, you've probably noticed that the $9.99 ebooks that were like crack when you first got your reader have now crept up to $12 or even $15). 

But on the other hand, we at Katherine Press have always seen the rising cost of ebooks from major publishers as an opportunity.  The biggest reason that publishers have been able to command steep premiums on their books is that they were guarantors of quality: you can be reasonably certain that your Simon & Schuster book will not only be free of typos, but will also be edited to read smoothly and professionally.  The same, sadly, cannot be said for many self-published books.  What the industry needs, then, is some cheaper institutions that could vouch for the quality of ebooks.  At Katherine Press, we've always seen that as being a role we wanted to take on.  Readers should be able to trust that, even with lower price points, you will get a well written and worthwhile book when you buy a Katherine Press publication. 

Whether or not this DOJ lawsuit happens, what we're watching is an industry in the process of metamorphosis.  Those left standing and financially strong will be the ones who didn't try to preserve the old ways of doing business but embraced the changes.  Books aren't going anywhere--they're just changing.  And if the industry can't accept that, well, that's not our problem.  That's our opportunity.