Hi Everyone,

thistleinthekiss are a new thinking, all-digital publishing house based in Scotland. We want to put you out there. We want to get you read. We want to connect you to readers. We want weirdness, beauty and good things.

We've got all sorts of ideas and we'd love to hear from you.


Check us out at www.thistleinthekiss.com - the full site will be available soon.

Hi Anon

I checked out the website as suggested, but there's nothing on it except your logo and a link to a single-item blog. When considering a proposition of this kind, writers not unreasonably expect some indication of credentials, experience and intended methods of connecting with the readership. Unfortunately the content of the blog is not totally reassuring.

Which is good for me because I couldn’t organise a scandal in a premiership football team, frankly

Is this telling us something about the likely quality of promotion?

we want to give our authors a better deal than they get from real-world publishers.

Most ww members are probably wanting to have a good go at getting published in the real world before considering the alternatives.

Your animosity towards books printed on paper and your conviction that they are generally cheap and nasty and badly made will not be shared by many.

Sorry to be cynical, but the section about copyright should cause anybody to think twice before going down this road.

But maybe that's just my jaded view...

Chris

Hmm... looks like something may have gone wrong with your URL! All I get is an odd sweary message.

Me too.

Not the best way to attract business!

Oh dear...
Not a great start is it?
Eve

Hi Chris2,

The website was down - briefly - last night, the security has been beefed up since, apologies to anyone else who tried to get on and couldn't. No, it's not the best start!

As for the blog, yes, I completely understand how it can seem a little...unnerving. For me though, the increasing reach, integration and commercial and artistic possibilities of digital content should really make people stop and think about how they go about the business of creating and dispersing written works.

The copyright issue is one of those great big questions that needs to be confronted, and as you picked up from the blog post, I have some different (maybe slightly controversial) ideas about it myself. I think it would be prudent of me to expound on that in a future post, but the bottom line is that I do agree with copyright (I don't think it would benefit anyone to take that away from authors of any kind) but the means of implementing it on digital content have been ineffectual at best. It's not that I couldn't put on DRM or another access controls onto content, it's that the benefits of doing so are far away outweighed by the negative side. But I do understand that it will be a fairly novel way of running things, but it's one that makes sense to me.

And, for the record, I really do still love the printed word! I really didn't mean to give the impression that printed books are cheap or badly made - I was attempting to put across the point that just because ebooks should be cheaper, it doesn't mean the content is worth any less. They won't be cheaper because of the quality involved, they will be cheaper because they are cheaper to make and distribute. The brief précis I gave of the traditional publishing process just highlights the time and expense in producing even quite a small print run. There is definitely room for both!
I'm of the mindset that digital publishing shouldn't be seen as an 'alternative' to traditional publishing, but should complement and augment it. Short stories, poetry, continuing series, bizarre and fringe materials all have arguably a better home in the digital environment.

Again, apologies for the odd sweary message - it's the first time the site has been attacked like that, and will hopefully be the last.

Oh dear. So many misunderstandings in that blog about e-books, digital rights, authors, and everything else.

And the website - such as it is - doesn't work properly with the world's most-used browser - Firefox

Emma

Hi Emma,
Just had a quick check in explorer, chrome, firefox, dolphin, opera mini and my default android browser - all seem to be fine! If there is anything specific that is or isn't happening, please do let me know.
As for the blog post (wow, I didn't realise it would be quite so controversial!) I don't think I went into any depth on the rights or the authors side of things, but if there are any specific things which you've picked up on on that brief overview, again please do let me know.
As for the views I put over on ebooks (specifically the access management/DRM side), I do see how that might be unusual, as I have gone over above, but again, i there is anything specific I'd love to get your perspective.

Hmm... where to start...

First off, my eyes have gone all weird from trying to read white on black. Bad move.

But mainly, the fact that you're telling people it's ok to copy books. NO, this is not ok. Unless an author signs over their rights (ie, if you hold a gun to their head), you do not own the copyright, and you do not have the authority to say, upfront, that it's ok to copy authors' work.

How, if you feel qualified to set up as a publisher, do you not understand this?

Just as a small point of correction - the debate on the green credentials of ebooks vs "dead tree books" is very much that - a debate.

There is no significant evidence to say that paper books are worse than digital ones, assuming they're printed on sustainably sourced paper. (And most big publishers use FSC certified paper)

This is because when you buy a book you are effectively paying for trees to be planted (to sustain the paper production) and the book itself is a significant carbon sink.

Whereas an e-book has to be read on a device (many of which are very significantly polluting in the manufacture) and if you're talking about an ipad vs an e-ink reader, then that device needs quite a bit of power.

I've seen statistics for example saying that if you read an online paper for just 30 minutes, it would be greener to buy a physical newspaper, even taking into account the transportation costs etc.

Likewise the claim that ebooks are significantly cheaper to produce is debatable. Physical production costs are a very small percentage of book costs compared to the costs of advances, editing, design, typesetting, publicity, marketing etc etc etc. Of course if you dispense with some or all of those factors as well, then the costs do go down dramatically. But that's a separate factor to the medium. You can do without those factors in print too. That's why publishers like Wordsworth have always been able to sell paperback copies of the classics for just Ł1 and still make a profit.

Thistle in the kiss is an EXCELLENT name btw!

Yes, paper books are definitely not worse for the planet than e-readers. Unlike a paper book, a Kindle doesn't bio-degrade - when you're dead it'll still be lying in a landfill somewhere.

<Added>

and insofar as e-readers are made of plastic, yes they do run on crude oil. Maybe the ink is penguin blood?

<Added>

I don't mean to sound negative, I wish you the best with the new publishing venture, but I think at the moment it's not convincing.

Hi Dee,
Thanks for the feedback, sorry about your eyes!
The point on it being OK to copy books - I didn't mean for it to sound quite so strong! The thing about any digital content (books, films, music etc etc etc) is that once it is made into a digital file it can be copied, and it invariably will be copied. For what it's worth, I think that the route taken by people like Amazon isn't the most effective.
Something with DRM from Amazon can only be read on one type of machine (one that can decode the DRM). Some access systems only let you put content on one device (which sucks if you break/lose/get a new one). They could stop supporting your particular device, leading to trouble down the road. And I'm sure most people remember the 1984 debacle a couple of years ago!
What I think is a more grown up and user friendly way of selling books is to make it easier to buy and use the books you own. The recommending and lending of books to friends is probably the most effective marketing tool there is. I am not saying that users can or should rip copies and distribute them willy-nilly. People sharing files is a fact of life, for better or for worse. What I would like is for people to think of ebooks as being much closer to 'real' books - a thing that you own, which you can do what you like with (within reason). People loan/give/buy second hand/cut up and deface books in a million different ways. The digital version has different challenges and safeguards needed, sure, but in a lot of important ways it can and should be treated in a similar way.

Besides all this, it *is* only a blog post, and really shouldn't be taken as the first stage in rights negotiations! I *will* be encouraging authors getting involved to consider creative commons licences, copyleft and other such creative ways of putting their works out there, but it will be part of a *negotiation* (hopefully with as few guns involved as possible). Will a lot of people be instantly turned off by this? You betcha, but like I said in the first post we're all about new thinking!

florapost - thanks!

Surely the question here is how you are going to get your goods to market - where will you sell the books? If you don't have a killer platform to sell on, then you are not doing anything we authors can't do for ourselves. I press a button here and I have a Kindle version or my book, another an it's epub. I can get it on Smashwords and Amazon for nothing - so what's your USP? How will you earn your 50%?

Ben Yezir

Besides all this, it *is* only a blog post, and really shouldn't be taken as the first stage in rights negotiations!

Maybe not, but you've come on here and directed us to the blog, presumably to attract us to open negotiations. As such, we can only assume that what we read is what we could expect from your services.