The great Authenticity Hoax paperback giveaway

Hey! The Authenticity Hoax came out in paperback this week in the USA and Canada. They are identical, except that the USA edition has a fancy new subtitle. It's also my birthday. So to celebrate, I'm giving away five copies of the book: Two in Canada, two in the USA, and one to someone from a third country.

How to win?

Well, you might have noticed that things have been a bit quiet on this blog. Partly it's because we just had a federal election here in Canada, and I spent a great deal of blogging and writing energy on politics, most of which ended up on my blog at Maclean's magazine. I also started an Authenticity Hoax tumblr, which has become a repository for a lot of the pics, quotes, links, and other miscellany. It's probably a bad idea to split the readers' attention like this, but I thought I'd try it out.

At any rate, the upshot is that I haven't been doing much of the long-form stuff I want to do here. So here's where you, the dear and the gentle, come in. Send me an idea for something I should blog about -- a link, a picture, a book, a band. If I use it, you get a copy of my book. Easy peasy.

So let's have it. What's got your authenticity hoaxed?

email: jandrewpotter@gmail.com

twitter: @jandrewpotter

Grim times for publishers

It was inevitable that the book industry would get all shook up by technology, in the way that music, film, and newspapers and magazines had done before it. Publishing hung on for longer for no reason other than it took a while longer for a delivery mechanism to come along that would rival the book as a technology.

The upside of this is that it is opening up new ways of experimenting with publishing -- Neal Stephenson's Mongoliad is a really interesting experiment. 

But just as Amazon made the bricks and mortar bookstore obsolete, the Kindle, Kobo, iPad and other such are making the book itself a quaint little objet de nostalgie.

I take no pleasure in this -- I write for a living, and writing is a very conservative business. But for that very reason, I'm worried that the publishing business is even worse situated to deal with the challenge than even the music and film bizes were. But I'm just guessing here, since I have no real experience on the inside. But someone who has worked in the biz, inside and out, is Megan Hustad. She has a great rundown of what the main problems are (with loads of good links as well), but her last point caught me by surprise:

All that said, however, there’s one blanketing sin that largely goes unmentioned. Any publisher that wants to exist let alone remain relevant in 2015 will have to figure out how to wriggle out from underneath it. The fundamental error, as I see it, is that the traditional publishing model privileges this formula:

• Underestimated costs + Overestimated benefits = Project approval.

In other words, before most publishers agree to publish anything, they run sales projections spun from a highly selective glance at the track records of “comparison titles” (as they’re called) that sold well. Comp titles that sold poorly are routinely ignored. Only projects for which all decision-makers have bought into best-case scenarios are pursued.

Now I'm dying to know what "comparison titles" my publishers looked at for the Authenticity Hoax.