The new publishing season

Eric Wittenberg is tring to break some sort of William Davis record: he has two books coming out from one publisher in a single season, Savas Beatie. Interesting that they would concentrate risk this way (on both sides of the deal). He has been good about posting his publishing experiences and I'll be very interested in how this turns out.

Speaking of Russel Beatie, I came across his Army of the Potomac Volume 1 in B&N the other day. Haven't seen it around lately. It had a blue color like the original issue in 2002. Here is that cover as it was issued; there is a flaw in this Amazon picture in that the navy blue color theme does not show well here - too much brown.

Anyway, the edition I picked up had a different picture on the cover than that shown above and it had a different shade of blue on the spine and different typeface. Had they reprinted the volume? Checking the copyright and reprintings info, I saw no, this was the old book in a new cover. Weirder still, when you go to the B&N website a third variant of the cover appears.

Well, the new cover also sports a new price: $60. This is a new marketing technique. Up from $49.98, IIRC. Haven't seen this before.

Nor have I seen the short writing efile model adopted by Amazon, before author Francis Hamit wrote to me about The Shenandoah Spy - Part 1, an Amazon Short. You get almost 10,000 words for under two bits. This business model has to be based on the idea of topic searches on Amazon.

Never thought of Amazon as a place to do topic searches but Mr. Hamit has published a ton of stuff through there in short format.

What an odd publishing season Spring 2006 is turning out to be.