Universal Music Group will drop the prices on the majority of its new CD releases to between six and 10 dollars. This plan dubbed the Velocity program will go into effect in the second quarter of this year.

UMG hopes this plan will at least slow the serious decline in CD sales that has been going on since MP3s and other digital music downloads came on the scene.

While UMG has its hands in music downloads and streaming, too, the profit margins are usually better with CDs. UMG claims that its cheaper CD plan will maintain a 25% profit margin.

Up until now, most new CDs have actually been more expensive than their download counterparts. If the price comes down, consumers will be more likely to purchase the goods. It's a simple economic principle. But to try to incentivize music fans even further, UMG plans to load the jewel cases with deluxe content that you won't usually get with online purchases.

We're not going to complain about lower prices. We welcome anything that reduces consumers' expenses. But do you think this will actually make a difference? A couple of us in the Mashable office haven't bought a CD in years if you're the same, will UMG's plan turn you around?

[img credit: lrargarich]

Tags: CD, CDs, digital downloads, music, umg, universal music group

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

(photo: Evil Erin)

Matt Yglesias analyzes the failure of the progressive block strategy, and chalks it up to progressives not picking issues that centrists care about.

He doesn't note his own role in that failure, vilifying the leader of the progressive block Raul Grijalva as the world's greatest monster unless he backs down. (Our own whip effort started to back Grijalva's efforts, which were already underway in the House when we started in June of 2009.)

I've said many times that it's impossible to expect progressive members of Congress to hold together if they don't have the backing of their natural fiscal constituencies the liberal interest groups and the unions. Without that support, they're left to raise money from PACS and other corporate sources to sufficiently fund their campaigns. That's why they take turns championing progressive bills that ultimately fail so they can pretend they do something, and then vote for bad bills that ultimately pass so someone else can be the failed hero. When Tammy Baldwin votes for one PhRMA-friendly bill after another, progressives can say hey, but she's so good on LGBT issues! Which never actually pass either, but the kabuki keeps activists sufficiently docile and donating to large organizations who fundraise off amping up outrage.

But it's also worthy to note that it's hard for them to withstand the assault of liberal pundits who sneeringly derided their efforts as naive, futile and purist. They should be proudly taking credit for their role in delegitimizing progressive opposition to the bill in liberal intellectual circles, much the same role that the same people played during the Iraq war. After all, it's TNR's stock in trade.

I'll leave it to others to analyze how corporate cash was laundered through foundations to underwrite the efforts of various opinion leaders in the health care debate, but it definitely deserves more scrutiny. . .

Monday, June 1, 2009

Kaiser Family Foundation Launches New Non-Profit Health Policy News Service

Menlo Park, CA In the midst of a major federal health reform debate and the ongoing financial turmoil in the media industry, the Kaiser Family Foundation officially launched Kaiser Health News (KHN) today to provide a new source of in-depth reporting on major health issues. KHN is staffed by experienced health policy journalists and editors, and will feature contributions from a wide array of leading health policy commentators and independent journalists.

[]

At the heart of KHN will be in-depth, explanatory stories about complex health policy issues and major developments in Washington, D.C., and around the country in the health care marketplace and health care delivery system. The news service will cover policy stories like health care reform, developments in major public health coverage programs like Medicare and Medicaid, and complicated ongoing policy challenges like the financing of long-term care, and it will examine the nation's health care system from a consumer perspective. KHN will also provide a synthesis of health policy news coverage through a daily health policy report, original programming from Kaiser's broadcast studio, and regular columns from contributing writers and experts. Jonathan Cohn, senior editor of The New Republic, and Howard Gleckman, senior research associate at the Urban Institute and former senior correspondent at Business Week, will be writing bi-weekly columns. Among others who will contribute occasional columns are: Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute, Jim Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Judy Feder of the Center for American Progress, and Mark Pauly of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

The development of Jonathan Gruber's much-vaunted model, which formed the justification for econo-wonks and politicians alike to support the Senate bill's voodoo claims about the excise tax, was originally paid for by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 1999 according to Gruber. It was given a facelift this year courtesy of the Small Business Majority, whose money comes from foundations including the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation. (h/t spanishinquisition)

And recall that Kaiser Permanente was the original sponsor of the Washington Post pay-to-play salons.

You have to wonder if any of that Kaiser cash underwrote other efforts at the Post after the parties fell through.

HCAN's efforts were funded by Atlantic Philanthropies, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and George Soros foundations, among others.

So, come on, pundits. Don't let the lameness of progressives in Congress get all the credit for shooting down the public option, rolling back choice, and teeing up constitutional amendments to overturn the health care bill around the country.

Stand proud.

Tags: Blogosphere, Jonathan Gruber, Kaiser Family Foundation, Matt Yglesias, Media, new media, Raul Grijalva, Robert Wood Johnson, The New Republic, TNR, veal pen

This post is my attempt to distill together many different threads into a common tapestry. There is a lot of turbidity in the publishing, podcasting, music, film, television worlds right now. I have these feeling that every bit of this is all part of a larger whole and I'm going to take a stab at defining it. This post will either be awesome because it succeeds or a miserable failure. There is no middle ground. Off in to it. This will be long, you have been warned.

First, let me inventory the raw materials that got me thinking this way. Recently JC Hutchins posted that he had been dropped as an author by St. Martins Press and that they would not be publishing the 7th Son sequels. The post lives between a gut-check and a crisis of faith from one of the pioneering new media creator/ novelist hybrid guys. He also posted about monetary realities of writers pubishing via ebooks. Not that long before this, I had listened to JC's Hey Everybody interview with Pablo Defendini and Ami Greko from The New Sleekness blog. It's a really interesting discussion about the future of book publishing by industry professionals young enough in their careers to be less invested in the status quo and more willing to help a new future emerge. (Side note 1: I met Pablo and Ami at last year's Dragon*Con in the classic SF con fashion I wanted to meet them, saw them in a hotel bar, asked if I could sit with them, introduced myself and hung out for an hour. Try it, it works! ) Much in my thinking was informed over the last month by the Amazon/Macmillan ebook pricing wars of far too large a trail to link to anything. In that debate I did first run across Joe Konrath, his fiction and some of his posts with amazingly open and detailed statistics of what he sells and what he makes from digital publishing. (Side note 2: I bought, read and enjoyed his book Whiskey Sour as fallout from the debate).

There are many other bits of thought in the mix, such as my feelings about beginning my own novel during NaNoWriMo and thinking about hiring my friends at Sterling Editing to work on it and what I might choose to do with such a book when)it is finished. That's enough of a prelude, though. Time to hit it.

JC Hutchins struck a nerve when he basically waved the white flag on his current way of working.

Creating podcast fiction does does not generate direct revenue for me. Based on anecdotal and statistical data, very few people are willing to pay for general podcast content, much less podcast fiction. Since my goal is to make a living wage with my words, the current monetization models including in-show advertisements will not deliver this. Dedicating time and effort to my non-fiction podcast projects will deliver equally underwhelming monetary results.

It is also apparent to me that using the Free model to promote a tangible product, such as I did with 7th Son: Descent and Personal Effects: Dark Art, does not deliver sustainable sales results. I have friends some of whom are my best friends, the most talented people I've had the privilege to know and work with who have absolute faith in this model. I treasure their trailblazing efforts and enthusiasm. My faith, however, has been fundamentally rattled.

Put simply: The new media model viably supports only the most blessed and talented of authors. The time, effort and money I invest in entertaining you for free pulls my attention and talent away from projects that can generate revenue. While podcasting, podcast fiction, and most importantly your support and evangelism has positively impacted my life and career in ways I'll never be able to fully express, I cannot continue to release free audiofiction if I wish to make a living wage with my words.

This is pretty big stuff in the world of podcast fiction. Hutch was one of the pioneers of the form and his getting picked up by St. Martins was considered a watershed and a validation for the medium. So if he can't make it in this world, what does that say about all the other podcast novelists who are less engaged, have less of a fan base, less sheer horsepower? Does it mean this medium is screwed?

I am positing that Hutch had a terrible misfortune of timing, that he arose as a viable author at exactly the wrong moment in publishing history. As he started down his path it seemed like the end game was to get a book deal with a major publisher. For writers of the last 100 years, this was the reasonable career success path for authors, and practically the only one. In the last few years though a sea change has happened so rapidly and thoroughly to flip that Hutch got his boat capsized in the process and he will be far from the only one. As crazy as it may sound, for a certain kind of author at this point I think a major publishing contract may seem like winning the game but is in fact losing it.

The red flags I got from the JC Hutchins post started here:

Examining the lead up to, and release of, the novel, I cannot see how I could have promoted it any better than I did. I literally went broke promoting this book and Personal Effects: Dark Art (another novel that will not have a sequel; it also underperformed). I conceived numerous brand-new online marketing campaigns that dazzled you and others. I asked you to purchase the novel, and many of you did.

If JC is literally going broke promoting 7th Son and Personal Effects book, I think a reasonable question to ask is What is St. Martins Press' role in this? If JC is willing and able to put so much of his own time and money into the promotion of the books, what value is he getting from the big publisher that is worth giving away 90% of the sale of the book to them? 50 years ago, and 20 years ago and 2 years ago, this made sense. It was pretty much impossible to get a book published and into the hands of the world in any significant way especially in a way that a writer could make a full-time living without a major publisher contract, especially one paying advances at a level to be a livable wage. Nowadays, especially due to the markeplace enabled by the Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader et al, that's a different equation.

Joe Konrath's post about the money he makes from the Kindle store shows a really clear pattern that he summarizes with:

My five Hyperion ebooks (the sixth one came out in July so no royalties yet) each earn an average of $803 per year on Kindle.

My four self-pubbed Kindle novels each earn an average of $3430 per year.

If I had the rights to all six of my Hyperion books, and sold them on Kindle for $1.99, I'd be making $20,580 per year off of them, total, rather than $4818 a year off of them, total.

So, in other words, because Hyperion has my ebook rights, I'm losing $15,762 per year.

For a writer with an engaged audience, like JA Konrath has and like JC Hutchins has, there may well be more money in their books self-published primarily through the Kindle and other ebook stores. An interesting bit from the Konrath numbers above, that's from making 35% of the sales price for his direct books. When it changes to 70%, he'll be making twice as much per book as he posted above for the self-published ones.

Let me say it again: for a writer who is engaged with their audience and reasonably prolific (because you need new books to keep this engine turning), we may be at the turning point where a better living is available through self-publishing than a big New York publisher book deal.

There are certainly authors that this model will not work for. During my preparation for last year's Podcasting for Working Writers panel at Dragon*Con I talked to both James Patrick Kelly and Kelley Eskridge on this topic and they both raised the point that for a number of old school writers, the idea of engaging at the level of podcasting and doing large parts of their own publicity is anathema. A reasonable chunk of authors don't want to get out in the limelight and picked this career specifically so they don't have to engage. They write their books, maybe do a few conventions a year, do some bookstore events and that's it. Back to the keyboard where the serious work happens. That's fair enough and those writers will always need a publisher to do the parts of this business that would make them unhappy to pursue.

I think of the classic big publisher and big record label model as basically serving the function of the bank or maybe as VC. The manufacturing and distribution of the creative work was too capital intensive for an individual so this company would lend that money to the process, make the books or records show up in the store, do some publicity and keep most of the money. They insulate the creator from the process and from the retailers and fans. What publicity efforts exist, the big media company acts as a semi-permeable membrane to let a little of the public through, but not a lot. Ultimately in this model, the relationship with the fans of the buying public is owned mostly by the retailer and the publisher or label, very little by the writer or musician. For the author that doesn't want to feed and water that relationship, that's perfect.

For the other kind of author, a JC Hutchins or Mur Lafferty or Scott Sigler, going with a major publisher outsources to a third party a relationship with their fans that these writers are really really good at maintaining. When Hutch is paying his own money to publicize his books and his his own direct line into his own fanbase, what can the big publishers do for him? They could give him large enough advances to keep his bills paid while future books are written, but obviously they aren't willing to do that because sales aren't high enough. JC's books earn money, but not enough money to keep him in that system. For me, the real question is Did St. Martins Press do 9 times the work than JC did to get the work promoted? If not, what did they do to deserve a 90/10 split?

Last November for NaNoWriMo I began a novel that I have literally been thinking about since 1991 when I was 23. While I came nowhere near finishing it that month and am nowhere near finished now, I have a goal to finish this novel in 2010. I've already been thinking about what happens when I finish the book. Do I try to find an agent and then try to have them place it with a major publisher? Since I don't have any plans beyond that one book and thus don't necessarily have a writing career in mind, how does that affect my decision making? At the moment I'm leaning towards not bothering to place the book with any publisher at all. I'll pay Nicola and Kelley at Sterling Editing to work with me to get it publishable and hire a book designer and/or artist to hone the final product and then publish it to the Kindle store, Smashwords, the Nook store and whatever else seems reasonable at the time. I'll probably release it via Podiobooks.com at the the same time, do my publicity via that and the other usual online suspects and let it ride. The key point to me is that the energy I could spend in placing my book at a big publisher could be spent selling the book to readers and I'll probably make more money that way in the long run. This isn't the way things worked for the 19th and 20th century and it may not be the way it works in the future, but March 2010 it is the way it looks to me now. The validation of having a major publisher decide I'm their sort of writer doesn't do anything for me. I don't need the book contract to pay my living, I'd end up doing mostly my own publicity anyway so what the hell does the publisher have to offer me anymore? Rather than have them put out a $15 Kindle book that I see a buck or two from and no one buys with a print version that is on and off the shelves in head-swimming time on a death march to the warehouse remainder store, I'd rather put out a $5.99 ebook version that I see $4 from each one and more people buy. I have a whole rant on how the true function of ebook platforms is to enable impulse buys, but this current post is already too long. That must come later.

When I interviewed Cory Doctorow in 2006, one of the things he said is that the generation coming of age now is the first one to arise without a stigma attached to self-publication. Since I've been paying attention to the world of science fiction and writers in general, a giant shift has happened. When I joined GEnie in 1992, the notion of self-publishing your work meant that it was unreadable tripe and the very thought of it was risible to any serious author. Nowadays, it might well be the most rational economic choice available. If you aren't already in the system and earning livable wages from advances on your books, and you are the sort of writer and person with that drive a JC Hutchins, a Scott Sigler, a Tee Morris, a Mur Lafferty, an Alec Longstreth, someone willing to do more than thrown the manuscript over the wall and wait for finished copies to return it might be time to take the reins yourself and just do this. The costs are low which means the cost of failing is low. The traditional publishers aren't paying that much anyway so the opportunity costs are low. Just do it. Lynne Abbey, CJ Cherryh and Jane Fancher did. The writers at Book View Cafe did. I will. Don't pin your hopes on a big publisher with economic drivers that are different than yours. Just do it yourself, work the people yourself and keep as much of the money as you can.

Tags: akismet, amazon, ebooks, jakonrath, jchutchins, kindle, macmillan, publishing, sterlingediting, stmartinspress

Anyone who's been to SXSW in the past few years, ever since the iPhone's release, knows that the AT&T network absolutely explodes during the festival. Texts, if they ever make it through, take hours; calls are dropped at an alarming rate, even by AT&T standards; and Internet access is essentially impossible. It's hard for AT&T to keep up because Austin, any other week of the year, isn't absolutely flooded with iPhone users mucking about, asking where the Facebook party is, or if they're on the list for the Gawker party. (I'm on the list, but I'm not going this year so it doesn't matter.) The point is, AT&T has its hands full that week, so let's give them an A for effort for trying to prevent another iPhone meltdown this year.

SXSW starts on March 12, and runs through March 21. It's a couple of days worth of tech, music, movies, and open bars. It's sort of an exaggeration, but every single attendee rocks the iPhone. It brings AT&T's network, already sorta meh, to it knees. This year, though, AT&T has prepared itself for the huge influx of users.

AT&T has installed a distributed antenna system at the Austin Convention Center. In a perfect world, it adds the equivalent of eight cell towers to the covered area. AT&T has also three temporary cell sites for good measure. These things are typically installed during big, but temporary events. Think Super Bowl or, well, large conventions.

The company also says it has added fiber-optic connections to more than quadruple the backhaul capacity of each of the eight cell sites that serve the event area, and temporary sites will also be served by extensive backhaul. Whatever that means!

Fingers crossed, every SXSW attendee will be able to FourSquare till their battery dies. That's all you can ask for.

Flickr

We just got a hot tip from one of our Verizon buddies. Apparently Verizon Wireless is starting a new BOGO campaign tomorrow that includes both of its Android handsets the Droid and Eris both Palm phones the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus along with the LG Chocolate Touch and Samsung Alias 2 features phones. We hear the promotion will allow you to mix and match any of the eligible handsets or even a Winmo/feature phone of equal or lesser value. Of course the buyer will be required to sign a two year contract but that's par for the course on these types of deals.

Our tipster says the stores have been prepped and the promo is set to begin tomorrow. No word on how long it will run so you better get your new phones soon.

Scammers beware though, remember Verizon recently hiked its ETFs on most advanced devices to counter those that were taking advantage of Verizon's genius nature. It's no longer worth it to simply get two new phones, pay the ETF and hawk the other one on eBay for a quick profit.

SFWeekly Web Editor Alexia Tsotsis (not pictured left) spent some time early this morning trying out Chatroulette, a website that connects random strangers for a video chat. The results are unlikely to surprise you. Unless you are new to this whole Internet thing. Screen shots of some of her more entertaining chats are below the post.

Harkening back to the days of A/S/L, the random vidchat service Chatroulette is one of those online arenas where not being a white male looking to get off puts you in a definite minority. Founded by a 17 year-old Russian high school student named Andrew Ternovskiy, the service is a more successful Omegle, combining elements of the MTV show Next with vidchat capabilities.

Aspiring chatees click to play and as an escape latch you or your partner can hit Next anytime if you get bored, scared, or have to get back to work. The Report video as inappropriate button also seems to provide some comfort, but by judging by the nsfw fare served to me last night, doesn't provide much of a threat.

I pressed play last night at around 3:00 am PST and after about 45 clicks on Next encountered 5 straight up penis shots, a lot of camera disabled chats, two women who automatically clicked Next once they figured out that I too was a female, and a lot of very grateful looking guys, including a Chinese fan of Google and a French guy in indoor sunglasses, who asked me whether I was a more dominate lady or submissive woman in the hope that I would be the former.

Out of the 10,920 of my fellow Chatroulette participants, my Roulettees were a good cross section of Internet humanity. And while I did not encounter the suicide hanging videos alluded to in many of the chats, things like did you hear the one about the guy who shot himself in the bath tub, were brought up in conversation quite a few times, as examples of just how crazy Chatroulette can get.

Anywhere you get a mass of people communicating uncensored (and yes much like 4chan.org, China has not yet blocked Chatroulette) will be subject to typical groupthink behavior like urban myths and requests for interaction better left to the casual encounters section of Craigslist. Nonetheless, the service's potential for more substantial acts of communication is formidable.

Chatroulette is what you'd expect it to be, micro-interactive reality TV with a large heaping of cybersex. While most people are (whether they admit it or not) voyeurs the fact that Chatroulette lets the both participants see each other limits the site's potential user base to the weirdos and despite piquing VC Fred Wilson's interest it doesn't seem like there's currently enough weirdos to turn the humble startup into something mainstream.

One Roulettee, when asked what he thought the service was most useful for, responded, connecting with people around the world. Yeah, and asking them to show you their boobs.

I recently went looking for some software to make a blog into a book. Here's what I found:

- Lulu will take PDF files for a book. Blogbooker.com will try to create a PDF from a blog. Unfortunately, my blog made BlogBooker choke (I have 991 posts from my blog) even when I excluded comments.

- Blurb.com will try to create a book from a blog, but it only supports blogs hosted on WordPress.com, not other WordPress blogs. That will help some people who want to print their blog into a book, but not everyone.

- I had the best luck with FastPencil. In order to reduce the size of your exported blog, you'll first want to go to your comments section, click on the spam link and clear out any spam comments by selecting all the spam comments and clicking Empty Spam. Then you can export your WordPress blog (from the Dashboard, click Tools, then Export) as an XML file that you can download to your computer. From there, FastPencil lets you upload the .xml file and then select which blog posts to include in the book. You can also filter by time, which I had to do. Even my blog posts (no comments) from the last year and a half still made a 350+ page book, and FastPencil choked on turning my entire blog into a book.

FastPencil did a few things well. Included images were imported, and some formatting such as bold made it into the PDF. But other formatting, such as code formatting and newlines/spacing between paragraphs didn't make it. Embedded content such as videos or polls were likewise empty. Trying to import my entire blog also didn't work. But all in all, I was impressed with FastPencil. They also have nice collaboration tools (e.g. you can designate editors, reviewers, co-authors, and project managers to help in writing/polishing the content). The site also works through your web browser instead of as a downloadable program, which appealed to me. If you're used to WordPress, FastPencil won't be too much of a change.

It's still not a point-and-click affair to make a nice looking coffee table book out of a blog, but it's getting closer. Right now, the make a book niche feels like the early days of recordable CDs. Back then, CD-R discs were expensive enough that I would spend time to make sure that I used all the free space on the CD. Eventually prices dropped so much that you didn't feel bad about burning a half-empty or not-perfectly-polished CD.

If you've tried other blog-to-book services or websites, let me know your experiences in the comments.