Publishing: There’s been a lot of bad behaviour in the publishing world recently. You can take your pick from the First One’s terrible contest terms, Laurell K Hamilton and PC Cast fans fall out over sartorial descriptions, and the making’s of an epic grudgewank between Decadent Publishing and The Enders review blog.

The most I’ve managed to gather so far is this: Decadent publish author Graylin Fox’s new novel. That day, she receives an email to her private address linking her to a bad review, which she tweets about as nasty. Graylin claims she was then contacted privately on twitter by someone who seemed very interested in the review, to get her opinion of it. Shortly afterwards, this post appears on the review blog, accusing Decadent of going through their purchase records to provide the author with private information about the review blog owners. Decadent reply to this post offering to let one of the reviewers out of his/her contract with Decadent, if s/he thinks so poorly of the company. At this point the rest of the web gets hold of the story and start sharing their opinions, which are predominantly anti-Decadent.

Decadent respond to the post over at Dear Author to say they never shared private purchase information with anyone, but they don’t answer Jane’s other questions. Meanwhile, they’re twitter and facebook feeds fill up with links to music videos such as ‘Lies, Lies, Lies‘.  Graylin gives her side of the story, supporting Decadent’s claims, but very vague about how she knew who the anonymous Enders were. People are already wondering about an older post on the Enders blog, namechecking Graylin for ‘Worst Author Behaving badly moment”. Back over at Dear Author, someone else decides to name names, and outs two of the Enders as Belladonna Bordeaux/TJ Killian/Lee Morris and Sandra Sookoo, a claim which is backed up by Graylin. If you glance back at the Best and Worst of 2010 post on the Enders blog, you’ll notice the Best books of 2010 go to Belladonna Bordeaux, Sandra Sookoo, and TJ Killian. Belladonna, at least, is/was an author with Decadent, though I’m not sure which person/pseudonym is apparently an editor with them.

There’s been bad behaviour all round (1 – authors shouldn’t link negative reviews from twitter, 2 – publishers shouldn’t comment on them, 3 – authors shouldn’t use anonymous review blogs to push their own books, 4 – publishers shouldn’t post passive aggressive videos on their blogs rather than answering questions, 5 – editors shouldn’t use anonymous review blogs to slam authors they used to work with…) and I think there’s a lot more info to come here. It’ll be interesting to see how the Enders respond to the new accusations. What was originally pitched as ‘prima donna author’ has exploded into something a lot more complicated, and it’s a good reminder that publishing is a fairly close-knit world. You’d be surprised how often you run into the same people over and over again.

Interest-Piquing: What, that wasn’t enough links for you? VJ Chambers shares the sales info for her self-published books for 2010. She concludes that:

Print books still sell better than ebooks (duh), but for the self-publisher, the expense and hassle of putting one out may outweigh the benefits, making ebooks a better choice

InsPiring: What’s the appeal of the high heel? I like the conclusion of the article, and it would be interesting to see if the integration of the high heel as lingerie corresonds in any way to the increasing acceptance of visible lingerie in day-to-day life (for example, visible thongs).

Procrastination: It’s pretty much twitter, isn’t it?

(btw, vote for Tease in the P&E poll? 🙂 )

Publishing: Onnesha Roychoudhuri in the Boston Review has an article on the impact of Amazon on the bookselling trade. It’s a long one (though not quite as long as the scrollbar might make it look) but it’s thorough and very interesting. The comments, sadly, fall into the pro- and anti-digital debate, rather than discussing the thrust of the article, though they’re still worth skimming, and the article helpfully links to Who Moved My Buy Button? which is especially useful for authors whose publishers are being squeezed.

In the meantime, Borders (US) is in trouble. It’s been defaulting on payments to small publishers for a while, but now it’s begging the big ones to let it off the hook where they can. B&N aren’t impressed with this, and insist if Borders gets special terms they ought to as well. For print books brick and mortar stores are still making the majority of sales, but if Borders goes that’s going to leave a large proportion of that market without a b&m bookshop to go to. Amazon’s stranglehold tightens.

In the UK, since Borders closed last year (well, December 09) there’s been an overall drop in book sales of more than 3%. Waterstones, their biggest competitor, has seen a rise in sales but has still had to close 20 stores nationwide (partly due to its sister chain, HMV, which had a poor season and is closing about 40 of its own shops). The Borders unit in my city still hasn’t been filled, and though Waterstones is a little busier I wouldn’t say it was Borders-customer-base busier.

Interest Piquing: EREC shares it’s annual data in graph form. It’s interesting that apart from one jump, titles still within their first year have remained fairly constant in terms of sales, while all other data being tracked rose. I wonder if that’s something to do with readers buying up digital backlists, and there being more digital backlists to buy now.

InsPiring: Two from the National Georgraphic today – a prehistoric predator found in a kitchen counter and a forest inside a cave.

Procrastination: The Adventures of Superhero Girl. Originally appearing in a newspaper in Canada, the artist is uploading it strip by strip for the rest of the world to enjoy!