IP to attend the upcoming Australia-China Publishing Forum 2014!

IP is one of only 5 publishers invited to attend the Australia-China Publishing Forum in mid-March 2014!  – who said the start of the year would be boring?

We are excitedly preparing pitches for Chinese publishing houses regarding prospective sales and rights deals and looking forward to brushing shoulders with our colleagues at with Penguin Random and New Frontier Publishing, who will be attending with us.

With a heavy focus on digital publishing, our team is keen to promote such titles as I Love You, Book, Even Grimmer Tales, No Matter Who We're With, and The Smallest Carbon Footprint (in ebook format, as well as physical formats). Though still awaiting advice on which publishers and agents we'll be matched with for the Chinese market, thanks to our wonderful and hard working authors, we'll have a well stocked list to show off!

As David prepares to travel to Beijing in mid March, he is thrilled to be arriving a few days early to meet in Hefei with China's largest publishing house, Time Publishing. Eager to learn more about the Chinese market, David is looking forward to a tour of Times headquarters and meeting with publishers of their various imprints. A meeting with the Australian Ambassador is also being planned.

While we send him off on these sorties, keep the excellent work coming in!

And keep up to date with the Forum events by following us here or on Facebook and Twitter.

... Are you as excited as we are?

Media attention for two wave-making books: magical realism novel and child abuse legal battle memoir

Blood by Peter Kay

Blood was recently featured in The Mercury Saturday Magazine. Blood, written by Tasmanian local Peter Kay, is a magical realism novel involving time travel, romance, adventure, and the WWII bombing of Darwin.

Blood has also been featured in The Sunday Tasmanian, The Saturday Tasmanian, CQU News and the University of Canberra Monitor.

Sexual Abuse Survivor's Handbook by John Saunders

Sexual Abuse Survivor's Handbook by John Saunders has also been making waves. Read the feature article in the Northern Star here.

Sexual Abuse Survivor's Handbook has previously been mentioned in NSW Parliament, featured in interviews on ABC Radio, and has been the star of several public forums for child abuse survivors.

For details about a forum near you, contact us at info@ipoz.biz

Commentary on latest US court ruling for Google Books

The American Authors Guild seems intent on throwing good money after bad by pursuing Google for publishing excerpts from digitised books and then making them available on Google Books. In the latest court decision in the ongoing battle, a US court has ruled that Google Books is operating within the constraints of "fair use" in publishing extracts from whole books.

I've never understood the problem. IP signed up for Google Books back in the days before Google sold books because we saw the site as offering our titles greater discoverability amidst the millions of titles published each year. We never saw it as an infringement of copyright, although I can understand the objection of authors who never volunteered to have their work posted this way.

We routinely offer a link from the dedicated mini-sites for our books to the Google Books page featuring the title. This allows us to provide a short sample on our site, then give people the option to connect to Google Books to read a longer sample. Our Store is always the top link on the Google page for people who decide to buy the book in print or digitised version.

Surely, posting 15% of a work does not constitute piracy, especially since authors and publishers can choose to opt out of Google Books in part or in whole. These days, when authors offer their ENTIRE books for free on Amazon, that is a greater potential threat to their copyright if the freebie is then passed on.

Google Books is all about discoverability and enticing people to buy your work after sampling it. To see how it works, have a look at The Snow In Us (2nd edition)