Ithaca Diaries Cover

I’m ecstatic to have finally launched a kickstarter campaign to bring Ithaca Diaries to life! And that the campaign is now already featured as a staff pick! Here’s the link…https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639099206/ithaca-diaries-coming-of-age-in-the-1960s?ref=category_recommended .

In case you can’t quite see the writing on the cover, left:

Ithaca Diaries is  coming of age memoir set at Cornell University in the tumultuous 1960s. The story is told in first person from the point of view of a smart, sassy, funny, scared, sophisticated yet naïve college student (moi) who can laugh at herself while she and the world around her are having a nervous breakdown. Based on diaries, letters, interviews and other primary and secondary accounts of the time, Ithaca Diariesdescribes collegiate life as protests, politics, and violence increasingly engulf the student, the campus, and the nation.  I hope my irreverent observations will serve as a prism for understanding what it was like to live through those precarious times. While often laugh-out-loud funny, I believe they provide meaningful insight into the process of political and social change from which we are reaping the benefits, today.

It would be great if you’d share this blog with anyone who might be interested….and contribute to the kickstarter campaign!
Many thanks, Anita

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and Marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.
Anita Harris is it’s Managing Director. She is also the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity. 

As an author, I’m having trouble getting my head around an email I received this morning from Amazon Kindle Direct publishing–charging Hachette Publishing Company with illegal collusion and asking me (and all authors) to demand that Hachette lower its ebook prices. Evidently, due to anti-trust settlement, Amazon can’t undercut Hachette e-book prices and is trying to renegotiate.  I ask you (and Amazon and Hachette): Are books a commodity? An art form? Something in-between? Does Hachette, with high-ish book prices, value the written word or is the company just out for high margins, of which most authors receive little?  Now, the New York Times reports, Amazon is calling on readers to pressure Hachette,  some best-selling authors are fighting Amazon,  and, as the following email shows, Amazon wants other authors to fight back.  I feel caught in the crossfire. Are we pawns in a battle between publishing giants? What is a  (literally) poor author to do? –Anita Harris, author, Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity  and Ithaca Diaries.   Here’s this morning’s email from Amazon Kindle: Dear KDP Author,

Just ahead of World War II, there was a radical invention that shook the foundations of book publishing. It was the paperback book. This was a time when movie tickets cost 10 or 20 cents, and books cost $2.50. The new paperback cost 25 cents – it was ten times cheaper. Readers loved the paperback and millions of copies were sold in just the first year.

With it being so inexpensive and with so many more people able to afford to buy and read books, you would think the literary establishment of the day would have celebrated the invention of the paperback, yes? Nope. Instead, they dug in and circled the wagons. They believed low cost paperbacks would destroy literary culture and harm the industry (not to mention their own bank accounts). Many bookstores refused to stock them, and the early paperback publishers had to use unconventional methods of distribution – places like newsstands and drugstores. The famous author George Orwell came out publicly and said about the new paperback format, if “publishers had any sense, they would combine against them and suppress them.” Yes, George Orwell was suggesting collusion. 

Well… history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

Fast forward to today, and it’s the e-book’s turn to be opposed by the literary establishment. Amazon and Hachette – a big US publisher and part of a $10 billion media conglomerate – are in the middle of a business dispute about e-books. We want lower e-book prices. Hachette does not. Many e-books are being released at $14.99 and even $19.99. That is unjustifiably high for an e-book. With an e-book, there’s no printing, no over-printing, no need to forecast, no returns, no lost sales due to out of stock, no warehousing costs, no transportation costs, and there is no secondary market – e-books cannot be resold as used books. E-books can and should be less expensive.

Perhaps channeling Orwell’s decades old suggestion, Hachette has already been caught illegally colluding with its competitors to raise e-book prices. So far those parties have paid $166 million in penalties and restitution. Colluding with its competitors to raise prices wasn’t only illegal, it was also highly disrespectful to Hachette’s readers.

The fact is many established incumbents in the industry have taken the position that lower e-book prices will “devalue books” and hurt “Arts and Letters.” They’re wrong. Just as paperbacks did not destroy book culture despite being ten times cheaper, neither will e-books. On the contrary, paperbacks ended up rejuvenating the book industry and making it stronger. The same will happen with e-books.

Many inside the echo-chamber of the industry often draw the box too small. They think books only compete against books. But in reality, books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more. If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.

Moreover, e-books are highly price elastic. This means that when the price goes down, customers buy much more. We’ve quantified the price elasticity of e-books from repeated measurements across many titles. For every copy an e-book would sell at $14.99, it would sell 1.74 copies if priced at $9.99. So, for example, if customers would buy 100,000 copies of a particular e-book at $14.99, then customers would buy 174,000 copies of that same e-book at $9.99. Total revenue at $14.99 would be $1,499,000. Total revenue at $9.99 is $1,738,000. The important thing to note here is that the lower price is good for all parties involved: the customer is paying 33% less and the author is getting a royalty check 16% larger and being read by an audience that’s 74% larger. The pie is simply bigger.

But when a thing has been done a certain way for a long time, resisting change can be a reflexive instinct, and the powerful interests of the status quo are hard to move. It was never in George Orwell’s interest to suppress paperback books – he was wrong about that.

And despite what some would have you believe, authors are not united on this issue. When the Authors Guild recently wrote on this, they titled their post: “Amazon-Hachette Debate Yields Diverse Opinions Among Authors” (the comments to this post are worth a read).  A petition started by another group of authors and aimed at Hachette, titled “Stop Fighting Low Prices and Fair Wages,” garnered over 7,600 signatures.  And there are myriad articles and posts, by authors and readers alike, supporting us in our effort to keep prices low and build a healthy reading culture. Author David Gaughran’s recent interview is another piece worth reading.

We recognize that writers reasonably want to be left out of a dispute between large companies. Some have suggested that we “just talk.” We tried that. Hachette spent three months stonewalling and only grudgingly began to even acknowledge our concerns when we took action to reduce sales of their titles in our store. Since then Amazon has made three separate offers to Hachette to take authors out of the middle. We first suggested that we (Amazon and Hachette) jointly make author royalties whole during the term of the dispute. Then we suggested that authors receive 100% of all sales of their titles until this dispute is resolved. Then we suggested that we would return to normal business operations if Amazon and Hachette’s normal share of revenue went to a literacy charity. But Hachette, and their parent company Lagardere, have quickly and repeatedly dismissed these offers even though e-books represent 1% of their revenues and they could easily agree to do so. They believe they get leverage from keeping their authors in the middle.

We will never give up our fight for reasonable e-book prices. We know making books more affordable is good for book culture. We’d like your help. Please email Hachette and copy us.

Hachette CEO, Michael Pietsch: Michael.Pietsch@hbgusa.com

Copy us at: readers-united@amazon.com

Please consider including these points:

– We have noted your illegal collusion. Please stop working so hard to overcharge for ebooks. They can and should be less expensive.
– Lowering e-book prices will help – not hurt – the reading culture, just like paperbacks did.
– Stop using your authors as leverage and accept one of Amazon’s offers to take them out of the middle.
– Especially if you’re an author yourself: Remind them that authors are not united on this issue.

Thanks for your support.
 
The Amazon Books Team

P.S. You can also find this letter at www.readersunited.com   New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and Marketing firm located in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

Boston children’s book author Irene Smalls has joined forces with artist/illustrator Cathy Ann Johnson and publicist Ayanna Najuma to establish 2GoGlobal Marketing--an agency to promote independent authors and small publishers at the Frankfurt International Book Fair, in October of 2014.

Frankfurt, the world’s oldest and largest book fair, is attended by some 300,000 publishers, buyers and authors seeking to purchase and sell international rights to books. Approximately 120 countries are represented, at some 1750 booths.

Typically, independent authors and publishers are not represented in Frankfurt.

But 2GoGlobalMarketing will exhibit books in a Frankfurt Book Fair front row booth, “hand sell” and actively search for international sales opportunities for select books, “ according to Smalls.

Smalls, an award-winning author who writes primarily for “diverse” or minority children, was told by her publishers there was “no interest” in her books internationally. But she found that was not true.  “Publishers from Lebanon and China expressed interest in my titles. I would not have known that without pursuing international rights sales on my own.”

According to Johnson: “Authors and illustrators must be entrepreneurs.  Being represented in Frankfurt is the next step in developing our brands and literary businesses.”

Najuma, who will direct 2GoGlobalMarketing’s promotion at the show, said: “Many representatives merely place books on a shelf in a booth. 2GOGlobalMarketing will showcase individual books and seek out buyers at events and venues throughout the show.”

2GoGLOBALMarketing is currently accepting a small number of select titles to showcase, for a $500 fee.  Authors  and small publishers may apply through August 31, 2014 via the 2GoGLOBAL website www.frankfurt2014.com.

Authors represented by 2GoGLOBAL  are also welcome to hold book signings at the 2GoGlobalMarketing booth.

–Anita M. Harris
Anita Harris is the author of Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity (2014) and Ithaca Diaries (forthcoming, 2015).

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group--an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA.

I’m very pleased to report  the launch of Virtual Book Group–which has chosen my book, Broken Patterns, Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity as its featured summer read.

Virtual Book Group is an exciting new venture of digital marketing guru (and chief operating bookworm) Christina Inge.  Readers from all over the world can  to join for free to share their thoughts about selected books and related topics with one another and with authors, over time.

Inge said: “We created Virtual Book Group for people who love books, and love talking about them–whenever and wherever they are. 

“This summer, we’ll be reading Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity.  Based on interviews with women who entered male-dominated careers in the 1970s and 1980s, Boston author and reporter Anita M. Harris looks at the intergenerational patterns of women’s lives. She shows how the experiences of mothers and grandmothers influence career decisions, and traces the impact of rapid technological and social change on family structures, psyches, and gender roles. 

“As with all summer books, ours is full of great stories, riveting drama, and lessons learned. But it’s not a potboiler. It’s an eye-opening look at generations of women in the workforce that picks up where Lean In leaves off.” 

As the author, I’ll be chiming in for online and video chats through August–and, possibly, beyond.

It’s free to join–but you do need to REGISTER.
If you’d like to buy Broken Patterns,  It’s available at the Harvard Bookstore, on Amazon and Kindle...as well as  Kobo, Apple, Inktera,  Nook, Page Foundry and Scribd.   You can find more information, photos, readers’ comments and tell your own story at Brokenpatternsbook.com.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is an author and communications consultant based in Cambridge, MA.
New Cambridge Observer is a publication the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning marketing and PR firm located in kendall Square, Cambridge.

On Friday, July 11, my friend Andrew Kreig spoke at the National Press Club in Washington about his new book Presidential Puppetry: Obama, Romney and Their Masters, which tackles intelligence agency influence on politics and the media.

Presidential Puppetry, is “a non-partisan exposé of the intelligence sector influence in the Obama administration’s second term,” he said.  Drawing from a century of history that includes the Romney and Bush family dynasties, it  argues that failures in news reporting will continue because both traditional and social media are heavily influenced by revenue sources little understood by the public, including most journalists and academics. Link to book preview video

In his talk, Kreig noted  that before the Washington Post was sold to Amazon CEO Jeffery Bezos last summer, the paper had, for many years, received just 4 percent of its revenue from circulation and 14-15 percent from advertising. Approximately 60 percent of Post revenue has come from an education subsidiary, Kaplan, which profits from lucrative but little-reported government relationships.

Similarly, Amazon.com, Bezos’ source of wealth, last fall obtained a $600 million contract to handle advanced computing needs for the CIA, Kreig said. The contract dwarfed the $250 million Bezos purchase price for the Post and further illustrates certain seldom-reported institutional ties between news-making agencies and news organizations.

In another example of close ties between government and the news media, Kreig noted that the president of CBS News is Andrew Rhodes. Rhodes brother, Ben, is Obama’s speechwriter, deputy national intelligence director and, as described by insider columnist David Ignatius in the July 11 Washington’s Post, “the closest thing he [Obama] has to a chief strategist.”

Earlier this month, Kreig pointed out, Ray McGovern, a CIA-analyst-turned peace activist, warned a separate audience at the Press Club that the mainstream media are suppressing vital news stories. According to McGovern, who spent 27 years as a CIA analyst with responsibility for daily briefings of two presidents, “Never has it been so bad in the 50 years I’ve been in this town” and “there’s one change that dwarfs all the others.”  What is that change? “We no longer have a free media,” McGovern said. “That’s big. It does not get any bigger than that.”

McGovern was first quoted in report published by the Justice Integrity Project, an organization Kreig founded in 2010 to probe courts, politics and media coverage (http://wwwow.ly/yT2Rw)

In Presidential Puppetry  Kreig documents how deep-pocketed corporations and other institutions have, for more than a century, shaped the public agenda with increasingly little scrutiny from watchdogs. The book draws on Kreig’s  two decades as an investigative reporter, lawyer and high-tech advocate based in Washington, DC.

In the book, Kreig alleges that what he calls “puppet masters” wield enormous influence over intelligence agencies, elected officials, and both traditional and social media. For example, he describes a pattern whereby many prominent elected leaders secretly served as CIA or FBI informants before they entered politics, thereby establishing relationships unknown to the public.

Such allegations are endorsed by an array of experts (www.presidentialpuppetry.com), including McGovern and former CIA analyst and retired journalist John Kelly, who is a board member of the Justice Integrity Project (http://www.justice-integrity.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=188&Itemid=153. Kelly is the last surviving reporter to have covered the 1960 JFK election victory party in Hyannis Port. He went on to work for CBS and NBC before becoming a CIA officer in Indochina during the Vietnam War era. In organizing and introducing last week’s dinner lecture, Kelly said the news media have become far too timid and institutionally compromised.

The “Puppetry” message is documented with 1,100 endnotes to help other researchers and reformers, Kreig said.  Its conclusion is that any reform must begin with an understanding of our hidden history. That is the theme of a 50-second preview video, entitled “Knowledge Empowers You.” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KV8Mt2nV_A)

I knew Kreig when he reported  for the Cornell Daily Sun in the late 1960s.  He’s since worked in journalism, technology, and  law. His Boston background iincludes coverage of the Celtics in the 1980s and a clerkship with Boston-based federal judge Mark Wolf, who is best known for presiding over the Patriarca mob case and exposing the Whitey Bulger scandal(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_L._Wolf). Kreig holds law degrees from both Yale and the University of Chicago. From 2009 to 2011, he researched controversial Bush administration federal prosecutions as a Washington-based senior fellow for the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.

–Anita M. Harris

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.

We are within days of the anniversary of the first revelations from Edward Snowden’s archive of NSA documents. The drum beat of new stories emerging from this trove continues even to this moment.¹ So, Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place To Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance State might be greeted with a yawn, what could be new?

In fact, there is much that is new about how these stories have come to light and a very good overview of what we have learned about what Greenwald calls the US Surveillance State. This is a book in two parts. The first 89 pages read like a cross between a detective thriller and a spy story. There are hand offs of thumb drives at airport boarding gates, virgin computers, cell phones sealed off from the reach of the NSA by removing batteries or stuffed in freezers, meetings with a yet to be identified Snowden by an unsolved Rubik’s cube in hand. This part of the book also establishes who Snowden is and how he thinks and views the world and his place in it. This latter introduction of Snowden is completely consistent with the person we have already come to know through his video interviews broadcast a year ago.²

The second half (really it is 170 pages) is a well organized exploration of what has been revealed so far of the NSA’s goals and programs.

THE GIANT SUCKING SOUND – “COLLECT IT ALL”

It is chilling to understand that the internal ethos of the NSA is summed up by the phrase “collect it all” where “it” is all of the information flows in the telephone and internet in the world.  As expressed in the presentation slide “New Collection Posture” from 2010, this is implemented through six strategies: “Sniff It All”, “Know It All”, “Collect It All”, “Process It All, “Exploit It All, and “Partner It All”. Even if you have been following the revelations as published in the various news sources favored with direct access to the Snowden documents, it was hard to envision quite how comprehensive the vision of the NSA is.

BUREAUCRATS DRESSED UP AS JUDGES

Greenwald reiterates the well-known fact that so-called court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, set up by congress to oversee activities of the NSA, FBI and others engaged in intercepting communications is not even an effective administrative element. He notes that in 2012 the “court” did not deny a single on of the 1789 applications. As i have argued earlier³ this so-called court lacks most of the important features that our tradition requires of a court – openness, representation of the plaintiff by a lawyer, and ability to confront accusers. The FISC is just a bunch of bureaucrats dressed up as judges.

BENIGN META DATA

Another issue that Greenwald deals with is the claim by the government and its apologists in the media and academia that the collection of meta data is not really an intrusion on privacy – the NSA is not collecting the content of the communications.(( earlier I have twice commented on this issue: “NSA Vacuuming, Meta Data, Mistaken Misleading Metaphors” and “The Uses of Metadata – an experiment you can conduct with your own life’s metadata“)) In a very telling note Greenwald repeats other privacy activists challenge to those claiming that meta data is benign that they release the meta data for all of their phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications. None have thus far taken up this challenge.

Greenwald touches on many other topics: the role of corporations, surveillance of US allies, many NSA software tools to exploit their data warehouses, privacy in human identity, and more.

In closing, Greenwald’s book is an excellent overview of the issues presented to date by the work done to understand the Snowden documents. And, it is actually a great read with its detective/spy thriller opening that engages the reader so effectively in the drama of the early days of the Snowden whistle blowing.

1. NSA Collecting Millions of Faces from Web Images http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/01/us/nsa-collecting-millions-of-faces-from-web-images.html accessed 06012014 [↩]
2.  http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jun/09/nsa-whistleblower-edward-snowden-interview-videoand http://www.theguardian.com/world/video/2013/jul/08/edward-snowden-video-interview both accessed 06012014 [↩]
3. “FISA Court – Not a Court – an Administrative Rubber Stamp – Bureaucrats Dressed Up as Judges” http://currentmatters.markorton.com/2013/07/fisa-court-not-a-court-an-administrative-rubber-stamp-bureaucrats-dressed-up-as-judges/ [↩]

–Mark Orton

This review was originally posted at

Current Matters

thoughts on the passing scene from Mr. Wonderful’s World

New Cambridge Observer is a publication of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Cambridge, MA. Mr. Orton is a HarrisCom advisor.

Authors Susan Coppack, Rick Wiggin, and Anita Harris; moderator Neil O’Hara. Photo by Katherine O’Hara. :

I was pleased to join Susan Coppack and Rick Wiggin on a panel about independent book publishing held at the Lincoln, MA Library on Wednesday, May 14, 2014.  All members of the Write Stuff, the Library’s writers group,  we’d each published a book in the past year–and had experienced both the excitement of having a book come out and the challenges of production and marketing. Link to video.

Susan told  the audience that she used a turnkey service from Book Baby to create and distribute her book, Fly Away Home: A Coming of Age Memoir, in electronic form. She said that had she realized how much time and effort it takes to market a book, she would have delayed publication by several months in order to reach her audience.  Fly Away Home describes her unusual childhood and adolescence as the daughter of disengaged parents, continuing through early adulthood until her mother’s death.  As described by moderator Neil O’Hara, who organized the panel: “At  25,000 words, the book is too long for a magazine but too short to interest traditional publishers, an example of how technology has opened up a new market for works of intermediate length, called “e-singles” in industry parlance. “Selling at “$1.99 on a multitude of electronic platforms, Coppack said she’s not in it for the money. Rather, she hopes to build an audience in order to engage in discussion with her readers.

Rick Wiggin is the author of Embattled Farmers: Campaigns and Profiles of Revolutionary Soldiers from Lincoln, Massachusetts, 1775-1783,a history of the revolutionary war focusing on the military service of Lincoln residents during the conflict, including profiles of the 256 documented combatants. The Lincoln Historical Society published Wiggin’s book in hardback and paperback. Wiggin described a painstaking editing process for which he is now grateful, a highly successful launch party that attracted some 300 people last July 4, and hundreds of sales there and at various historic sites on the East Coast. At some 1500 pages, the book sells for $30. Rick advised thinking carefully about whether to choose digital or offset printing. Digital  printing eliminates many of the mechanical steps required for offset printing such as making films and color proofs and thus offers quicker turnaround time and lower costs for very small print runs. Offset printing,  he suggests, can offer higher image and print quality and costs less as quantity increases.

Last but not least, I described the incredible number of steps involved in publishing Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity, which tells the stories of generations of American  professional women. Originally published by Wayne University Press, it had gone out of print.   I  purchased back the rights, updated the book and published the new edition in both e-book and paperback formats through Cambridge Common Press, my own publishing imprint. I used Amazon.com’s publishing arm “CreateSpace” and Kindle.  Broken Patterns is now available on Amazon.com and Kindle, and in the Harvard Book store, in Cambridge.

I’ll write more about the publishing and the marketing processes in future blogs. For now, suffice it to say that all of us feel a bit overwhelmed by the  time, energy, strategy and skill  it takes to write, publish and market a book.

If you want to know exactly what we said, here’s a link to a video of our presentation.

–Anita M. Harris

Anita M. Harris is the author of Broken Patterns: Professional Women and the Quest for a New Feminine Identity and Managing Director of the Harris Communications Group, an award-winning PR and marketing firm based in Kendall Square, Cambridge, MA.