On this very important day for Morrison and the book, a culmination of a lifetime of dreams and hard work, Boyd is sharing his day with Planet iPad readers. Through emails, texts, and at a morning (Pacific Coast Time) telephone conference, Boyd painted a picture of the day he expected: just another day in the office. He doesn’t expect today to be a “make or break” day for the book.
(Editor’s Note: We’ll see, and I do wish Morrison well, but there’s a certain upside down quality to the narrative when any author gets rejected by the Big Six publishers, achieves great success by publishing directly on the Kindle platform, and then calls it a victory when he signs a contract with one of the same publishers that rejected him in the first place, for royalties that are only a fraction of the royalties he would earn through direct publication. Reporter Dulaney may be a few years off when he editorializes that “such a relationship [is] the dream of most would-be bestselling authors.” These days, many of the smartest authors figure that dinosaur publishers like Simon and Schuster may well go belly-up before the decade is out, and are finding their own more secure paths to publishing success along the lines laid out in pieces like It’s Your Universe and Observations at #8 by Joe Konrath. Morrison may have had his own very good reasons for taking the course that he took, but in all likelihood he would have a more secure and better compensated career as an author over the next few years had he continued, and built upon, his “direct to Kindle” success in 2009. –S.W.)
