Chasing Portraits: A Great-Granddaughter’s Quest for Her Lost Art Legacy by Elizabeth Rynecki, is the story of her search for the art of her great-grandfather, which disappeared after he was killed in the Majdanek concentration camp. Moshe Rynecki’s body of work reached close to eight hundred paintings and sculptures, which he created between the First and Second World Wars in Warsaw, Poland. Recently, I interviewed her about her research, writing the book, and working on the documentary film. Trace Sonnleitner: The interactions you portray between Moshe and his parents, and between you and your parents, and grandparents, remind me of some generational differences in my own family. When I ask them questions about their past they are usually answered with quickly worded stories that make me laugh, or draw out my sympathetic emotions. Did you intentionally display these generational differences in your own family? Elizabeth Rynecki: My goal was to tell the story of my great-grandfather’s art, but it quickly became clear that each generation—the artist, his father, his son, my Dad, and I—had very different relationships to the art. My great-grandfather, the artist, felt an incredible compulsion to paint. His son, my Grandpa George, understood the historical importance of his father’s work, especially in light of his death in the Holocaust. Dad understood his father’s love of the art and asked me to build a website to make the art more accessible to others. I have taken Dad’s initial steps and pushed an even more expansive view—to uncover details…

Not content to let Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing be the powerhouse of the self-publishing world, Nook Media (a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble) is rolling out Nook Press, its own self-publishing platform for eBooks. What completely sets Nook Press apart from Kindle Direct Publishing is the integrated feature of composing, editing and formatting your book within the platform instead of uploading and converting a file to an eBook format. When self-publishing through KDP, there isn’t a way to edit your book within the platform; once you’ve uploaded it it’s set in stone as far as Amazon is concerned. Simple tweaks can require multiple uploads. Nook press is eliminating that hurdle and giving authors simpler-to-use ways to control the final version of their book. Nook Press is also banking on integrated social capabilities; authors will be able to share their content and receive comments and feedback before publishing. There’s no guarantee that Nook Press will lure readers away from eBook frontrunner Kindle to the experiencing-a-plummet-in-sales Nook, but authors will certainly be drawn to features made for burgeoning writers. But just because you have more control doesn’t mean that you should consider self-publication in your immediate future. Swenson Book Development had written about this in the past; consider your needs against the cons of self-publication before you are lured to the easier-than-ever world of online publication.

Steven Piersanti, the President of Berrett-Koehler Publishers, recently updated his 2009 report on the publishing industry earlier this summer. Previously I posted an essay here that referenced Piersanti’s points raised in 2009 and how authors could overcome the 10 big mistakes big publishers make (February 28, 2011). Piersanti’s assessment in 2011 reflects the changes in technology and the economy in the past two years. In summary, here are “The 10 Awful Truths About Book Publishing”: 1. The number of books being published every year has increased, but of the 3 million titles published in the U.S. in 2010, 2.7 million were non-traditional, e.g. print on demand, e-books, reprints of public domain works, self-published and audiobooks. 2. Book industry sales have continued to decline since 2007. 3. Despite skyrocketing e-book sales, overall book sales are still shrinking. 4. The average U.S. nonfiction book is now selling less than 250 copies per year and less than 3,000 copies over its lifetime. 5. A book has less than a 1% chance of being stocked in an average bookstore. 6. It is getting harder every year to sell books. Investing the same amount today to market a book as was invested two years ago will yield a smaller return in sales today. 7. Most books today are selling only to the authors’ and publishers’ communities. 8. Most book marketing today is done by authors, not by publishers. 9. No other industry has so many new product introductions. 10. The book publishing world is in…