The conga line forms here. If you’ve been with us in the past few days here at The FutureBook, you’ll know that we’re tripping the estimates fantastic in terms of just how large a market we’re talking about when we say “self-publishing” in the UK and US markets. As the author Hugh Howey has pointed… Read More
Get Porter Alerts: Publishing Coverage On The Fly
Know When The Tweets Take Off Publishing’s conference and trade-show events stack up like the cities of Troy, one atop the other, right? It’s always springtime for publishing somewhere, and who can keep up? Now, you can: Let my boarding passes be your guide. Sign up at my site for my free newsletter, Porter Alerts! By having these notices… Read More
Why Are Boys Not Reading More?
‘We Are Not Creating Male Readers’ I would suggest to you that we have shared responsibility here — teachers, parents, authors, and publishers. Literacy is the kingpin skill of school success. Unless we get all kids reading, they’re not going to be successful. That’s Peg Tyre, author of The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons,… Read More
Data-Dancing: How big is self-publishing?
‘Shock and awe.’ I’m here with the same question asked by my colleague, Bookseller editor Philip Jones in his companion piece to this one: How big is the market for self-published titles? “The question is a simple one for which there is no simple answer,” Jones writes. “In fact, there are lots of complicated answers.” We want your… Read More
'A Year of Men Self-Publishing'
We started with the longest pause yet at the top of a #FutureChat session. Crickets. “#FutureChat is open for your comments,” I announced. “The floor is yours.” Beat. Beat. Beat. And then, after a couple of minutes, several folks braved the Twitter silence, editor Dan Benton finally easing the tension by suggesting that 2018 “Year of… Read More
Australia's Tablo adds fee-based analytics for 'authors who are serious'
Not unlike the social writing-and-reading platform of Allen Lau’s Wattpad, the Melbourne-based Tablo positions itself as an online site at which you can “create, publish, and discover new books.” Its founder, Ash Davies, has been honoured several times as one of Australia’s younger entrepreneurs. He says that more than 130 countries are represented in… Read More
What's 'fairness' got to do with publishing?
We seem to encounter ‘fairness’ questions in publishing at every turn these days. Three weeks ago, our #FutureChat focus was on questions of an “unfair” tendency to allow inconsistent metadata procedures and sheer negligence overlook proper credit for book illustrators. Two weeks ago, we talked about writers contributing articles and posts without pay to… Read More
'The Tsunami-of-Content Monster': #FutureChat recap
“Ninety percent want to publish a book? That sounds great to me!” Of course, that would sound great to Miral Sattar, wouldn’t it? Sattar runs Bibliocrunch, which connects writers and “author services.” I ran into Sattar as she was putting together her booth at the post-BookExpo America (BEA) Javits Center in New York on Saturday morning (30th May)… Read More
At BEA's IDPF Digital Book Conference: Youth Reading – Or Not
“How many of you think of your customers sitting in a chair reading a book?” Bookigee founder and CEO Kristen McLean got a goodly show of hands with that question as she opened her session on youth reading in the States at BookExpo America (BEA) on Wednesday (27th May). McLean focused on trends in young readers’ and teens’… Read More
Authors making $8,000 per year? Why write free? A #FutureChat recap
‘Question is, are you making money for someone else?’ That’s the historical fiction author Jane Steen, English, based in Chicago, during our live Twitter conversation at the end of last week. But not for nothing do independent writers like to “celebrate their diversity,” as they tend to put it on a good day. Views of… Read More