I’d like to be paid per-page for everything written about Amazon’s KDP Select since the 15th of the month. And certainly, I’ve tried to hold up my end. I wrote about it here. And then I wrote about it there. And now I’m writing about it once more, hoping that you’ll join us in this week’s #FutureChat on… Read More
Gaming the system: Amazon at home and abroad
The special symmetry of ‘the disrupter that demands to be undisrupted’ As Friday’s edition of The Bookseller points out, last week brought Amazon’s place in European markets into tighter focus. A scene-setting article from my colleague Lisa Campbell announced the European Commission’s formal antitrust investigation into the retailer’s relationships with publishers and ebook distribution. Campbell also pointed to… Read More
Amazon And Its New KDP Select Per-Page Payments: Everybody Has To Swim For It Now
‘What This Means For Authors Is Debatable’ Yesterday’s news (15th June) that Amazon is changing its payout structure for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) lending scenarios — that’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) — has been met with somewhat muted reactions. And this is good to see. Some mature, prudent thinking is… Read More
In Self-Publishing, The Gatekeepers Are Dead. Long Live The Gatekeepers!
‘To Establish Trust With Readers’ Readers aren’t all the same. Readers, in fact, are very different from one another. Some only want to read what everyone else is reading, so they can join a movement and a discussion. Some stick to what’s been adapted to the big and small screen, or what’s hit the NYT… Read More
‘The Overselling Of Self-Publishing': New Perspective
‘A Serious Epidemic Of Impatience’ Here in New York City where BookExpo America (BEA) is holding the focus of many in the traditional publishing establishment, a friend and I were finishing lunch at Café Luxembourg when the waiter approached. “I overheard you guys talking about publishing,” he said. “I wondered if you could give me any advice about… Read More
Global dreams, local challenges: BEA amid transition
Amazon’s shadow, BookCon’s boost, IDPF’s confab, Chinese Trajectory, scalding-hot Scalzi: Must be BEA Just in time to chill the rising heat of late-May New York: news of troubled talks in the UK between the biggest bookseller and the biggest book publisher on Earth. As my colleague Philip Jones writes at The Bookseller, “Penguin Random House UK and Amazon… Read More
What if the 90 percent does write a book?
‘Your followers are so cynical’ In digital publishing, we’ve been talking about that “tsunami of content” (thank you, Jon Fine) for a long time. This week here at BookExpo America (BEA), however, we had a good remi nder that the world at large may not yet understand the stupendously deepening inventory that has come right along with… Read More
Why We Don’t Read More? Are Books Still Our Best Bet?
What If Books Just Aren’t It Anymore? Why don’t we start with the assumption that social media and the web are taking over because people actually enjoy them and go from there? Baldur Bjarnason Baldur Bjarnason does seem to actually enjoy getting het up about things. And he’s good at it, too. People generally like… Read More
An Author Speaks Directly To Publishers: Kathrin Passig’s Commentary In Berlin
‘You’re Giving Amazon Another Advantage’ I know you’re all very nice people that are a pleasure to work with, and I know you do things in this roundabout way because you love talking and I even love talking to you… But when you offer workflows that are slower, less functional and more complicated than what… Read More
From Boston's #TheMuse: Whatever happened to 'author-ity'?
When Everybody Publishes, Is Anybody An Authority? The Muse and The Marketplace has opened on Friday, 1st May, with of authority in digital times was followed Friday (1st May) by our weekly #FutureChat from The Bookseller’s The FutureBook. The Muse annually draws some 800 attendees and is produced by the highly respected Grub Street creative writing center,… Read More