If you walked into publishing right now and stopped one of us to ask, “What’s the healthiest, happiest part of the business to get into?” — the answer you well might get is “children’s books!” The exclamation point would be there, yes. They’re a generally exuberant lot these days, the children’s books folks. And why not? Thanks to Charlotte Eyre’s… Read More
Applauding gaps in 'retail stonewalling'
What might have been an hour or so of complaint and commiseration became — in the tweeting hands of The FutureBook community — something more hopeful and more nuanced than some would have predicted. Our topic, ‘Retail stonewalling’ and Amazon sightings in bookstores, took its phrase from Amazon Publishing author Tim Ferriss. And its starting point was The… Read More
BEA on Ice! (That Retailer-Publisher Chill)
For all the hot and humid “how dare they?” rants greeting Amazon’s standoff over sales terms with Hachette, our more sensitive spines may be feeling a chill. Cooler heads are trying to remind the anti-Amazonian forces that Barnes & Noble created a very similar crisis for authors last year without suffering nearly so much criticism.… Read More