Has anybody told the readers about this? You know, the customers? What if they were brand-savvy enough to know what they’re missing when a contract dispute stalls out the shipping of their favorite author? What if we tell them? If readers were aware of who published what and, in the current example, became incensed that… Read More
What If Boys Can't Find the Right (Reading ) Stuff?
The basic premise of what Nottingham-based author Jonathan Emmett is laying out here: The preponderance of women in the curation and presentation of so much of children’s material may have something to do with a perceived lack of content that’s as interesting to boys as it is to girls. Read More
At London Book Fair: Mind the Digital Gap
Publishing can no longer hope to come out the other end of the digital chute by simply creating more digital interpretations of print traditions. The time has arrived when what’s really being called for is digital origination, leveraging the power of digital to move this industry’s grasp of Hugh Howey’s story and Jonny Geller’s “individual experiences” down the road toward the new context imagined by the conference’s title. Read More
As London Book Fair Looms: Debates Natural and Not
It can almost seem you’re hearing people talk about different industries…as if our own debates inside the industry! the industry! were the point…as if digital weren’t bigger than publishing…as if what’s at stake here were really only a glowing plastic e-reader vs. a gorgeous hardcover print book. Read More
Hi Opens to the Public: Writing for Moderns
Craig Mod’s frequently gorgeous and always interesting online initiative called Hi is rolling out to the public. Mod’s discussion of his idea and intent has sometimes used the phrase “narrative mapping,” something that has taken on actionable reality in the intervening months. The idea is that people all over the world offer imagery and text from someplace on Earth. Read More
Book Prices: Have Authors Lowballed Themselves?
What if, in order to try to capture market share from traditional publishers, independent authors’ bargain-basement pricing has seriously damaged the public’s idea of what books are worth? Are book prices too low for what authors’ efforts and talents and skills actually are worth? Is it really possible that a full-length book is ever really worth only $2.99 or less? What signal does that send to readers about what writers think of their own work? Read More
Short Reads: The Rooster Crows, Very Briefly
If one more person announces that Dickens worked in serial form, I’m probably going to have to be physically restrained. We know. In fact, we’ve known all along. Don’t tell us again that Dickens did serials, okay? Okay. Read More
Do Hugh Howey’s AuthorEarnings Add Up?
By Porter Anderson | @Porter_Anderson Issues on the Ether: Do Hugh Howey’s AuthorEarnings Add Up? Do Hugh Howey’s AuthorEarnings Add Up? In Publishing Perspectives’ Issues on the Ehter, Porter Anderson preps an #EtherIssue live debate on Hugh Howey’s new AuthorEarnings.com initiative. Read the full post: PublishingPerspectives.com Google+ Join our Headliners at BEA’s uPublishU AUTHOR… Read More
The Literary Elitism Question
As Laura Miller at Salon opens her own reflection on this, “Is the Literary World Elitist?”, she rightly explains that Eleanor Catton—responding to an instance of reader indignation at writer’s use of a 50-cents word—”treats the reader’s ire as a symptom of the creeping consumerist attitude in our response to literature.” Read More
How Is Self-Publishing Maturing?
Despite our inability to measure the true breadth of self-publishing—as long as the key metric, the ISBN, depends on authors to pay much more for their identifiers than the industry does—we know that self-publishing is growing. What comes across as a more volatile debate, in some ways, is the question being asked among some authors themselves about their goals. Why are self-publishers self-publishing? Seems a crazy question, doesn’t it? But maybe not. Read More