“The essay,” Ian K. Ellard said, “imagines a world where advances are rare, and the bulk of book publishing is done on a revenue-share basis. The way it works at the moment, an author starts with 100-percent stake in their book, and sells that stake, often 100 percent of it, to a publishing house for an advance. That used to be a good deal–publishers offered the only route to market, and were prepared to pay a wholesale price for the product. But now that barrier has come down, the author has more options for bringing their product to customers—they decide how to spend their 100 percent.” Read More
Is Self-Publishing a Flying Leap?
Ideas of how much support a good author needs are among the highest-visibility differences of opinion you can find in the business these days. The traditional industry, of course, represents the historical standard of approach. While pressures to get to market more quickly are having some impact even in some of those houses, the basic concept of an extensive set of procedures in both editorial and physical (and digital) production involves multiple people and departments. Read More
#EtherIssue: Is the Price Ever Right for Books?
What does it do to the perceived value of reading and books by the marketplace when pricing—whether by traditional publishers, retailers, or self-publishers—goes so substantially lower than it once was? Read More
#EtherIssue at Publishing Perspectives: Lists of Books…and Biases?
Do we need a better understanding of how many books are authored by men and how many by women? Or does it not matter? Are all these lists—Best Gardening in Dim Light Books for 2013!—really worth anything unless the various media waving them at us tell us how they created them? Read More
“Amazon Will Be Disrupted One Day”
What may have been the best lesson from the 60 Minutes interview getting so much traction this week is evident, finally, in Jason Del Rey’s piece at AllThingsD. And in bloggy-newsy tradition, it’s all in the piece’s long headline: Afraid Amazon Will Crush Your Small Business? “Complaining Is Not a Strategy,” Says CEO Jeff Bezos. Read More
Publish Faster, Publish Less: Futurebook’s “Big Ideas”
Calling the group of the FutureBook Conference’s “Big Ideas” into session, Faber’s Stephen Page left no doubt that he hoped for something a bit more than a smooth ride, remarking: “To change, when you’re doing pretty well, is incredibly difficult. We must innovate in the core, in the core of our publishing.” Read More
Can We Stop Short of Overstatement?
Few of even the most effective self-publishing authors will say they want to see traditional publishers go down the proverbial drain. And it’s always good in these times of sensitive, difficult, exhausting change and unease to be careful how we interpret comments. Read More
More Gatekeeping? Sisyphus Could Relate
What happens when self-pubishers, themselves, begin creating awards and accolades for each other’s (self-published) work? Have self-publishing authors at that point not begun to reflect some patterns of quality-delineation, selectivity…gatekeeping? Read More
Can Co-Publishing Make 'You Crime' Pay?
This is a story about a clever way of bringing established, big-selling authors together with emerging writers, and about choosing those emerging writers not only for their literary chops but also for just how digitally savvy they might be in the marketing department. Read More
Big Ideas from Books in Browsers IV: An "Architecture of Collaboration"
“New forms of writing and reading, new tools for creating and sharing and the growing dialogue between creators and consumers—most readily evident in fan fiction, but it won’t stop there—are all pushing us to develop an architecture of collaboration,” said publishing consultant Brian O’Leary. Read More