So Grumpy Cat got more rock-star cheers from the BookCon crowd at BEA than John Green did. Nevertheless, the trade show’s first-ever Author Hub for entrepreneurial authors held its own. And one author managed to sign and give away 500 copies of her book on Saturday. While those of us working on the Hub saw… Read More
BEA’s New Author Hub: “Don’t Sit Down!” Programming
From a new assessment of author services by the Alliance of Independent Authors to an AuthorEarnings talk by Hugh Howey, a book cover chat with C.J. Lyons’ artist, an explanation of the SELF-e library project and more, BEA’s Author Hub is humming. The Author Hub at BookExpo America (BEA) is the annual event’s first effort to follow its… Read More
When Retailers & Publishers Collide: Who Gets Hurt?
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
Publishing's "Metamorphoses" at Klopotek 2014's Berlin Forum
BERLIN, Germany — For “ten years I have been in charge of this conference,”Helmut von Berg told the Publishers’ Forum assembly here Tuesday evening. “And I wondered what changed in that time.” The director of Klopotek, the publishing software company, von Berg paused with the timing that comes of a decade’s practice at conference-closing speeches. Then: “I had no immediate… Read More
The Muse’s Town Hall: Jane Friedman on Literary in Digital Times
Jane Friedman: “Thoughtful, intelligent ‘literary’ work is doing quite well digitally if you step away from book-length or novel publishing and into journalism-driven or nonfiction-driven publishing…I wish there were a community aspect to it (maybe there will be), which the literary world needs. Where’s the literary person’s version of Wattpad? Does that even make sense? I’m… Read More
London Book Fair to PubSmart: Are Publishers & Authors Getting Closer?
The non-aligned author corps these days is replete with people whose idea of value in literature seems to revolve around what Dan Holloway terms “the wild, the brilliant, the flamboyant, and the flawed.” And some of these folk seem determined to reject any chance that such edifying material might find its way to market through… 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
Ian K. Ellard: Profit-Sharing Authors
“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
#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