Raise your hand if a family member took your ‘professional’ headshot. Every two years, you need a professionally made career headshot. A real one. Read More
‘Who Decided Our Worth?’ Do Free Books Give Away Authors’ Value?
‘There’s Something Badly Wrong’ For those following the industry! the industry! in its digital melodrama, tossing books to the crowd free is not new. But the question of whether today’s plethora of free offers may devalue books and/or authors in readers’ minds is not going away as easily as some folks wish it would. Roz Morris… Read More
Author Publicists Who Don’t Tweet? And Under Their Own Names? Fire Them.
Two Things Prompted This Irritating Column A clearly lame bid for authors’ hard-earned money for so-called “reader engagement” and book sales. The arrival on Twitter of a brand-new user who is also one of the highest-visibility literary agents in the country. Old scams and new social mediators. I knew it was time to get at… Read More
A New Architecture Of Algorithms: Could Trajectory Make Books ‘Discoverable’ At Last?
‘To Read More Books In A Similar Vein’ As the book publishing industry heads into its first major conference of the year this week — Digital Book World (hash it #DBW15 with us) in New York City — we learn now that we won’t be seeing one late-breaking major development on the program. And that’s not the… Read More
16-24-Year-Old Readers And Their Books: #PorterMeets Luke Mitchell
With all the pleasure any good teenager has in proving his elders wrong, the 16-to-24-year-old age group might seem at times to delight in confusing marketers. And at Thursday’s The Bookseller Children’s Conference, in London, some of Luke Mitchell’s comments to the audience will help sort out what may be behind that demographic’s role in… Read More
Can we float more indie boats?
With news of The Bookseller’s Independent Author Previews — an arrangement with the Barnes & Noble self-publishing platform Nook Press — self-publishing authors gain a store window on a long, virtual high street that’s swarming with competition. For those books and authors chosen to be featured, Independent Author Previews has the potential to be a game-changer. The new programme will see an average… Read More
Eight Issues in Author Ethics
As Self-Publishing Matures… Well, I’ve never purchased or read a self-pubbed book and have no plans to do so, in part because they’re generally unedited and of poor quality and in part because you can’t trust the reviews. I think most of us know that if an indie book has all glowing reviews, they’re either… Read More
Picador Champions ‘Station Eleven’
“Hell Is Flutes” A writer who can pry that paraphrase from the jaws of Jean-Paul Satre’s “hell is other people” certainly has some chops. If she can then deliver it as a genuinely funny laugh line amid a global Huis Clos 20 years after the collapse of human civilization, she’s no slouch. Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven may hand her… Read More
Don't Let Publishing Intimidate You
Messing With The Mystique You have the right to ask questions. You have the right to get answers. You have the right not to like the answers. To see your own publisher’s jaw drop? Phil Sexton recommends you ask him or her to let you review your book’s metadata. Then, with smelling salts ready for your… Read More
Is Today's Book Marketing All in the Algorithms?
In Publishing Perspectives’ Ether for Authors, Porter Anderson looks at the focus Joanna Penn puts on marketing algorithms: a report from the future. Read More