The high view of self-publishing, in Jon Fine’s words, is peopled with ‘increasingly sophisticated authors’ supported by ‘increasingly sophisticated consultants’—a movement growing into its own alongside the ‘curatorial mark’ of trade publishing. Read More
SELF-e And The World’s Authors: Is English Our Lingua Franca?
‘Keep Calm And Study English’ “Since the smashing success of the first Harry Potter novel—which was a No. 1 bestseller in Germany in its English version at one point—we have evidence of English, as a reading language, to be a global phenomenon.” Rüdiger Wischenbart is the Vienna-based publishing consultant who produces the Global eBook Report and directs… Read More
Why Do Book Releases Take So Long To Cross The Atlantic?
Delayed Publication Dates Hurt Sales The onslaught of the autumn conference and trade-show season in publishing has meant, at times, more travel than reporting. It’s a mad scramble from one bad wi-fi service to another, really. Sometimes the missing bandwidth has to do with mental exhaustion and other times it has to do with sputtering… Read More
At Frankfurt: AmazonCrossing's new $10 million translation bid
Interviewing Sarah Jane Gunter at Frankfurt Book Fair’s Business Club This story was written for Wednesday’s (14th October) “Hug the Alien” session at Frankfurt Book Fair. In a move that answers a constant question both from independent authors and from publishers, AmazonCrossing has announced that it now is accepting submissions. The news comes with word of… Read More
Fair Contracts For Authors: Don’t Let Go Of Your Copyright
Novelists Inc. Plans Authors Guild Session There’s news this week from the roughly 900-member Novelists Inc. (NINC) organization that the Authors Guild will present a special session on rights reversion at NINC’s conference, 30th September to 4th October. Executive director Mary Rasenberger and staffer Ryan Fox will go to St. Pete Beach for talks with NINC members,… Read More
As The World Gets Smaller, Authors’ Jobs Get Bigger
‘An Entire Chain Of Questions That You Have To Ask’ We have a very difficult debate about subscription models or flat rate models because some publishers are afraid that they rather ruin their traditional way of making money. So very quickly you end up in an entire chain of questions that you have to ask. That’s… Read More
Digital Book World’s Choir: Keynotes From Amazon, Apple, And All
The First Major Publishing Pilgrimage Of 2015 Publishing conferences are ritual performances. They are to the varied segments of publishing what morality plays are to the various forms of Christianity. They are narratives that are organised to demonstrate, emphasise, and reinforce the orthodoxy. Those are the words of one of our most dependable iconoclasts, Baldur… Read More
Not exclusively about exclusivity: Kindle Unlimited
With subscriptions at the center of last Friday’s #FutureChat — and Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) in particular — it’s worth noting how pleased we are that both Justo Hidalgo of Spain’s 24Symbols and (tentatively) Eric Briys of France’s Cyberlibris will join us on 14th November in London for The FutureBook (#FutureBook14), Europe’s largest publishing conference, at the… Read More
Is Amazon KU exclusivity a velvet barrier for authors?
It “might be a possibility” at some point that Amazon would consider changing the the Kindle Unlimited (KU) subscription programme’s exclusivity requirement for independent authors, according to Daniel Slater, Amazon Independent Publishing principal. He spoke Thursday (22nd October) on a panel discussion at the 25th anniversary national conference (#ninc14) of Novelists Inc., in St. Pete Beach, Florida. Slater was… Read More
AuthorEarnings.com: Kindle Unlimited On The Line
‘I wish our conclusions could be more . . . conclusive’ But all things being equal? Authors are working without a net right now. As with so many things in publishing at this point in its encounter with the digital dynamic, the potential contradictions loom large in the new AuthorEarnings.comreport, just out today from the… Read More