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
London Author Fair’s Debut: Change Agents
The inaugural #LAF14 was attended by close to 300 people and presented with knees-up professionalism at Covent Garden’s Hospital Club — a daylong journey’s sophisticated tour of entrepreneurial authors’ interests. 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
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
As at DBW, the Many Faces of Amazon
DBW’s three days of programs has drawn an aggregate audience of some 1,500 attendees, according to organizers. None of them will have seen “our friends in Seattle,” as the retail behemoth Amazon is at times called, given this level of direct, interpretive attention at this iconic event in the heart of the US publishing industry. Read More
If Hugh Howey Ran HarperCollins
At last year’s Digital Book World Conference & Expo (DBW), author Hugh Howey and his agent, Kristin Nelson, joined conference chair Mike Shatzkin onstage in a session about Howey’s newsmaking print-only deal with Simon & Schuster for the first book in his internationally bestselling Silo Saga, Wool.
Today, as #DBW2014′s workshops and associated conference sessions open the week’s events at the Sheraton New York Times Square Hotel, neither Howey nor Nelson are on the speakers’ roster. But they’re certainly speaking to power. And they’re being heard. 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