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
Is There an “Architecture of Collaboration” for Startups?
It’s hard to think that “you get around that” (problem of communication between publishers and startups) without developing an “architecture of collaboration,” an understood way of working together that allows for risk-and-regret absorption, for the distinctions of lingo, for decision-authority black holes, and for a better shared understanding of what each party counts valuable and needs to protect to move forward together. 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
Where Is Publishing's Jetpack?
Because moving into new potentials will mean leaving some things behind, it’s hard to contemplate, at times, the sort of speculation we need. Letting go is not easy. Read More
At Frankfurt Book Fair: Reaching for the "New Book"
If digital has taught us anything yet, it’s that its energies can blindside and reshape our work in publishing much more quickly than we expect at times, and in ways we inevitably wish we’d put more thought into earlier. Read More