For all the hot and humid “how dare they?” rants greeting Amazon’s standoff over sales terms with Hachette, our more sensitive spines may be feeling a chill. Cooler heads are trying to remind the anti-Amazonian forces that Barnes & Noble created a very similar crisis for authors last year without suffering nearly so much criticism.… Read More
The Bookseller's #PorterMeets: Penguin Random House's Dan Franklin
You could hardly find somebody standing nearer to the center of the intersection of “discoverability” and “know thy consumer” than Dan Franklin. As Digital Publisher to the Penguin Random House empire, he has responsibilities with the Vintage, Penguin General, Cornerstone and Penguin Press divisions. He could be forgiven for needing something of a map to… Read More
New Howey Report: Self-Published eBook Authors May Out-Earn The Rest By 27%
A new quarterly report from AuthorEarnings.com is out. Its data estimates are interpreted to show that, quoting the text, “Self-published authors are clearly earning as much as traditionally published authors on the largest ebook sales platform in the world.” AuthorEarnings.com is the site housing these controversial reports generated by Sand and Wool author Hugh Howey wih the help of an unnamed author-associate (referred… Read More
Could We Get Over "Women's Fiction," Please?
Author Randy Susan Meyers, in What Does ‘Women’s Fiction’ Mean? at Beyond the Margins, has found the courage to call into question a classification that may be the perfect example of the trap of ghettoization. She writes: One can only assume…that what one needs to write ‘women’s fiction’ is simply a uterus. Jests aside, this category seems suddenly entrenched… 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
Buggy Whipped Into Collaboration
BERLIN — “The market for reading may be expanding significantly,” Brian O’Leary told the plenary session at Klopotek’s Publishers’ Forum, “but the gains are seen almost entirely outside the prevailing supply chain. Fixed on the creation, management and sale of physical and digital objects, publishers view forms of writing and reading as potential threats to… Read More
The FutureBook Hackathon: London’s Publishers Brave The Weird
Right on schedule, a round of disparaging tweets was launched today by the foppish members of the community, as the news was announced about the London hackathon. I’ll give it to you as a short scene among bewigged swells in Congreve. The quotes are actual, from Twitter. Mister Pan-It-All: How many of these hacks lead to products or sustainable… Read More
The Muse's Town Hall: Benjamin Samuel on Literature's Future
Benjamin Samuel: “I think we may start seeing more unconventional formats, literature in spaces that are mostly unexplored. Digital publishing has more potential than just an animated page-turn on your iPhone. In other words, digital publishing is much more than just ebooks. As writers experiment more with apps and other platforms (Shelley Jackson’s Instagram story,… Read More
Writers Wrestling On The Conference Circuit
The problem is not that our dinner-table companion disagreed with an agent on a panel at PubSmartCon. The problem is that she seemed to hold it against the conference (let alone against “that agent”) that she had heard a comment not supportive of the self-publishing approach she favors. This writer was offended, thoroughly peeved that her view… Read More
What If Boys Can't Find the Right (Reading ) Stuff?
The basic premise of what Nottingham-based author Jonathan Emmett is laying out here: The preponderance of women in the curation and presentation of so much of children’s material may have something to do with a perceived lack of content that’s as interesting to boys as it is to girls. Read More