Amazon’s shadow, BookCon’s boost, IDPF’s confab, Chinese Trajectory, scalding-hot Scalzi: Must be BEA Just in time to chill the rising heat of late-May New York: news of troubled talks in the UK between the biggest bookseller and the biggest book publisher on Earth. As my colleague Philip Jones writes at The Bookseller, “Penguin Random House UK and Amazon… Read More
What if the 90 percent does write a book?
‘Your followers are so cynical’ In digital publishing, we’ve been talking about that “tsunami of content” (thank you, Jon Fine) for a long time. This week here at BookExpo America (BEA), however, we had a good remi nder that the world at large may not yet understand the stupendously deepening inventory that has come right along with… Read More
#MusicForWriters: Joby Talbot On The ‘Path Of Miracles’
‘Translated To Heaven And Spain’ For most of us, it would be a miracle that a single element of aboriginal music survived in our memories from youth to adulthood. For composer Joby Talbot, however, retrieving his teenage hearing on BBC Radio 3 of the Taiwanese Bunan tribe’s Pasiputput seems to have been an easy stop on… Read More
‘All Calendars Suck: Start Saying No’
The Curse of the Calendar Reversals of logic stay with you, witty whiplashes show you something looking unlike it did before. That’s how Mike Monteiro’s article The Chokehold of Calendars may work on you. Monteiro writes: All calendars suck. And they all suck in the same way. Calendars are a record of interruptions. And quite often they’re… Read More
‘Publishing Goes Pop,’ Part 1: Can Reading Find True Fandom At BookCon?
‘There Was No Interest At BEA In…Readers’ BookExpo America (BEA) makes its annual appearance next week (27-29 May). It’s one of the world’s big-three publishing trade shows of the year, preceded in April by London Book Fair and followed in October by the largest of all, Frankfurt Book Fair. And while the show officially ends on Friday the 29th, it… Read More
Should Authors Write Without Pay?
From anyone else, the advice might sound like right-headed rationality, itself. But as the author Roxana Robinson (pictured) can tell you, when you’re the president of the Authors Guild, nothing you say seems to fall on unbiased ears. This time, Robinson is talking about what authors may be doing to inadvertently diminish their own perceived… Read More
Illustrating a need for publishing reforms
Yes, she has to draw you a picture. Since our #FutureChat of Friday (15th May), we’ve had the news that illustrators Axel Scheffler, Chris Riddell, Birgitta Sif, and others — including the irrepressible Sarah McIntyre — are among contributors featured in a new book, Creatures, to be published by Macmillan Children’s Books in September. As our colleague at… Read More
#MusicForWriters: Paola Prestini’s Songs From Another ‘Labyrinth’
‘You Can Free Yourself’ I wanted to write these two large-scale, deeply virtuosic pieces for these two muses, but I hadn’t had a chance to create a large-scale work like that yet. That comment may surprise regular #MusicForWriters readers who rememberour December article on the composer Paola Prestini and her Oceanic Verses. A complex work of… Read More
May The Best SELF-e Win: Library Journal Ups The Ante
‘Judged Purely On Whether We Are Worth Reading’ As the word spreads about independent authors’ new avenue into the nation’s libraries, the organization behind SELF-e,Library Journal, is launching a contest, kicking off today (11 May) and with a final deadline of 31 August at midnight Eastern time for submissions. Ebook authors in four genres — romance,… Read More
'It's discovery that's lagging'
“A difficulty in marketing something that has no physical presence.” That’s the author Stark Holborn talking with my Bookseller associate Sarah Shaffi (pictured) about the question of digital-first publishing and its potential for writers, in Authors debate digital-first publication. And that line, appearing among many enthusiastic comments from writers about digital-first in Shaffi’s story, echoes the strongest qualm… Read More