‘A long summer absorbed in our colouring-in books’ My colleague Philip Jones at The Bookseller today is making the case today in his leader piece that Harper Lee’s endlessly watched Go Set a Watchman “is the latest big title to demonstrate how the trade’s pricing strategy remains too set on using discount to drive sales —… Read More
The Competition For Authors’ Dollars: ‘Writer Beware’
‘So Many Are A Waste Of Time’ Writers between the ages of 18 and 35 in the UK and Ireland have been rushing to get their work entered into the newly revived Sunday Times / Peters Fraser Dunlop Young Writer Of The Year Award. Having been on hiatus since 2008, the rejuvenated competition has been… Read More
The Amazon Birthday Party
On the occasion of its 20th birthday, The Bookseller would like to wish Amazon and its founder Jeff Bezos many happy returns. Amazon is a remarkable business led by a remarkable visionary. My colleague at The Bookseller, Philip Jones is right — party hats: on. In his leader piece for today’s edition of the magazine on… Read More
A Conversation With the SELF-e Team: Exploring Payment for Authors
Note from Jane Friedman: Earlier this month, I featured a guest post on how self-published authors can distribute their ebooks to libraries, through the SELF-e program from Library Journal and BiblioBoard. That post wasn’t without controversy, since the program doesn’t pay authors for licensing of their ebooks. I invited the folks behind SELF-e to comment on the program, to start a… Read More
Reaching for accord: Authors' Contracts and Controversies
Authors approaching accord Two venerable author advocate groups, the UK’s Society of Authors and the Authors Guild in the USA, have recently stepped into the limelight to announce that they are fighting for fairer contracts between publishers and authors. The impetus for these actions seems to come from reports that authors’ median incomes have dropped precipitously since 2009, while publishers have fared… Read More
Is A Fan A ‘Quantified Reader’?
Michael Bhaskar: ‘Fans are critical to what it means to be a publisher today’ Historically, publishing meant amplification. “Making stuff available,” Canelo Publishing’s Michael Bhaskar told our Berlin audience. Putting something into print was enough to amplify it. But actually, now, on the Internet, when everything can be made available automatically, simply having stuff available is no longer… Read More
Subscriptions, 'know your readers'
Last August in his two-part essay for us here at The FutureBook, “On streaming, subscription, and big data,” CyberLibris’ Eric Briys (pictured) wrote of “understanding reader frustration.” Briys joined us from France Friday for #FutureChat with a timely reminder that knowing readers is really the key to right decision-making in the bounding changes of marketplace strategies.… Read More
Bath Spa University's MIX 03: Mixing it up for digital writing
‘An unusual event’: a space to show work, a chance to discuss work Recently at Bath Spa University’s Newton Park Campus, delegates to the third annual MIX festival have heard from a host of speakers including: Lucy English on the Book of Hours Sophy Smith on “Pervasive Theatre: New Online Environments for Performance Narratives” (which might… Read More
#MusicForWriters: Laura Karpman ’s ‘Your Mama’
‘A Conversation Between Black And White America’ In one of the most effective instances of a difficult form to pull off, composer Laura Karpman lets you know from the first moment that she’s got this under control. Her full-album 12-part treatment opens with the unadorned sound of an archival recording of Hughes introducing his 1961… Read More
China’s Feng Tang: Translating the ‘Beijing, Beijing’ Of His Peers
‘Sexuality Is Almost My Trademark’ “Why didn’t you take your stupid Three Gun briefs home?” she asked. “They were clearly dry already, dry as they would ever get, but you didn’t take them back. Why? After looking at them all day, I would go out and dance all night.” What the author Feng Tang does… Read More