‘Communion With Music And Audience’ When I last spoke with composer Lisa Bielawa, she was working up to theAirfield Broadcasts. These were huge events staged in October 2013. In each, as many as 1,000 musicians were involved in what Bielawa calls “spatialized symphonies.” The events were created for two airport-born parks. One is in Germany, the… Read More
Is Online Life Real Life? #AskELJames – No, Ask Chuck Wendig
One Big Gray (Not Grey) Area Of Rage Online is IRL. It’s all real. This is all really happening… It’s not a show, no matter how much we want it to be. That’s the author Chuck Wendig, wrapping up what he seems to have thought would be his one post on the PR hair-tearer #AskELJames. But a funny… Read More
When Authors Yell ‘Everybody Into The Pool!'
What Writers Say To Agents After The Party Many types of comments are generously added to articles, of course, here at Thought Catalog and in other places. It’s a form of sharing, after all, still relatively new in human correspondence. The closest thing in the past might have been those Letters to the Editor in… Read More
'Growing pains': Scribd's romance 'purge'
Mark Coker: Smashwords’ Scribd sales may ‘drop at least 50 percent’ Coming in the context of Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Select’s controversial new per-page paymentsin its Kindle Unlimited (KU) and Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) services, the news from Scribd may not raise independent authors’ spirits. One key platform c.e.o., Smashwords’ Mark Coker, refers to it as a… Read More
Scribd makes cuts to romance in its catalog
Scribd has announced to publishers and distributors that it is “making some adjustments, particularly to romance” in its $8.99-per-month ebook subscription service. Described by Mark Coker, founder and c.e.o. of Smashwords, as “dramatic cuts to [Scribd’s] catalog of romance and erotica titles,” the changes are removing an unknown portion of the subscription’s titles from the… Read More
SELF-e Gets Indie eBooks Into Library Catalogs
The American Library Association’s (ALA) 2015 Annual Conference & Exhibition opened Thursday (25th June, #alaac15), in San Francisco with something unprecedented being offered at this year’s gathering: Library SELF-e’s first-ever national curated collection is now ready, an array of 200 indie ebooks that librarians can peruse and consider carrying for their patrons to check… Read More
A Digital Picket Line: The Authors Guild Would Like Your Attention
‘Authors Are More Vulnerable To Exploitation Than Ever’ London-based publisher Michael Bhaskar has called digitally empowered readers “the power brokers who matter most” in publishing today. While that kind of commentary refers to the industry’s efforts to strike a more direct-to-consumer stance with a curatorial audience, there are other ways in which readers soon may begin… Read More
Is Amazon KDP Select's per-page payout better?
I’d like to be paid per-page for everything written about Amazon’s KDP Select since the 15th of the month. And certainly, I’ve tried to hold up my end. I wrote about it here. And then I wrote about it there. And now I’m writing about it once more, hoping that you’ll join us in this week’s #FutureChat on… Read More
Writers And Their Business: Don’t Assume It’s All For One
‘Authors Earn Their Living As Freelancers’ There’s a sense these days that the centricity of the author is becoming more convincing in publishing. Or maybe to put it more accurately, it’s becoming harder to think that the centricity of the author won’t be the contextual understanding in publishing some day. Nevertheless, it’s also possible to discern a striking division… Read More
Is Your Self-Published Ebook in the Library? SELF-e Is Ready To Help
Hear that cheer from the Left Coast? That might just be librarians gathered for the American Library Association’s (ALA) big Annual Conference & Exhibition. It opens today, Thursday (25th June) in San Francisco. And among the news you may hear coming out of the gathering, one of the most upbeat announcements is that the… Read More