‘Fake Reviews Are Still Rife’ Three summers ago, in August 2012, one of the hottest stories of the year came from the book-retail sector. The author John Locke had confirmed to The New York Times’ David Streitfeld that he had paid for reviews, lots of them, starting with 50 reviews of his books for $1,000. The… Read More
Gaming the system: Amazon at home and abroad
The special symmetry of ‘the disrupter that demands to be undisrupted’ As Friday’s edition of The Bookseller points out, last week brought Amazon’s place in European markets into tighter focus. A scene-setting article from my colleague Lisa Campbell announced the European Commission’s formal antitrust investigation into the retailer’s relationships with publishers and ebook distribution. Campbell also pointed to… Read More
#MusicForWriters: Michel van der Aa’s ‘Hovering’ Flight
‘The Darker Aspects Of Life’ This week’s #MusicForWriters column: Like one of my favorite artists and friends, the music-theater virtuoso Martha Clarke, Michel van der Aa trades deliberately in what you’ll see him call in our interview “the darker aspects of life.” As a kid, we learn, he got into music on a psychologist’s advice, to… Read More
Can publishing use a little mindfulness?
Not that anybody in publishing is tense When my colleague Miriam Robinson put together her programmefor the upcoming Bookseller Marketing and Publicity Conference at Southbank Centre, we all might have looked a tad haggard to her. She installed a special session on 30th June called “People-Powered Products and PR” with Rohan Gunatillake, the mind behind… Read More
Hoofing self-publishing's 'known unknowns': A #FutureChat recap
‘The author services crowd is loving these big numbers!’ That was author Abby Quillen during our #FutureChat of Friday (12th June). And she’s right. The blind man on the team who’s in the author services biz is sure to be happy with the size of whatever chunk he encounters. Everybody agrees that self-publishing is big. Very big.… Read More
Amazon And Its New KDP Select Per-Page Payments: Everybody Has To Swim For It Now
‘What This Means For Authors Is Debatable’ Yesterday’s news (15th June) that Amazon is changing its payout structure for Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) lending scenarios — that’s Kindle Unlimited (KU) and the Kindle Owners Lending Library (KOLL) — has been met with somewhat muted reactions. And this is good to see. Some mature, prudent thinking is… Read More
In Self-Publishing, The Gatekeepers Are Dead. Long Live The Gatekeepers!
‘To Establish Trust With Readers’ Readers aren’t all the same. Readers, in fact, are very different from one another. Some only want to read what everyone else is reading, so they can join a movement and a discussion. Some stick to what’s been adapted to the big and small screen, or what’s hit the NYT… Read More
How big is self-publishing? Data-Dancing on the platforms
The conga line forms here. If you’ve been with us in the past few days here at The FutureBook, you’ll know that we’re tripping the estimates fantastic in terms of just how large a market we’re talking about when we say “self-publishing” in the UK and US markets. As the author Hugh Howey has pointed… Read More
Why Are Boys Not Reading More?
‘We Are Not Creating Male Readers’ I would suggest to you that we have shared responsibility here — teachers, parents, authors, and publishers. Literacy is the kingpin skill of school success. Unless we get all kids reading, they’re not going to be successful. That’s Peg Tyre, author of The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons,… Read More
Data-Dancing: How big is self-publishing?
‘Shock and awe.’ I’m here with the same question asked by my colleague, Bookseller editor Philip Jones in his companion piece to this one: How big is the market for self-published titles? “The question is a simple one for which there is no simple answer,” Jones writes. “In fact, there are lots of complicated answers.” We want your… Read More