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
Will We Ever Be Able To Trust Online Reviews?
‘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
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