The Face Of The Company’s Publishing Platforms To Thousands After almost nine years at Amazon, I am sorry to announce that Jon Fine has decided to leave the company at the end of the year. When he wrote the internal memo that told the Amazon workforce of Jon Fine’s impending departure, Charles Kronbach, may have had the same… Read More
The 66th Frankfurt Book Fair: A Fast Arc Into Change
‘Beer swilling and book selling’ But he doesn’t stop there. When Frontier Project Partner Jason Allen Ashlock talks about why that international strategy consultancy goes to Frankfurt Book Fair, he makes it clear that his Global 500 clients need him there because of one word: innovation. Ironically, it’s precisely that bid for the future — innovation… Read More
Music for Writers: JACK Quartet + Four áltaVoz Composers
‘The Ride Of Our Repertoire’ “What was that term you used? ‘Screechy?’” John Pickford Richards is laughing at me as he takes a question about how reachy — “not at all screechy, John,” I assure him — some of the music on the JACK Quartet’s new album may be for these artists. As personable a… Read More
Paywall Parkour: How to Rip Off Your Friends
Very pleased to have this essay made the first in a new “Dealbreaker” series at Jane Friedman and Manjula Martin’s terrific new quarterly Scratch — to which I hope you’ll subscribe. This piece is in the “Community” section, not behind the paywall, and you can read it free along with other sample posts at the site.… Read More
Innovation’s Momentum: A Digital-Only Publisher In Oz
“I Got Acquired” Over the weekend, an Australian author, Steve P. Vincent, was a guest blogger at Writer Unboxed, one of the best-read daily blog sites around. In his piece, Advice To My Newbie Self , Vincent made some perfectly cogent points familiar to many writers. Among them: After submitting your manuscript, it will take longer than you’d… Read More
Publishing innovation: #FutureChat recap
Pushback and pull forward…If there had been any doubt about the scepticism encountered around digital cookbooks, you could find some verification in The FutureBook.net community’s #FutureChat on publishing innovation. Alta Editions’ Chris McBride, in our walkup to the #FutureChat, had spoken of how the cookbook sector has seemed to lag some other parts of the books industry… Read More
Night Of The Social Media
“Your ignorance is stunning!”…That line got one of my Twitter followers muted recently. And she has stayed muted. And she will stay muted. I only regret that I have but one chance to mute her. Despite this follower’s flattery — I’d never speak of my own ignorance in such vaunted terms — she is one author I will… Read More
Music For Writers: Caleb Burhans’ Leap Of Faith
Thinner Air “Between 1959 and 1960, Joe Kittinger went to the top of the atmosphere in a helium balloon three times and performed record-breaking sky dives.” So what were you expecting composer Caleb Burhans to talk about? Music? Actually, he is talking about music. His newly released Excelsior is named for Kittinger’s 1960 Project Excelsior. What Burhans has done… Read More
Reedsy: Bending into digital self-publishing
In the graphics for Reedsy, you sometimes spot “cattails,” as we call them in the sea islands of South Carolina. Reeds. Thus one can go into an interview here hoping that the cutesy name for this new company isn’t a misspelling of “read.” Big relief: “The name is meant to refer to reeds,” says chief operating officer Ricardo… Read More
Applauding gaps in 'retail stonewalling'
What might have been an hour or so of complaint and commiseration became — in the tweeting hands of The FutureBook community — something more hopeful and more nuanced than some would have predicted. Our topic, ‘Retail stonewalling’ and Amazon sightings in bookstores, took its phrase from Amazon Publishing author Tim Ferriss. And its starting point was The… Read More