According to a recent USA Today article, retailers such as Best Buy, Target, Barnes & Noble, and Wal-Mart are cutting back on their CD selections. A Best Buy spokesperson is quoted as saying, “As people buy less, we stock less.” Sounds like a self-fulfilling cycle to this observer, but, sadly, one that isn’t likely to Read more…
I’m fresh back from New York City and the Independent Book Publishers Association’s Publishing University, which they refer to simply as “Pub U.” The Pub U is held on the two or three days just prior to the huge, annual Book Expo America. If you are a book publisher or if you plan on publishing, Read more…
The book business is more granular than other businesses. Books are sold one copy at a time. Hook someone on your brand of toothpaste or a certain wine and you’ll get sale after sale. Hook someone on your book and the best you can hope for is that he buys copies for gifts—and that he has Read more…
Federal Judge Denny Chin, after 13 months of pondering, rejected the proposed amended settlement agreement in the Google Books class action lawsuit. If you don’t recall… In 2005, Google began systematically scanning every book they could find. A number of august university and public libraries stepped forward to allow this. Both copyrighted public domain material Read more…
Since we are about to launch the first eight books in our Classic Wisdom on Writing series, I felt The Write Thought deserved a logo. Here in 4-color, grayscale, and black and white is what I came up with. I felt it had sincerity and enthusiasm. What say you? Just a write thought.
My son, Josh Mettee, a number of the staff of American West Books—Josh’s company—and I recently attended one of those traveling Get Motivated! seminars where headliners include Colin Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and Joe Montana. So did 16,000 other people. The traffic into the arena was horrendous. Our seats were in the nosebleed section. Huge TV Read more…
There was a bit of consternation over the last two weeks due to Barnes & Noble firing B&N’s longtime small press liaison Marcella Smith along with most of B&N’s regional buyers. Marcella was instrumental in helping a multitude of independent presses get their books into B&N over the years—including my start-up, Quill Driver Books, more Read more…
As most of us know, Borders is in trouble. For one thing, Borders has “delayed” payments to publishers and other suppliers. I leave it to you to imagine what that is going to do to the company’s ability to resupply. Borders’ problems are publishers and authors’ problems. If Borders closes up shop, there will be hundreds of fewer bookstores Read more…
A friend of mine recently sent me a chapter of his memoir. The tone of this memoir is quiet and calm—like most of us, shootouts and runaway trains are not part of his life. That’s fine, but since there isn’t much action to keep the reader’s attention, I suggested he deliver a richer picture of Read more…
I once saw a woman sitting behind an upturned cardboard box on a New York City subway platform. She had three stacks of stapled papers on the box in front of her. A sign on the box read, “Short Stories $1.” I bought two. Point being, if you want your writing to sell today, you Read more…