You’ll be able to tell your children’s children that you remember the day Google launched Google eBooks and changed the landscape of publishing. Well, there may be a little hyperbole in that sentence, but today Google put more than 3 million e-books in reach of anyone in the U.S. Soon, I’m sure, availability within the Read more…
As unemployment in the United States hovers near nine percent this Thanksgiving, people who write or who publish have at least four things to be thankful for. One: A writer or publisher can never be replaced by a computer anymore than a barber can. Two: Some writers (and their publishers, obviously) are raking in the Read more…
While-you-wait book printing will soon be available in stores of all kinds. At least one huge tech company has plans to launch a machine that will print and bind paperback books in just a few minutes. (As an Independent Book Publishers Association board member, I was in on a pre-announcement phone conference with two of Read more…
As a publishing choice, short stories vie with poetry as the quickest way to drain a publisher’s bank account. Yet, a year-old publisher of short stories, Electric Literature, may have found the magic formula. The company’s mission “is to use new media and innovative distribution to return the short story to a place of prominence Read more…
Thank goodness market research for writers and publishers includes keeping up on one’s reading. When family members see us sprawled on the couch, book in hand, we can claim, oops, I mean explain, we are working. And, in this endeavor, NPR is here to help. NPR conducted a poll titled “Killer Thrillers” to help you Read more…
There has been an interesting brouhaha since last Thursday when the Wylie Agency announced plans to launch a digital book publishing venture called Odyssey Editions. Wylie is no slouch of an agency. Odyssey Editions plans to publish e-book editions of some of Wylie’s author’s backlist titles that have yet to be published as e-books. These Read more…
Funny how headlines morph as stories move from one newspaper or online media to the next. I usually spend a few minutes each morning reading the Slatest Morning Edition, a daily e-mail that offers a headline and the first few sentences of a dozen top news stories of the day from Slate, a Washington Post Read more…
“If you want to see how a society thinks, look at what it searches for.” —George Bernard Shaw Allow me to slightly rewrite Shaw’s wise counsel: “If you want to know what a society is thinking about, look at what it searches for.” As writers of nonfiction books, magazine articles—even novels—it behooves us to Read more…
Amazon.com has plans to split their bestseller list into two, one for free titles and one for paid books. This will likely please authors and publishers and add a tenth of a basis point or so to Amazon’s bottom line. It also points out that “free” isn’t the price point for delivery of content. Authors, Read more…
Yesterday an elderly gentleman was in my office asking what he should do with his fourth book. He’d paid a “publisher” out of Southern California $25,000 to publish his first book and $5,000 to publish his second. The publisher published the third for free. None of them sold any copies to speak of even though Read more…