Yesterday Scholastic listed 10 trends in children’s lit for 2010, and #6 is in alignment with an October New York Times article on the decline in picture books. From the Scholastic list: “Publishers are publishing about 25 to 30 percent fewer picture book titles than they used to.” From the Times article: “Picture books are [...]
publishing
Amazon and Seth Godin partner up to create new worldwide publishing imprint
I’ve long had some precognition that I might be psychic, but now it’s confirmed; just a week after I posted a more or less random item about Seth Godin freebies, Amazon has announced that they’re partnering with him to launch a new imprint he’s calling The Domino Project. Godin says he’s got three titles already [...]
Amazon and Penguin announce fourth annual novel writing competition
I hesitate to post this now that NaNoWriMo has just wrapped up, but fortunately the submission period doesn’t begin until the end of January, so you’ve got a couple of months to cool down and start rewrites. Anyway: Penguin and Amazon are holding the fourth annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest for fiction and young adult [...]
Why DRM is a distraction
There are bigger problems in the ebook marketplace than individual piracy. You may not feel that way if you’re an author or publisher with a marketable title. And you may not feel that way if you’re a staunch consumer advocate, or if you worry about how DRM prevents ebooks from being future-proof. But the underlying [...]
Three misperceptions about the ebook business
You can pretty much always find outspoken, passionate diatribes about ebooks online. I’ve written several myself, but in my defense I had to, or else the Ebook Bloggers Board would have flogged me and taken away my WordPress dashboard. Even setting aside my own involvement, I’ve always enjoyed this sort of spirited discussion–it’s like politics, [...]
Updike, Nabokov, Borges and other literary giants finally hit the Kindle Store
Update, 24 Aug 2010:Wylie’s agency has made-up with Random House and is canceling this deal with Amazon, so never mind. Original post below: Up until now, some of the biggest names in Western literature–Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul, Hunter S. Thompson and Salman Rushdie for example–have been poorly represented in the ebook space. Thanks to [...]
After 20 years of traditional publishing, Donna Fasano goes indie
Update! – Sunday, July 11thDonna Fasano is holding an Amazon gift card giveaway to readers who purchase The Merry-Go-Round this month from Amazon or Smashwords. Check out her Goodreads author blog for details. Donna Fasano’s first novel was published by Harlequin Silhouette in 1990, and it was chosen by the Romance Writers of America as [...]
Writers, readers, publishers, and the desire to know everything at once
I like infoporn. I love to pore over traffic charts for websites, or look at survey numbers from opinion polls, or sit back and marvel at a really good graph, which is infoporn’s centerfold. One area where the data-crunching promise of personal computing has delivered is in capturing, assembling, and displaying this kind of labor-intensive [...]
Chaos over securing digital rights for "enhanced" ebooks
If the history of commerce on the Internet is at all predictive, then we probably have a good ten years before big publishers bring the right big guns to the fight and suck up the majority of the market. That leaves a lot of time for disruptive newcomers to transform the marketplace significantly enough that they emerge as permanent and powerful market leaders.
What's the weirdest book title of 2009?
The Bookseller, a UK publishing magazine and website, has an annual prize called the Diagram Prize that it awards to the “oddest book title of the year.” The Twitter network effect led to a tripling of submissions this year, so Booklist has published their “Very Longlist” for the first time ever. Here are all the [...]
Penguin previews interactive books for Apple's iBook store
Penguin Books’ CEO John Makinson gave a presentation in London today where he demonstrated some books/applications–I’m not sure what you’d call them technically–that Penguin plans to sell on the iBook store when the iPad launches later this month. Penguin is doing some pretty inventive stuff with its content, judging by these demos, and I think [...]
Publishers should add value before raising ebook prices
When it comes to ebook pricing, I’ve changed my position on the matter almost weekly; sometimes I side with publishers, sometimes with retailers, sometimes with consumers. But I think this week I may have finally realized something that forces me into a more permanent point of view on the matter. It’s this: Most publishers want [...]