My wife and I saw the 1951 version of “A Streetcar Named Desire” tonight. It differs from the play in a lot of ways, most of them fairly preposterous. I can’t find my copy, so I went on Amazon to get a new one for Kindle, but there doesn’t appear to be one. “Streetcar” is #2 on Goodreads’ Greatest American … Read More
Mark Coker: 21 Book Publishing Predictions for 2013: Indie Ebook Authors Take Charge
A few of my favorites:. 2. Follow the eyeballs: 2013 will be the first year unit volume of ebooks exceeds print …..7. Passive discoverability trumps other book marketing methods …..marketing isn’t quite as important as most people think it is. Marketing is a catalyst, not a fuel. The book, and the customer’s reaction to that book, is the fuel. In … Read More
USA Today Launches eBook Publishing
Everybody wants to get into the act. 🙂 USA Today joins a long list of non-book-publishing media companies to get into the ebook business in 2012. Most recently, Harlequin and Cosmopolitan magazine inked a deal to publish several ebooks a month together.Newsweek/Daily Beast entered into a partnership with Vook to publish ebooks. Playboy launched a series of shorts for the Kindle, the Washington Post announced an e-book … Read More
This Author Self-Published and then Sold the Same Book to a Traditional Book Publisher
Judy Mandel describes her experience: It was Christmas when I noticed some weird deposits in my bank account online. Again, I absolutely forgot that I had arranged direct deposit for the e-book sales. It turned out I was selling around 4,000 e-books a month.
Amazon No Longer the Lowest-Cost Place to Buy Books?
Amazon as the lowest-cost seller of books – an outdated myth? Online retail giant Amazon is cheapest option only on its top 20 bestsellers, with lower-selling books costing 14% more than price charged by rivals, study finds
Huge Ebook Growth Continues
Via digitalbookworld.com: As ebooks become a bigger piece of the publishing pie, growth as a percentage of the previous year’s total will continue to slow. But a 25% increase on $2 billion (basically where ebooks across the trade are headed this year) is about the same in actual dollars as a roughly 100% increase on $450 million (2011 vs. 2010).
Smashwords CEO’s Epic Putdown of Big 6 Self-Pub Efforts
Via DigitalBookWorld: Becoming yet another blood sucking parasite is not the path forward for publishers. It runs completely counter to what the best publishers have always represented. Great publishers invest in authors, not exploit them.
New Self-Publishing Service from Simon & Schuster
Via Digital Book World: Simon & Schuster is joining Penguin and other full-service publishers in entering into the self-publishing business. In partnership with Author Solutions (now owned by Penguin), the company is launching Archway Publishing, “a new self-publishing service with a focus on fiction, nonfiction, business and children’s categories,” … I hope they accept books in epub format, so that … Read More
New Previously Unpublished Kurt Vonnegut Fiction? Yes!
Amazon found it and is releasing it as part of its new Kindle Serials program. With the cooperation of the Kurt Vonnegut estate, Amazon Publishing is releasing a collection of previously unpublished works by Vonnegut: six unpublished short stories (plus an additional unfinished science-fiction story) and one unpublished non-fiction essay, releasing today as a Kindle Serial for $2.99 under the … Read More
Which Publishers Do Best at Ebook Sales?
Plus this: …we all know that self-publishing is growing by leaps and bounds, but just how well do you think those scrappy upstart authors are doing against the big publishers in sales?