From The Digital Reader: Earlier this week The Publishers Authors Guild released a report that “explores the factors leading to the decline in the writing profession. Alas, this report is based on the flawed survey that I debunked last January, making it the epitome of the “garbage in, garbage out” error. As I reported last year: The Authors … Read more
Note from PG: The reason that the following item and the congressional hearings it describes is important for indie authors is that §512 impacts the least-expensive way of dealing with online piracy of an author’s work – DMCA Takedown Notices (go here and here for an overview if you don’t know what those are). From … Read more
From Aeon: While in graduate school in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a logic course from David Griffeath. The class was fun. Griffeath brought a playfulness and openness to problems. Much to my delight, about a decade later, I ran into him at a conference on traffic models. During a presentation on … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: It doesn’t take serious writers long to learn that we need to be fanatical about quality with every element of our stories. So why, when we demand quality everywhere else, do we embrace Hollywood hacker stereotypes when it comes to technology? We’ve all seen the tropes: bad guys breaking into important systems … Read more
From Wired More often than not, when people buy books online, they do so by clicking little thumbnails of novels and essay collections on Amazon’s website. Those thumbnails then materialize as physical copies on their doorsteps in a matter of days. Easy-peasy. The online retailer is the most dominant force in American bookselling today, accounting … Read more
From The Los Angeles Times: It was poised to be a blockbuster long before copies arrived in bookstores last week: a thrilling contemporary migration story following a mother and her son, desperate to cross Mexico and reach the United States. Its publisher, Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, paid a seven-figure advance after outbidding several … Read more
From The Digital Reader: The legacy book publishing industry is fond of telling itself comforting myths. For example, one myth that just crossed my desk was the idea that younger readers preferred print books over ebooks. This is comforting to the legacy industry because it reassures them that their bad business decisions (high ebook prices, … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Amid today’s technological wizardry, it’s easy to forget that several decades have passed since a single innovation has dramatically raised the quality of life for millions of people. Summoning a car with one’s phone is nifty, but it pales in comparison with discovering penicillin or electrifying cities. Artificial intelligence is … Read more
From The Literary Hub: “Anyone can be a critic.” It’s a common lament these days now that the book review landscape is changing. English professors and book reviewers in newspapers aren’t the only tastemakers in literary criticism anymore: Goodreads community members, anonymous or top reviewers on Amazon, and dedicated bloggers can, and do, produce discourse … Read more
From The Digital Reader: As I am sure you know, Amazon requires competitive prices for ebooks sold through its site. The ToS for KDP specify that authors can’t price their ebooks at lower prices on other sites, and if Amazon finds a lower price, it reserves the right to price match. This policy has caused … Read more
From The Smashwords Blog: Welcome to my annual publishing predictions, and hello 2020! . . . . Each year at this time I polish off my imaginary crystal ball, read the proverbial tea leaves, and generally attempt to divine a future that is anything but divinable. The value in speculating about the future is that … Read more
from ALLI: This New Year marks not just the turning of a year but the beginning of a decade. Ten years ago the iPhone was a new-fangled piece of technology and ebooks were a rarity. Today, as indie authors get to grips with a plethora of technology, ALLi director Orna Ross looks to the future, … Read more
From Wired In the late 1970s, Robert Hazard had a problem. He’d been tooling around Philadelphia’s music scene for more than a decade, trying out any sound that might put him on the map, to no avail. Then, in 1981, he finally recorded a demo of catchy new wave songs, which his manager passed along … Read more
PG’s last post on December 24 was about the following Vox article that purported to talk about what a bust ebooks have turned out to be. If you missed it in the holiday rush, there were some good comments and, yes, it is a Vox article, so you can assume the author was born yesterday. … Read more
From Our Windsor.ca: In 2010 or so I bought my first e-reader. A Kobo. I was intrigued by the idea of an e-reader; I thought it might be convenient. But I equivocated — should I buy a Kobo? Or a Kindle? Kindle was associated with the growing bookseller Amazon, the Kobo with the Canadian company … Read more
The mummers (some of the house serfs) dressed up as bears, Turks, innkeepers, and ladies–frightening and funny–bringing in with them the cold from outside and a feeling of gaiety, crowded, at first timidly, into the anteroom, then hiding behind one another they pushed into the ballroom where, shyly at first and then more and more … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: On Sunday (December 15), Rakuten Kobo [reached] its 10th anniversary. . . . . In any week, [Kobo CEO Michael] Tamblyn says, Kobo will deliver ebooks to some 150 countries. “Over the course of a year,” he says, “we’ll hit all the countries the United Nations recognizes and a few others.” . … Read more
From The Book Designer: This is a third and final perspective in my publishing strategy trilogy, a drama festival with three events, Amazon and Ingram being the earlier performances. There have been five-week breaks between these theatrics as I proceed in the Joel Friedlander modern publishing ecosystem. If you want to distribute your ebook through Amazon directly and then … Read more
From ALLi: There is an old business saying: follow the money to see the true story. If we follow the money in publishing, from the perspective of authors, what story does it tell us? This is the typical money trail in trade publishing: Reader pays bookstore Bookstore pays wholesaler Wholesaler pays distributor (sometimes wholesaler and … Read more
Based on some questions from clients, PG thought it might be a good idea to republish this earlier post he wrote and published here several years ago. Agency Clauses An agency clause may be inserted into a publishing contract between an author and a publisher. In essence, a typical agency clause provides that the agent … Read more
From Pirated Thoughts: “I’ll be back” said the author of the original Terminator movie. Gale Ann Hurd, the author of the original Terminator film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, has informed Skydance Media that it is terminating the grant of copyright to the work and seeks to reclaims the rights…but how? Copyright law is complicated and the ins and outs can … Read more
From veteran publishing consultant, Mike Shatzkin: More than two decades into its digital transition, book publishing has evolved so that a capital-intensive infrastructure is no longer a requirement to successfully develop a book, or a list of books, and bring the books to market. This has resulted in a self-publishing segment, so far almost entirely … Read more
PG has mentioned this brilliant strategy from Macmillan here and here, but under the principle that you can’t celebrate Big Publishing stupidity enough, here’s more. From Slate: If I wanted to borrow A Better Man by Louise Penny—the country’s current No. 1 fiction bestseller—from my local library in my preferred format, e-book, I’d be looking at about a 10-week … Read more
I looked through our bookshelves and I saw that Sarah Payne looked only a little bit like her jacket photo; I had read her books. And then I remembered being at a party with a man who knew her. He spoke of her work, saying that she was a good writer, but that she could … Read more
From EContent: I moved to Nashville, Tenn., in the summer of 1999 to go to college, in the height of the file-sharing “crisis.” I put the word “crisis” in quotes because while the music industry was quick to judge on what was, and was not, ethical consumption of music, we learned a few things from … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Many of the millions of people who shop on Amazon.com see it as if it were an American big-box store, a retailer with goods deemed safe enough for customers. In practice, Amazon has increasingly evolved like a flea market. It exercises limited oversight over items listed by millions of third-party … Read more
From Wired: On a bright Monday in January 2017, at 2:30 in the afternoon, about a thousand Google employees—horrified, alarmed, and a little giddy—began pouring out of the company’s offices in Mountain View, California. They packed themselves into a cheerful courtyard outside the main campus café, a parklike area dotted with picnic tables and a … Read more
From The Write Life: How do you write faster with fewer errors? No matter how long you’ve bonded with your keyboard, it’s almost impossible to avoid errors, typos and grammatical mistakes. . . . . Grammarly is an AI-powered product that checks online grammar, spelling and plagiarism. While our writers have tried a number of … Read more
From The American Library Association: On July 25, Macmillan Publishers announced a new library ebook lending model. In response, the American Library Association’s Public Policy and Advocacy Office released the following statement: The American Library Association (ALA) denounces the new library ebook lending model announced today by Macmillan Publishers. Under the new model, a library … Read more
From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin: I am returning this September to speak at Digital Book World. . . . . The new DBW is well aware of “corporate” publishing, a term they use to describe the increasingly frequent occurrence of non-publishing companies and entities issuing their own books (and not necessarily with the primary … Read more
The following is a longer post/excerpt than PG usually includes on TPV, but the topic fascinated him. PG is happy that the foolish things he did in high school and college have disappeared into thickening mists of the fading memories scrabbling for survival within the minds of himself and fellow members of the Order of … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: When the disruption hit the publishing industry ten years ago, I watched with a wary eye. After I finished The Freelancer’s Survival Guide in the summer of 2010, I repurposed this weekly blog to help me understand the changes the publishing industry was undergoing. It seemed, in those heady days, that everything changed … Read more
From Crime Reads: The crux of Claire Harman’s new book, Murder by the Book: The Crime that Shocked Dickens’s London, is that life imitates art. In the dead of night on May 5, 1840, someone slit the throat of Lord William Russell. Suspicions quickly narrowed on Lord William’s valet, Francois Courvoisier, who, it was argued, had … Read more
From NPR: On average, every 30 seconds someone in the world buys a copy of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Maybe it’s for a grandchild, an expectant parent or a dear friend’s new baby. Nearly 50 million copies have been sold since the classic picture book was first published in 1969, and it has been translated into … Read more
PG will note that TPV is not and has not been a political blog. PG would like to keep it that way. PG understands that everything is supposed to be political, etc., but he believes such sentiments are, of themselves, political, and he manages to do a lot of things and have many satisfactory online … Read more
From Newsweek: Google calls it the “copyright case of the decade.” “It” is the $9 billion copyright infringement suit Oracle filed against the search giant nearly 10 years ago. Oracle brought the case in 2010 after Google incorporated 11,500 lines of Oracle’s Java code into Google’s Android platform for smartphones and tablets. Android has since … Read more
From KQED: Larissa Archer has been asked to perform for free so many times she’s lost count. Despite her years of training, impressive resume and credibility as the founder of San Francisco Bellydance Theater, she often finds herself turning down invitations to dance for a few wrinkled dollar bills. As Archer explains it, event producers “can’t cut … Read more
From Social Media Week: I’m sure that when they were first composing captions for their Student Government Association at University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Ja’Bre Jennings and Juwon Nicholson couldn’t have imagined they’d one day build a business around the snappy words they’d add to photos. But only a few years later, they’re garnering good … Read more
From Working Knowledge, Harvard Business School: Brian Kenny: In the world of computer science, Jon Wainwright is kind of a big deal. A computer language pioneer, he was the principle architect of both Script 5 and Manuscript. What makes John a legend has nothing to do with programming. Let me explain. On April 3, 1995, Jon … Read more
From Just Publishing Advice: It takes total concentration to read a book or an ebook. But with an audio book, a listener can multitask. This is the key attraction for so many younger readers in particular, as it allows for the consumption of a book while driving, commuting and playing a game on a smartphone, … Read more
PG was pleased with the emails and comments he received referring to the poem from W.S. Merwin he posted yesterday. PG thinks Merwin is not as well known today as some of the other poets of the late 1950’s and Vietnam eras who he numbered among his friends, including Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Allen Ginsberg … Read more
From Wired: “Helvetica is like water,” says a recent video about the most popular typeface in the world. The 62-year-old font family, with its sans-serif shapes and clean corners, is ubiquitous. It is used on the signage in New York’s subway system. It is the brand identity of American Airlines, as well as American Apparel. It is … Read more
From The Literary Hub: Midway through Seasonal Associate, Heike Geissler describes a day off from the Amazon warehouse. It is spent at the Leipzig Christmas market, drinking mulled wine, and then at the fine art museum, strolling through the galleries, looking at paintings, and taking her first deep breath since getting hired for the holiday rush. … Read more
From The Conversation: Microsoft has announced that it will close the books category of its digital store. While other software and apps will still be available via the virtual shop front, and on purchasers’ consoles and devices, the closure of the eBook store takes with it customers’ eBook libraries. Any digital books bought through the … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: Americans have a paradoxical attachment to the social-media platforms that have transformed communication, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll finds, saying they regard services such as Facebook to be divisive and a threat to privacy but continue to use them daily. Across age groups and political ideologies, adults in the … Read more
From The New York Review of Books: Who is going to save the humanities? On all fronts, fields like history and English, philosophy and classical studies, art history and comparative literature are under siege. In 2015, the share of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the humanities was down nearly 10 percent from just three years earlier. … Read more
From The Digital Reader B&N Press continues to add features, lending credence to rumors about an impending sale of the Nook division. I just got an email from B&N, informing me that B&N Press now offered users ebook coupon codes and better formatting control over book descriptions. Currently in beta, B&N’s ebook coupon codes give … Read more
From ArtNet News: A thorny lawsuit making its way through the courts pits Harvard University against a woman who claims she is the direct descendant of slaves depicted in several 19th-century daguerreotypes owned by the school’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. In a case filed on March 20 in a Massachusetts court, Tamara Lanier … Read more
PG did a quick Google search and couldn’t find any mention of iBooks in Apple’s big “moving to services” announcement yesterday. Is there any reason to think Apple is going to pay much attention to iBooks going forward? Anything Amazon should be worried about?
From Medium: There’s a joke in the creative industry that “everyone is a designer”, making light of how infuriating it is to have someone (without a visual background) tell a designer how things should look. It’s a huge and common problem, caused by a “client is always right” attitude — something we’ve all experienced, and all must … Read more