From The New Yorker: A few Saturdays back, I stopped to visit my friends John and Miriam at Mellah, a Moroccan rug shop they opened last spring in Toronto. Mellah is a small store in the city’s West End, set in a neighborhood that’s rich in coffee shops, young families, and dive bars, but not … Read more
From American Thinker: The Copyright Industry, especially the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) have suppressed every form of innovation, and technology to protect their questionable rights. In the 80s, they sued to stop video recorders, but were thankfully held back by the Supreme Court in the famous … Read more
From USA Today: Simon & Schuster is publishing a book by Milo Yiannopoulos, the Breitbart News right-wing provocateur, and for that has been roundly cursed by liberals, and accordingly mounted a free speech defense. Buzzfeed published the dossier of unverified charges against soon-to-be President Trump and was roundly attacked by Trump partisans, and, as well left … Read more
From Facebook: To all our friends, readers, reviewers and fans of our authors, Due to various personal reasons it is with a heavy heart that we have decided to close Wilde City Press. We have enjoyed every moment of our journey over the past four years, and want to thank everyone who has been a … Read more
From Gallup: Despite the abundance of digital diversions vying for their time and attention, most Americans are still reading books. In fact, they are consuming books at nearly the same rate that they were when Gallup last asked this question in 2002 — before smartphones, Facebook or Twitter became ubiquitous. More than one in three … Read more
MY NEW NOVEL IS AVAILABLE IN THE FOLLOWING FORMATS Posted by Tom Gauld on Monday, January 2, 2017 Thanks to Dave for the tip.
From PC World: Now you can tweak the user interface, no rooting required. You can also view full desktop versions of websites, instead of the default–and minimalist–mobile versions that the Kindle Fire normally delivers. And you can add several gigabytes’ worth of music to your device without hogging valuable storage. Here are five tips to … Read more
From publishing professional Mike Shatzkin: A lot of people in publishing would pay a lot of money to get a reliable answer to these two questions: When will the growth in Amazon’s share of the consumer book business stop? Who will be left standing when it does? . . . . Any discussion of Amazon’s … Read more
From Digital Book World: As tablet sales surge and put downward pressure on dedicated e-reader ownership growth, publishers are pessimistic that tablets will provide readers with an enticing reading platform. According to a recent Digital Book World survey, conducted by Forrester Research, 31% of publishers think iPads and other tablets computers are the ideal e-book … Read more
From the New York Times: In March 2009, an eternity ago in Silicon Valley, a small team of engineers here was in a big hurry to rethink the future of books. Not the paper-and-ink books that have been around since the days of Gutenberg, the ones that the doomsayers proclaim — with glee or dread … Read more
PG tweeted the Publetariat version of this before discovering the post originated with regular visitor and author M. Louisa Locke: I have a lifetime of experience of being supported by people I know, whose friendship, sympathy, advice, and encouragement has sustained me in my life and work. However, in the past two years that I … Read more
From the New York Times: When Jessica H. Lawrence left her job with the Girl Scouts of San Gorgonio Council in Redlands, Calif., to pursue a new life in New York City, she arrived in late January without a job, an apartment or someone to keep her warm through the winter nights. But in less … Read more
No, a video book club is not ten people getting together to eat cookies and talk about a YouTube cute kitty video. From Reuters: Nine book clubs across the United States took part in an hour-long discussion earlier this month with Meg Wolitzer, the best-selling author of the “The Ten-Year Nap,” in what is thought … Read more
From long-time publishing pro, Mike Shatzkin: I hope it is a mistaken impression — it certainly isn’t scientifically arrived at — but I have the feeling that there is widespread sentiment among self-published writers opposing publishers’ attempts through the agency model to keep ebook prices up. I have said before that I think agency pricing … Read more
It’s been five months since Passive Guy started this blog. The original business purpose was to build a platform to support some PG works of fiction that won’t see the light of day for awhile (PG has issues with letting go of backstory). Since his readers are his constituency, PG decided to provide a State … Read more
Here’s one I didn’t know about. Steven Lewis talks about using Kindle’s “Before You Go” screen effectively. For those of you who have a similar level of ignorance to Passive Guy: All books on the latest generation Kindle now bring up a Before You Go… screen with the last page turn of the book. The … Read more
Penny Sansevieri, marketing expert, says authors should blog. Excerpts: With all the Tweeting, Facebook Liking, and LinkedIn connecting going on, it’s easy to forget about blogging and finding the time to do so. Blogging, however, can be extremely useful for more reasons than just populating your website with content (although that’s important too). . . … Read more
Suggestions from Victorine Lieske: I quickly learned that the wonderful people over on the Kindleboards don’t appreciate authors who post an ad once a week and never stick around to socialize. Those get ignored. I found that the best way to draw attention to my book was to put my book cover in my signature … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: Smart authors, faced with storms, chose to create umbrellas. That’s why a diverse group of authors banded together to create The Fiction Writer’s Co-op which will work to find innovative ways to promote each other’s work and cheer each other on in a very competitive field. “The idea of starting the co-op came to me … Read more