From Electric Lit: I started querying agents for my memoir, Negative Space, in 2012, after two years of writing and revising. I got a few rounds of passes, including several friendly rejections in which agents said they just didn’t “know how to sell” my book. I heard this refrain enough times that I started considering the … Read more
From The New York Times: When Simon & Schuster dropped Senator Josh Hawley’s book a day after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, the news caused an explosion of attention, condemnation and praise. Amid the cries of censorship and cancel culture, however, the way the publisher backed out of the deal got relatively little attention. Simon … Read more
From Protocol: On the surface, there couldn’t be a more wholesome story than the meteoric rise of the Libby app. A user-friendly reading app becomes popular during the pandemic, making books cool again for young readers, multiplying e-book circulation and saving public libraries from sudden obsolescence. But the Libby story is also a parable for … Read more
From Writers in the Storm: Here on Writers In The Storm we’ve talked about putting the promise of your genre on the cover and how vital it is for selling your novel. As I’ve said before, a good cover is a contract with the reader that this story fits in the genre they’re looking for. … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rus ch: In 2020, BookExpo finally died. BookExpo was, once upon a time, a convention for booksellers, put on by the publishing industry. Back then, it was called The American Booksellers Association Convention, and honestly, it was marvelous. If you were a book person, it was like the best place ever. Books … Read more
From BookBub Partners: 1. Make part of the book’s cover wearable Some authors and publishers have created fashionable swag from the cover’s design elements or the novel’s plot. Book bloggers, influencers, and readers are often excited to show off these items on social media, creating a unique opportunity for word-of-mouth buzz.` The cover design for Grown by Tiffany … Read more
From The New York Times: Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah had just turned 26 when he got the call in 2017 that Mariner Books wanted to publish his short-story collection, “Friday Black.”Mr. Adjei-Brenyah suspected that the contract he signed — a $10,000 advance for “Friday Black” and $40,000 for an unfinished second book — wasn’t ideal. But … Read more
Click here for Part 1 of the Nine Worst Provisions in Your Publishing Contract No Minimum Performance Standards – Out of print Out of print clauses have been in publishing contracts for a long time. The original rationale for them was that, unless a publisher kept printing books that could be sold, the publisher had … Read more
Several years ago, PG prepared a presentation for an authors’ group and called it The Nine Worst Provisions in Your Publishing Contract. At the time, he included those items in a series of blog posts for TPV. Today, those posts may be findable in the dusty archives of TPV, but who knows what’s happening down … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: Elisabeth Sifton, who edited three of my books and died a year ago, used to put a big X in the margin whenever I mentioned a book that a writer had published. “Writers don’t publish books!” she’d say. “Publishers publish books.” I would dutifully change the wording, but I have to confess that I didn’t … Read more
From The Bookseller: On average I devour 120 books per year, mostly literary and genre novels. I have time to do this because I don’t watch TV and my Facebook account has been deactivated years ago. Reading is my meditation. It grounds me. But e-Books are verboten. For me, it’s strictly paper books. This may … Read more
From Writer Unboxed: Women’s fiction author Densie Webb [asked]: “The rights to my first book (with a small publisher) revert back to me in January. I’ve thought about self-publishing, but I don’t have a clue how to go about it.” Densie asked for help evaluating the decision, a simple step-by-step process for self-publishing a book, and inexpensive resources … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: In a letter provided to Publishing Perspectives this morning (August 17), three leading American publishing industry professional organizations tell the House of Representatives’ Antitrust Subcommittee that “a few tech platforms in the digital marketplace” wield “extraordinary leverage over their competitors, suppliers, customers, the government, and the public. “Regrettably,” they write, “as the subcommittee’s hearings … Read more
From Public Books: “Spying and fiction are not entirely different processes,” says historian of British espionage Ben Macintyre, in a conversation with master of spy fiction and former intelligence officer John le Carré. “You try to create an artificial world. And the better and more realistic and more emotionally believable you can make that world, … Read more
From Public Books: “Spying and fiction are not entirely different processes,” says historian of British espionage Ben Macintyre, in a conversation with master of spy fiction and former intelligence officer John le Carré. “You try to create an artificial world. And the better and more realistic and more emotionally believable you can make that world, … Read more
When I was six months pregnant, I moved across the world, and I found myself thinking a lot about containers. First, in order to move I had to put everything I owned, including books, into containers. Then those containers had to be loaded into a shipping container that went across the Atlantic. My old life … Read more
From Deloitte Insights: The next time you settle down with a good book, will you reach for a set of headphones instead of an eReader? Audiobook publishers are hoping so—and the market’s anticipated growth lends weight to their aspirations. In 2020, Deloitte predicts, the global audiobook market will grow by 25 percent to US$3.5 billion. … Read more
From Electric Lit: It’s been said many times already that the coronavirus pandemic has laid bare the dramatic economic inequality in New York City—which of course ties into deeper systemic issues around race. But to pretend those inequalities haven’t been obvious before this time—to pretend they haven’t always been part of the city’s history—is a … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: Even as John Bolton’s The Room Where It Happened: A White House Memoir continues to roil the American political scene, its publisher, Simon & Schuster, now has seen yet another move against it on the month’s upcoming release, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. … Read more
From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin: One thing the pandemic has done is to make everybody more aware of “supply chains”: the path by which a thing gets made and delivered to its ultimate user. Many of us heard many times that a ventilator is constructed of 150 parts that come from all over the … Read more
From The New Publishing Standard: When India’s Prime Minister extended one of the world’s harshest national lockdowns to May 3, as the country tries to ensure the coronavirus tragedy in West Europe and the USA is not replicated, it became clear publishers needed to adapt, and fast. Penguin Random House India did so in style, … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: The coronavirus outbreak is punishing the economy, but as a debut author, I never imagined the release of my forthcoming anthology would illustrate the impact of economic ripple effects. In 2017, I published a call for submissions asking women to send their stories of how they’ve been affected by Donald Trump and … Read more
From Wired: Jodie Archer had always been puzzled by the success of The Da Vinci Code. She’d worked for Penguin UK in the mid-2000s, when Dan Brown’s thriller had become a massive hit, and knew there was no way marketing alone would have led to 80 million copies sold. So what was it, then? Something … Read more
From veteran publishing consultant, Mike Shatzkin: In 1990, three zero years and three decades ago, the universe of books available for a person to buy or for a store to carry was pretty much defined by “Books in Print”. This annual compilation, at that time primarily delivered as a book itself, passes along the aggregate of what … 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 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
From The Scholarly Kitchen: I recently spent the better part of a work day reading Richard Poynder’s 87-page treatise on the current status of open access. Even as I printed it out, so as to protect myself from any digital distraction while reading, I wondered whether reading the full text was in fact the best … Read more
From BookRiot: It’s the season of best of lists, and with the bonus of this being the end of a decade, we’re being treated to double the number of best of lists this year. What shouldn’t be overlooked among those lists are the incredible book covers that graced shelves this year. Works of art in … Read more
From The New York Times: In 2017, the Dallas food blogger Urvashi Pitre published the “Indian Instant Pot Cookbook.” By any measure, it was a hit, selling more than 100,000 copies. But under the contract she signed with her publisher, Callisto Media, Ms. Pitre received no advance, the payment often given to an author when a book … 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
From Publishers Weekly: In every informational interview I’ve participated in, students and interns begin in the same way—what they most want me to know about them, even before the school they’re going to (or in one case, even their name): They love to read. When I hear this my heart sinks. I don’t want to … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: The Authors Guild in New York has today (August 23) issued a statement on the class action lawsuit filed against Cengage by a group of writers for the service. As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall from our mention of this case on August 19 that this is the second time writers have challenged the Cengage Unlimited subscription offer … Read more
Yesterday, PG had a post about a Publishing Perspectives piece discussing a New York Times article condemning Amazon’s sale of “counterfeit books,” many of which originated overseas. An alert commenter to that post mentioned a U.S. Supreme Court case that may be relevant, Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 568 U.S. 519 (2013) PG … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: Little, Brown, in conjunction with the estate of J.D. Salinger, announced plans to release e-book editions of Salinger’s four beloved works of fiction, marking the first time his books have been available in a digital format. The release of the four books—The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey, and Raise High … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: More than a year after imposing a controversial four month “test” embargo on new release e-books in libraries from it’s Tor imprint, Macmillan announced today that it will now impose a two month embargo on library e-books across all of the company’s imprints. The terms take effect November 1. Under the publisher’s new … 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
From Medium: I am not an expert. I have co-authored a single book in 2017 called Cloud Native Infrastructure for O’Reilly Media. Many people have asked me what it was like so I will attempt to explain the process, time investment, and financial incentive here. . . . . The process was about what I … Read more
From Buzzfeed News: Five years ago, Kathleen Hale wrote an essay for the Guardian — about targeting a Goodreads reviewer — that nearly ended her career. Now, she’s back with a new book that some people say never should have been published. . . . . When you start writing professionally, namely about yourself, people … Read more
From The Washington Post: Natasha Tynes, an award-winning Jordanian American author who lost a book deal following claims of online racism, is suing her publishing house for $13 million. The lawsuit, filed in California on Friday, alleges that Rare Bird Books breached its contract and defamed her, causing “extreme emotional distress” and destroying her reputation. In … 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
From The Wall Street Journal: Facebook Inc. rolled out a substantial redesign of its website and mobile app, geared partly toward steering users to participate in more group conversations as the company strives to reduce abusive content and the scrutiny resulting from it. . . . . Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said in an interview that … Read more
From Writer Beware: It’s not all that common, but I do see it from time to time in small press publishing contracts that I review: a publisher explicitly claiming ownership of the editing it provides, or making the claim implicitly by reverting rights only to the original manuscript submitted by the author. Are there legal … Read more
From Anne R. Allen: It’s not just today’s authors who work hard. Consider Ian Fleming. The Man With The Golden Typewriter: Ian Fleming’s James Bond Letters is a collection by Fleming’s nephew of the author’s letters to his publisher, editors, colleagues, other writers, fans, readers, and friends. They were written in the 1950s when the British … Read more
From Copyright and Technology: Blockchain technology has reached e-books. . . . . B2C applications focus on the user experience, by using blockchain technology to help emulate consumer ownership of digital content. The idea is this: a user buys a digital content file. A record of the purchase is put on a blockchain, which establishes … Read more
From McSweeney’s: Did you know that I have a book coming out? If you’ve visited any of your social media channels even once in the past month, you should know. It is very important for the world to know that I have written a book that is actually getting published so I have posted pictures … Read more
From Publishing Perspectives: One of Ukraine’s oldest open-air bookselling sites, Knizhka—located in Odessa’s marketplace—soon may be closed by local authorities, as confirmed to Publishing Perspectives by Sergei Dubenko, a deputy head of the department of trade in Odessa’s regional government offices. The decision to close the market, Dubenko says, has been made because of urban-planning regulations violated by the … Read more
From c/net: AI [artificial intelligence] software reportedly uncovered suspected GDPR breaches by Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook. The software — created by EU Institute researchers and a consumer group — looked at the privacy policies of 14 major technology businesses in June, the month after the EU’s new data privacy laws went into effect, according to Bloomberg. Researchers named the … Read more
From Copyright and Technology: There’s been lots and lots of talk about DRM for e-books over the years. Lots of controversy, debates, diatribes, conference panels, etc. Watermarking? Not so much. That’s despite the fact that e-book watermarking has been in use for much longer than most people realize, and that it has recently become very … Read more
From Hong Kong Law and Crime: A bibliophile who worked in a Hong Kong public library has been arrested for using the personal information of about 130 customers without their permission so she could quickly borrow their loaned books. . . . . The 25-year-old woman, who formerly worked for a contractor company for Tseung … Read more
From The New York Times: When Michael Lewis had an idea for his next book, a contemporary political narrative, he decided he would test it out first as a 10,000-word magazine article, as he often does before committing to a yearslong project. But this time he made a surprising pivot. Instead of publishing the story … Read more