From The Smithsonian: Three-hundred-year-old scraps of paper that somehow survived centuries aboard the wreck of Blackbeard’s flagship are offering new insight into what pirates read during their down time, according to conservationists at the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources. As George Dvorsky at Gizmodo reports, researchers found 16 tiny scraps of paper embedded in sludge pulled from a … Read more
From the Wordfence blog: Things we need: 1. Money Someone wrote the above text on a whiteboard in the Fort Des Moines Museum earlier this year. I’ve returned to it often, ever since a friend retweeted a photo of it, as a reminder of the inherent difficulty in critiquing small presses and literary magazines’ funding practices, … Read more
From David Gaughran: Kristi Belcamino is really being messed around by Amazon. Yesterday morning, she was rank-stripped for the third time, and it appears to be happening every time she puts a book free – even before she hits the promo sites or moves up the charts. Back in September, Kristi was one of the … 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
Jo was the first to wake in the gray dawn of Christmas morning. No stockings hung at the fireplace, and for a moment she felt as much disappointed as she did long ago, when her little sock fell down because it was crammed so full of goodies. Then she remembered her mother’s promise and, slipping … Read more
From Wired: In 2007, A small team of Amazon employees had been working for a few years on a new ebook reader project they’d eventually call the Kindle. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was eager to finish and sell the thing; he was certain Apple or Google was working on something similar, and didn’t want them to beat … Read more
Like a great many people, PG hadn’t spent much time thinking about fonts until he acquired his first laser printer. This was in the glory days of WordPerfect (RIP) and a person who wanted fonts other than Courier had to download them into the printer at the beginning of the day if the printer had … Read more
From The Bookseller: David Walliams’ Bad Dad (HarperCollins) has claimed the Christmas Number One, selling 60,694 copies for £376,111 through Nielsen BookScan’s Total Consumer Market. It beat challenger Jamie Oliver’s 5 Ingredients (Michael Joseph) by 1,608 copies to claim the number one for a sixth non-consecutive week. This tops off a stellar year for the comedian-turned-author, in which he’s … Read more
From TeleRead: Authors Sharon Lee and Steve Miller are running into a little static when trying to publish some of their short stories via Amazon—thanks at least in part to the automation by which Amazon has to run its self-publishing operation. Lee and Miller have been self-publishing some of their short stories in chapbook form … Read more
From Seeking Alpha: It’s that time of year again. Time for the analysts and pundits to start looking ahead and muse about their favorite investment themes for the coming year in 2018. . . . . So what’s among my favorite investment themes for 2018? The “Anti-Amazon” trade. . . . . The prefix “anti” … Read more
From The New York Post: To football fans, he is the “Gronk.” To a couple unwittingly enmeshed in a less-than-literary work of fiction featuring him, it was an invasion of their privacy. To a panel of judges, it was a case dismissed. A federal appeals court this week turned away a lawsuit by an unnamed … Read more
An annual Thanksgiving piece from the Wall Street Journal: Here beginneth the chronicle of those memorable circumstances of the year 1620, as recorded by Nathaniel Morton, keeper of the records of Plymouth Colony, based on the account of William Bradford, sometime governor thereof: So they left that goodly and pleasant city of Leyden, which had … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: Three of four large trade houses that reported results for the quarter ended Sept. 30, 2017, said that sales and earnings in the period were higher than in the same period last year. The strongest sales performance was turned in by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s trade division, where sales were up 11.8%, though … Read more
From author and TPV regular Gene Doucette: I want to talk a little about an Amazon service called Kindle Unlimited, because it’s complicated and interesting, and is increasingly the primary discussion subject among authors (of the indie variety) and not for a lot of really good reasons. Here’s the summary, from the reader’s perspective: Kindle … Read more
From The New York Times: I live in the city that hit the Amazon jackpot, now the biggest company town in America. Long before the mad dash to land the second headquarters for the world’s largest online retailer, Amazon found us. Since then, we’ve been overwhelmed by a future we never had any say over. With … Read more
From New York Times Magazine: On one of my first meetings with Philip Pullman, he led me to the crenelated tower of Exeter College, in Oxford, and pointed out the room he lived in as a student. More than 50 feet up from the ground was a tiny attic window. To visit friends living in … Read more
From Good Ereader: There are millions of pirated ebooks online and many publishers have begun to go after the pirates and either shut them down or block access to websites via an ISP. New research suggests that this might be futile, removing ebooks online does not influence sales. That is it say, pirates are not … Read more
From Nathan Bransford: I should emphasize from the start of this post that as of this writing there are no signs that Barnes & Noble is close to bankruptcy. And yet in publishing circles, the prospect of Barnes & Noble going the way of Borders is sort of like a doomsday conversation that is impossible … Read more
From The Literary Hub: As transmitted by my screenwriter aunt, Harriet Frank, Jr., who was our family narrator, the central myth of our family concerned my paternal grandmother and the way she reinvented herself in 1939. After ten long and unhappy years toughing it out during the Depression in Portland, Oregon, Huffy (as she was known in … Read more
From The New Yorker: On an April afternoon in 1929, a timid-looking man with a broad face appeared at Moscow’s Academy of Communist Education and asked to see a memory specialist. The man, who would become known in the psychological literature as S., had been sent by his boss, a section editor at a Moscow … Read more
From Publishers Weekly: I started my writing career in the early 1980s as a satirical essayist. I wrote a book but was eventually lured away by the crazy money writers make in film and television. A few years ago, having accrued some cash and a Writer’s Guild pension, I returned to more literary pursuits. My … Read more
From veteran publishing consultant, Mike Shatzkin: There are three new promotion and marketing opportunities for publishers of ebooks that have been created by the original upstart ebook publisher, Open Road Integrated Media. They all come from OR/M’s development of tools to promote their own extensive list of ebooks, but which now actually benefit from the … Read more
From National Public Radio: Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Edward Albee has been in the news a lot lately. Albee died in 2016, and since then his estate has turned down a multi-racial production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and put his contemporary art collection up for auction for an estimated $9 million. Now The New York Timesreports that his incomplete works may … Read more
From The Wall Street Journal: For years, Nike Inc. was one of the biggest holdouts against Amazon.com Inc. refusing to provide its sneakers and athletic clothing for sale on the hulking e-commerce site. Its products were so cool, the company reasoned, it didn’t need or want the help. Recently, Nike reversed course. Behind that decision … Read more
From The Bangkok Post: A former Amazon employee once said that the traditional book market was “an absurdly inefficient model, worse than my uncle sending his laundry home from college”. Amazon grew from a stereotypical garage business led by a Kool-Aid-drinking skinny kid to the largest book retailer in the world. On its way to … Read more
From Growth Lab: The Coaching Habit was published on February 29, 2016. (Leap Day! Why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?) In the year since, it’s sold nearly 200,000 copies, including 8,000 ebooks in one week in May. It made the Wall Street Journal bestseller list “organically” (which is to say, accidentally). It received more … Read more
From Seeking Alpha: Over the past week, Barron’s has been working on an article centered on retailers that are resisting the Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) tide. Over that same period, I’ve been doing the same thing, but my focus has been on AMZN, and how the hunter may become the hunted; the disrupter suddenly disrupted. That’s the … Read more
From New Statesman: One of the most revealing photographs of Osip Mandelstam still in existence is a mugshot taken in the Lubyanka, on the occasion of his first arrest, in 1934. In the side-on view, it’s of little significance: he looks like any balding 1930s labourer from almost anywhere. Face on, though, arms folded and lips … Read more
From The Bookseller: This week the Telegraph newspaper laid a cloak of misery over the excellent UK book publishing results for 2016, concentrating of course on the negative element…(lordy, they talk of “the demise of fiction”). In fact, the UK book industry delivered an amazingly healthy 7% increase in overall book sales (the best industry … Read more
From Nashville Scene: In 2009, on New Year’s Day, I got fired from my job as the book-page editor of the Nashville Scene. I was standing in line at Target when the paper’s editor-in-chief called my cell and got right to the point: “We’re canceling the book section,” he said. “I’m sorry, but I have … Read more
From The Atlantic: You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: So much of the writing advice we get comes from a set of assumptions that are no longer true. I’m not sure if they were ever true. But that’s for another blog post. (Or maybe I’ve written that post already.) Anyway, the assumption is that our culture is monolithic, that we … Read more
Yesterday, PG read an article commemorating the 20th anniversary of the death of Mike Royko. PG is certain that most of the world has never heard of Royko, a Polish-Ukranian newspaperman who wrote a daily column for the Chicago Daily News for many years. When the Daily News closed down in 1978, Royko took his column … Read more
From Literary Hub: An invitation to represent England at the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway was scary enough. But to share a stage with the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the same time: absolutely terrifying. I remember Yevtushenko from the 1960s when I was a Columbia student. He was the pop star … Read more
From Fast Company: At a little before 9 a.m. on a Sunday in late March, a small group of people stood sheepishly eyeing each other in a lower Manhattan office building. Their friends, it’s safe to say, were sleeping in, sipping mimosas, and walking their dogs at this hour. Meanwhile, this group of bleary-eyed professionals—most in their … Read more
From The New Republic: Imagine a conversation stitched together across time. On one side of the table, it’s 1993 and David Foster Wallace is hunched, do-ragged, gesticulating: “I probably didn’t watch quite as much TV as my friends, but I still got my daily megadose, believe me. And I think it’s impossible to spend that … Read more
From The New Yorker: On March 18, 1817, Jane Austen stopped writing a book. We know the date because she wrote it at the end of the manuscript, in her slanting hand. She had done the same at the beginning of the manuscript, on January 27th of that year. In the seven weeks in between, … Read more
From The Hindu: How visitors to a Kerala book fair walked out with their writing in a publication ‘Publish yourself’ recently assumed a different meaning, when visitors to a street book fair in Thiruvananthapuram turned contributors, their impromptu writings were turned into books as the event concluded. Ninety-year-old Balakrishna Kurup never expected his jottings to … Read more
From Kristine Kathryn Rusch: This morning, a tweet from a British comic book writer floated across my Twitter feed. He wrote (and I’m paraphrasing here): Sorry about the flurry of political tweets. I’ll get back to light stuff—comics, games, graphic novels—when the world is no longer on fire. Oh, boy, do I understand how he … Read more
From veteran publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin: The sales-and-returns convention by which most books are sold by most publishers to their retail and wholesale accounts is too often described as “consignment”. It actually isn’t. Actual consignment terms would give us a quite different supply chain, and we may be closer than most people imagine to shifting … Read more
From Orthodoxy and the World (translated from the original Russian): Twelve-year old Tanya Savicheva started her diary just before Anne Frank. They were of almost the same age and wrote about the same things – about the horrors of fascism. And, again, both these girls died without seeing victory day – Tanya died in July … Read more
From author and TPV regular Randall Wood: I’m FREE! In more ways than one. Let me explain. Three months ago I tried an experiment. I pulled my books from all the other vendors and went all-in with Amazons KU program. I was following the advice of many that had gone before me and decided to … Read more
From author Jody Hedlund: Every so often I’m tempted to pull myself out of the social media game and sit on the sidelines. I especially feel this way when I’m focused on finishing a WIP or exhausted from my real life. At those times, I usually feel like I don’t have much to say on … Read more
A reprise of a post from last year. Contract clauses beginning with the phrase, “For the avoidance of doubt” are a common feature of business contracts. For example, Company A is negotiating a three-year contract with Company B to purchase twenty different products from Company B. The contract includes ten pages outlining minimum purchases, pricing … Read more
Yesterday, Passive Guy wrote about the difficulties the authors of a bestselling novel, titled Sugar and Spice, on Amazon UK were having after their book was taken down for 18 days. PG has received an email from one of the authors informing him that the book has reappeared. When PG checked, he found it not … Read more
Another excellent essay from Kristine Kathryn Rusch: Theodor Geisel, whom you all know as Doctor Seuss, stunned the publishing world by writing an original and somewhat controversial book for a strict formula book line. He had the task of writing a children’s book, using only 225 approved words. None should be above two syllables. He … Read more
Passive Guy saw the doom-and-gloom summary of a speech given by author Ewan Morrison at the Edinburgh International Book Festival a few days ago and dismissed it as hopelessly chicken little. However, regular visitor and commenter Julia Rachel Barrett tweaked him about it, so here are some excerpts: Will books, as we know them, come … Read more
Writing is essentially a self-motivating occupation. Passive Guy knows the Mastercard bill helps with motivation, but a writer doesn’t have a district director setting quotas and giving weekly motivational speeches (“Write or die!”). Hugh McLeod is an advertising executive who is creative (not necessarily a common pairing). He also makes money by drawing cartoons on … Read more
Contract clauses beginning with the phrase, “For the avoidance of doubt” are a common feature of business contracts. For example, Company A is negotiating a three-year contract with Company B to purchase twenty different products from Company B. The contract includes ten pages outlining minimum purchases, pricing and quantity discounts, price adjustments for changes in … Read more
Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written another important essay on the changing face of publishing. I’ll intersperse some excerpts with my comments, but this is one you’ll want to read in its entirety. There is, as always, a link at the bottom. As will be abundantly clear from Kris’ examples, traditional publishers and the new agents-turned-publishers … Read more