TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics » publishing

James Patterson and His Publishing Bailout Non-Plan

Juli Monroe — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 17:55:30 +0000

I know I’m coming a bit late to this party, but I was out of town while everyone was discussing James Patterson’s ad. And I’m kind of glad I was. It gave me time to digest what other people were saying and form my own opinions. I wasn’t in favor of the government bailout of [...]

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Keeping Score with VIDA: Women in Literary Arts

Lynn Rosen — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 20:15:45 +0000

It was the first day of my first college English class, and the teacher of our freshman seminar opened the discussion by announcing that, in this class, we were going to read only books written by women authors. My first thought was that that seemed to be a rather arbitrary and meaningless distinction. Then she [...]

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David Gaughran on Argo Navis and Lazy Literary Agents

Juli Monroe — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:17:09 +0000

David Gaughran published a scathing article yesterday on Argo Navis Author Services and the agents who are promoting it to their clients. I wasn’t surprised that yet another barely dressed up distribution service was attempting to convince authors to give up a ridiculous percentage for services which are little better (and arguably worse) than those [...]

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Steps We Must Consider When Pricing E-Books? Really?

Juli Monroe — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 17:15:02 +0000

When I read the DBW article yesterday entitled “7 Must-Consider Strategies for Ebook Pricing,” I ended up scratching my head. What happened to “listen to the consumer and what they consistently tell you they want?” That sounds like a good idea when considering pricing e-books. Apparently not. It started with strategy #1. “Charge extra for [...]

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One publisher, Tor/Forge, truly understands reader engagement

Juli Monroe — Sun, 07 Apr 2013 16:42:03 +0000

It’s easy to always talk about publishers who get it wrong, and yes, lots of them do. Bookish, anyone? (Where you can get recommendations, but it’s all a one way street, and many, if not most, of their articles are aimed at books or authors published by the houses behind the site.) Tor, an imprint [...]

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Backlists, Hydra and the Future of Indie Publishing

Juli Monroe — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:30:56 +0000

I’m a bit behind on reading Rusch’s blog on the business of being a writer, but one of her recent articles on binge reading (which also touched on Hydra) was excellent food for thought. Note that her article didn’t cover Hydra’s recent changes in its royalty and payment structure, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t [...]

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Random House’s Hydra changes contract terms

Susan Lulgjuraj — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 01:34:16 +0000

Many publishing insiders and authors have been discussing Random House over the past week. The company might wish it had stayed out of the news as criticisms came down over its digital imprints, especially Hydra, which handles science fiction. In case you missed the news, here’s the basic version: Contract specifications for Hydra were made [...]

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Two David and Goliath stories with happy endings

Joanna Cabot — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 22:09:12 +0000

TeleRead has earlier covered two stories about some bad publishing experiments: The first was about the scammy contracts Random House was offering authors who signed with their digital-only imprint. The second was about a Canadian newspaper, the National Post, which was trying to extract ‘licensing’ payments from readers who were trying to quote from their [...]

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From the author of Fifty Shades, a how-to writing guide

Dan Eldridge — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 01:22:05 +0000

It sounds suspiciously like a story from The Onion: ‘Fifty Shades’ author to publish writing guide. But nope—it’s actually a real-life AP wire story that appeared on the Philadelphia Inquirer‘s website this morning. Scheduled to be published on May 1 by Random House’s Vintage imprint, Fifty Shades of Grey: Inner Goddess (A Journal) will be a combination of author E.L. [...]

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Indie comic book creators get a new digital outlet from ComiXology

Susan Lulgjuraj — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 19:45:52 +0000

Independent comic book creators will get a new outlet for their creations. Earlier today, ComiXology announced the launch of ComiXology Submit, where comic book and graphic novel creators can upload their files for free. ComiXology will then transform the files to be read on its platform, which itself can be accessed across a variety of apps. “While we [...]

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Little, Brown UK creates Blackfriars, a digital-only imprint

Susan Lulgjuraj — Thu, 07 Mar 2013 03:43:06 +0000

Science-fiction, adult-themed novels and other types of genre fiction have made an impression on the digital world. Little, Brown UK’s Clare Smith thinks literary fiction is obviously the next step in the e-book world. The company has created Blackfriars, a digital imprint to be launched in June. “I think the thing for me, with doing [...]

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What was the first book ever written with a word processor?

Dan Eldridge — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 21:14:33 +0000

I’ve always been a sucker for stories about the history of American pop culture. So when TeleRead founder David Rothman sent me an email last weekend with a subject line that read, “This Was the First Word Processor Ever Used By a Novelist. It Weighed 200 Pounds and Had to Be Brought in Though the [...]

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Book Promotion: What Works, What Doesn’t

Joanna Cabot — Tue, 05 Mar 2013 16:02:28 +0000

Thanks to Nate over at The Digital Reader for alerting me to this great blog post by author Lindsay Buroker. Buroker runs through a number of Amazon ‘tricks’ which, for various reasons, are losing steam as powerhouse author tools. Some tools, such as tagging and keyword manipulation, never worked that well anyway because people don’t [...]

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Group looks to create Rabble Reads, an aggregated book review site for indie and traditional books

Susan Lulgjuraj — Sat, 02 Mar 2013 20:16:12 +0000

Being able to trust a book review on popular sites such as Amazon and Goodreads is getting difficult. These sites have fake reviews—some good and some bad—designed to work the system by raising and droping books in the rankings. Amy Holman Edelman and those at IndieReader are looking to help readers with this problem. They recently created a Kickstarter campaing to [...]

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More reviewers say ‘yes’ to indie authors today, but getting noticed is still an uphill climb

Susan Lulgjuraj — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 03:10:34 +0000

Allen Schatz published his first book two years ago. After things didn’t work out with an agent, he went the self-publishing route and knew he had to market on his own, which meant contacting reviewers. Some said yes, many said no. But Schatz noticed a change in the business around this time and self-publishing didn’t [...]

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