Those of you who work professionally in the publishing biz have probably been reading, hearing and talking about the art and science of 'e-book discovery' for years now; it's been a slowing growing industry trend for as long as I can remember. But unless I've suddenly been stricken with a nasty case of Baader-Meinhof Syndrome, the so-called 'discovery' concept has absolutely exploded lately: Everyone in the book world, it seems, is talking about it. Why is that? The best explanation, as far as I can tell, is that book publishing itself has exploded—e-book publishing especially—now that we all live in the Age of...

Well, it’s been fun, but I’ve just made my last post to TeleRead as a regular contributor. Starting tomorrow, I’m moving to The Digital Reader, to write for my friend Nate Hoffelder. It’s important to note that there are no hard feelings between me and NAPCO or new editor-in-chief Dan Eldridge, who I’m confident will do a great job keeping TeleRead true to the vision of founder David Rothman. I just don’t have the time to write as much as I used to anymore. Still, you may see the occasional bit of content from me pop up here from...

I had never heard of this Ewan Morrison person before blogging that story quoting him the other day, but all of a sudden it seems like he’s coming out of the woodwork everywhere. I saw a mention on the E-Book Community Mailing List of a column by him on The Guardian. It says it’s third in a series, but I’m not sure what the other two are because there aren’t any links to them there. In this column, Morrison basically pooh-poohs the idea of social networking to sell self-published books, pointing out that if you’re spending 80% of...

If you’re interested in any new tidbit of information about the legal matters surrounding the publishers’ and Apple’s implementation of agency pricing, here’s an interesting one for you. Publishers Weekly reports that Denise Cote, the judge in the class-action suit against Apple and the publishers, has ruled that Walter Isaacson, the the author of the Steve Jobs biography, does not have to divulge unpublished notes and interview materials to the law firm serving as the plaintiffs in the case. The law firm wanted to see the notes to pick them over for anything that would lend support to the...

Fantasy author Holly Lisle (whose books I’ve read and enjoyed) has a series of writing lessons that she sells in e-book form. One of these, “Lesson 6: How to Discover (or Create) Your Story’s Market,” discussed techniques for using Amazon’s software and databases to place stories in alternate genres. It had links to Amazon in it, and Apple quickly rejected it (as it did one of Seth Godin’s e-books in February, for a similar reason). So Lisle revised the e-book to remove the Amazon links and resubmitted it—and this time it was rejected for mentioning Amazon. In...

Is the era of the professional writer drawing to a close? At least one contemporary British author thinks so. In a recent article, the Globe and Mail quotes UK writer Ewan Morrison’s contention that advances from traditional publishers have declined so much in recent years that he is practically working for free. Morrison sees self-publishing, book piracy, rampant e-tailer discounting, free writing online, and the “free culture” movement as killing off traditional writing and publishing. While consumers may be happy to get a lot of stuff for free, he insists, they’re killing our culture, and “There will be no...

The “Writer Beware” blog usually warns of scams and fly-by-night publishers trying to take advantage of inexperienced writers, but a guest post from writer and writing instructor Marcia Yudkin warns of something else—inexperienced writers apparently trying to take advantage of readers. I’m reminded of the aphorism, “Fast, cheap, good: pick any two”—because Yudkin is talking about writers who write fast, and self-publish for cheap, but may not actually be any good. Yudkin talks about communities she’s encountered where writers, enamored of the way they could make money right away by listing cheap e-books on Amazon, share tips on how...

Last week, author Charlie Stross posted his review of the process of writing using Scrivener, a specialized story-based word processor I’ve mentioned a few times. Stross has a good overview of the program’s strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of a professionally-published writer. The program’s biggest weakness, he finds, is that it essentially becomes useless at the point a novel is finished and submitted to the publisher—because the Word document output isn’t quite ideal for submission, and then the publisher will send revisions in the form of Word documents, and expect them to be processed accordingly. Since...

The BBC reports on Glaswegian crime author Denise Mina, whose novel The End of the Wasp Season recently won the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, expressing her feelings about e-books. And unlike some writers, she doesn’t feel threatened by them—indeed, she thinks that they are in the process of revolutionizing publishing. Calling e-publishing “a fundamental shift in the way stories are put out into the world,” Mina feels that it will change things previously taken for granted in print publishing, such as book length or the practice of having cliffhangers at the end of every...

On Felicity Wood’s blog, Julia Crouch writes a guest post about her experiences writing on trains, using it in part as a metaphor for the e-book experience, and partly to discuss a publicity project she did in which she wrote a complete short story over the course of her train journey to and from a writers’ convention. The story, Strangeness On A Train, has been published as a free eBook on Amazon and Apple, as well as being printed up into samplers to be handed out on the Harrogate train and at the Harrogate Crime Writing...

Today the Wikimedia Foundation announced a demonstration of a forthcoming new WYSIWYG editor for Wikipedia, in the hope that making it easier for people to edit without having to understand confusing symbols or wikitext markup will lead more people to edit the wiki. The idea is that you shouldn’t have to learn a new coding language in order to contribute what you know. (According to TechCrunch, only about 0.7% of Wikipedia users are active contributors to the site, making up about half of the entries.) While the demonstration version still lacks a number of key features and is restricted...

Some friends called my attention to an interesting-looking book: Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection by Aaron Schwabach—a legal textbook examining the copyright issues surrounding fanfic. At $81 for the paper form or $70 for a Google e-book, it’s obviously meant for the edification of college or law students, not the enjoyment of one such as you or I. That being said, I found an interesting review of it by Stacey M. Lantagne in the peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Lantagne’s review gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about, and...