One of the best ways to learn as a writer is to study the work of other writers. And one of the best ways to learn as an entrepreneur is to study other entrepreneurs. So who should you learn from if you are an author who wants to not just write, but sell? Here are three authors whose blogs should be must-reads for you. These authors blog in an engaging, realistic way about not just the craft of writing, but the business side of it too. In no particular order... 1. J.A. Konrath (http://jakonrath.blogspot.ca/) Konrath's blog, affably titled 'A Newbie's Guide to Publishing,'...

I've seen at least four stories today on the Scott Turow editorial in this week's New York Times (for example, here and here). Turow's editorial was a mishmash of all sorts of trending stories, offering his comments on used books, libraries, the Kirtsaeng decision, Amazon, and who knows what else. He has been derided, and rightly so in my opinion, for taking a somewhat extreme and out of touch view of the current marketplace. But what I think often gets lost in this knee-jerk reactionary stuff (both on the part of the originator and the various respondents) is that these pieces often do...

Two great reads came into my inbox this morning, one via Book Riot and one via email, from a blog called Picky Girl, which I have not read. The subject? Reader responsibility. Do they have any? Does being a 'reader' obligate one to perform certain tasks on behalf of the author? It was an interesting dialogue. Picky Girl (aka Jenn) began with an author tweet that read 'I am VERY happy you found my novel at the library, dear reader ... but do realize that if only libraries buy books, authors don't eat.' [caption id="attachment_82572" align="alignright" width="246"] THIS IS HORSESHIT[/caption] After her initial irk...

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 public, and many realized the terms were not ideal for authors. The digital imprints offered a publishing package with no advance, and with net proceeds that would be split 50/50. In addition, the author would have to pay a one-time fee for set-up costs such as...

The book is written. It’s for sale on your website, on Amazon, or wherever you think people will look. So, how do you get people to buy? Getting through the noise can be difficult. That’s where Publisher’s Portal hopes to jump in. It’s a Web-based company looking to distribute excerpts of books for a small fee. With discoverability a current hot topic in the digital publishing world, Publisher’s Portal hopes to tap into the market by creating an excerpt from a book's first chapter (or its first 17,000 words), and then sending it to library catalogs, online retailers and book distributors. The excerpts are searchable by...

On FutureBook, blogger “Agent Orange” discusses the way manuscript consideration times have ballooned in recent years. Where it used to be a known standard that editors should take only one month to decide whether to offer or reject, now manuscripts can be held for a year or more without the authors hearing anything about them. While this might have flown in days before the Internet, now authors have social media and can communicate their anger with their publishers to other authors who might then be inclined not to do business with that publisher. And that’s not the worst of...

E-books aren’t the only form of tech-related books whose business models are seeing technological disruption lately. The Bookseller has a report on a controversial initiative offered by (Amazon-owned) Audible.com in which the audiobook store will pay authors who sign up to Audible Author Services $1 per sale out of a $20 million fund, in addition to the normal royalties such audiobook sales offer. The offer is open to any author who has an audiobook available for sale through Audible.com or Audible.co.uk. Apart from the $1 per sale, Audible Author Services itself seems to be mainly a setup to let...

An update on that story from a couple months ago about a coalition of Chinese authors planning to sue Apple over their works being sold in the iTunes store without authorization. China’s state-owned news agency Xinhua reports that the coalition has grown to 22 authors, who are claiming that 95 of their works have been sold without their permission. The story doesn’t really have many details about how these books got into the store. It does say Apple was “too slow” to remove them after the authors complained, though doesn’t say just how slow it was. A local Apple...

Mike Shatzkin has another long and thoughtful post, this time arguing that publishers should change the accounting methods they use in order to pay authors more for sales of e-books. At the moment, publishers count the 70% of e-book cover price they keep under the agency model as their revenue, and pay authors a percentage of that revenue. If authors are paid a 25% royalty, for instance, 25% of the 70% works out to 17.5% of the e-book’s cover price. Shatzkin argues that publishers should instead call the whole price revenue, and account for the 30% as a “cost...

Mike Shatzkin’s latest post suggests that writers, even those who don’t write for major publishers, should be grateful that the publishers implemented agency pricing, and should be rooting for it to continue out of sheer self-interest. He casts the publishers as being analogous to unions that improve working conditions for everyone, even non-union workers. Shatzkin suggests that there’s no guarantee the current conditions that allow self-publishers to publish cheaply and keep a large chunk of royalties will continue. He says that the higher prices are prolonging the lifespan of printed books, which will reduce revenues as well as...

The five alert services (all free) discussed are: 1. Track New Book 2. Book Buzzes 3. Any New Books 4. Author Alerts 5. Wowbrary A service many of you are probably familiar with. Wowbrary alerts users to new books at numerous public libraries around the U.S. Like many services on the WWW, the four mentioned in the MakeUseOf article are all (with the exception of Wowbrary) variations on a theme. Since the price is right (free), sampling all of them is easy to find the one(s) that might work best for your info need. Read the Complete MakeUseOf.com Article: "5...

Authors have experimented with Twitter fiction before, and even fictional characters from a musical have taken to Twitter to do a little world building (and marketing). But Reif Larsen's enigmatic matryoshka doll piece is the first I've seen in a while to make such effective use of the format. Here are some examples from the blog A New Kind of Book: here’s what Reif wrote on July 19th: Package from Serbia just arrived. I did not request such a package. I wonder the % of unrequested packages that end up being life-changing. That’s odd, I thought. A little quirky, a...