Tartarus Press is "a small, British independent press founded in 1990. We specialise in collectable hardback limited editions of literary supernatural/strange/horror fiction, and we also publish paperbacks and ebooks. We have been the recipient of three World Fantasy Awards, and in 2010 received a Stoker from the Horror Writers Association." TeleRead recently spoke to Tartarus co-editor and co-publisher Ray Russell about the press's e-publishing program, and how it fits with the rest of its business. TeleRead: You sell your e-books off your own site, in EPUB and Kindle/Mobi format, without DRM. What decided you on that policy? Ray Russell: Tartarus has always been about publishing...

Futurebook is reporting that Pottermore, JK Rowling's portal for all things Harry Potter, was a big winner at The Bookseller Industry Awards. As author Philip Jones explains, the thrust of the message they are hearing now is that there is no longer such a thing as 'digital strategy.' It's all just strategy now. So, what do they think Pottermore is doing right? They identify four things Pottermore did incredibly well "for which the words 'game changer'" apply: 1. They created a commercial e-book platform that was at least as good as Amazon's 2. They set their own prices, and sustained them in the face...

By Michael Weinstein There’s been a great deal of conjecture lately about the future of the bookstore: What will happen to the B&N stores (especially if they do plan to reduce the number of stores)? What about independent bookstores? Will Amazon crush bricks-and-mortar stores out of existence? Oh, lordy, will there even be such a thing as a bookstore!?!? Not surprisingly, this all made me think of a song. Under time pressure to have a song for the first Earth Day concert in 1970, the great Tom Paxton created the gold standard for songs about ecology when he wrote “Whose Garden Was...

After reading my review of David Gaughran's self-help guide to visibility-raising for self-publishers, Let’s Get Visible: How to Get Noticed and Sell More Books, Gaughran himself got in touch with me and outlined some of his views on traditional media exposure and self-publishing. As I noted in the review, traditional publicity venues didn't feature much in his book, and Gaughran explained to me why. With his permission, I'm reproducing his remarks, which may help other self-published authors still further with their marketing choices. “Right now ... there are very, very few paths to success outside Amazon, and I felt the book had...

Magazines have taken a hit over the years on sales in the marketplace. But we’re talking about physical magazines, the ones where you leaf through actual pages. Companies have moved toward digital magazines as a way to get consumers back, and even find new ones. According to research by Adobe, which produces the software that most professional print and digital magazines are created with, the outlook is positive. “The momentum we’re seeing in digital publishing is that publishers are actually able to make money off these magazines,” Lynly Schambers-Lenox, Adobe’s group product marketing manager for digital publishing, told TabTimes. “They are coming...

A couple of weeks ago I read about Draft2Digital, an e-book distributor still in beta mode. They got my attention with their claim to be able to turn a Word doc into a functional EPUB or Mobi (Kindle) file. Naturally I had to check them out, so I asked for a beta code, and I've been playing around with their conversions ever since, to see if they're any good. The results so far have been fair. I threw them a Word doc of my nonfiction book, which had previously given Barnes & Noble fits. Amazon had handled it well, but the...

Earlier today, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly announced in a blog post that after seven years of hosting the Tools of Change for Publishing conference, a digital publishing event attended annually by many of the biggest names and most important members of the industry, the conference is being officially retired. Also folding along with the conference is the popular TOC blog, which, like its namesake series of events, is considered a crucial portion of most every digital publishing professional's media diet. The rationale behind the cancellation of Tools of Change seems largely to be one of financial priority. In the aforementioned blog...

OverDrive Media Console Now Available on Linux (Good e-Reader) 9 Ways Big Pub is Like Big Pharma (Huffington Post) Canada Post Claims Exclusive Use of Word 'Postal Code' (Boing Boing) The Digital Truths Traditional Publishers Don't Want to Hear (The Guardian) Kindle Daily Deals: Archie Meets Nero Wolfe by Robert Goldsborough (and 3 others)  ...

For many years, author Ray Bradbury didn’t want his books digitized. But he finally relented before his death in 2011, and allowed arguably his most famous book, Fahrenheit 451, to become an e-book. But fans of Bradbury—old and those yet to be made—will be happy to hear that several of his books will in fact be released as e-books starting this Tuesday. There will be 16 backlist titles in the month of April going digital, with several other coming later this year, MediaBistro's GalleyCat blog reported. It seems his family is behind the project as well. His daughter Alexandra Bradbury released a...

Tim Waterstone is embarking on a new e-book project. It kind of involves owning a bookstore again. Sort of. Waterstone talked about his new venture, Read Petite, with The Guardian this week. It will be officially announced to the public at the London Book Fair next week. Read Petite is a digital imprint for short-form e-books. It will include fiction and non-fiction titles, according to The Guardian. The site will use a monthly subscription format and have unlimited access to all the work, which will be about 9,000 words or fewer. Here's Waterstone, as quoted in The Guardian: A lot of the best short fiction has...

Last year was a positive one for U.S. trade publishers, according to the Association of American Publishers' newest “StatShot” monthly report for December 2012. Digital Book World has an extensive breakdown of the statistics from the report. Most notably, e-books accounted for 23 percent of net revenues for 2012, which is up from 17 percent in 2011 and just one percent in 2010. U.S. publishers saw a net revenue gain of 6.2 percent ($7.1 billion) compared to 2011. The top categories were Adult Fiction/Non-Fiction and Children’s/Young Adults. Between those two categories and religious e-books, publishers gained a 41 percent increase in net revenue,...

We've watched with interest as a few new digital publishing-related startups have launched seemingly out of the blue over the past few weeks. Thin Reads, a fantastic new website that runs reviews of e-singles, is definitely one of our favorites, and we're clearly not alone; the site has been enjoying a ton of mostly glowing press. (Click to see what Mashable, Paid Content, and MediaBistro's GalleyCat have to say about the new site.) But there's another interesting and brand-new startup known as Blackstrap that hasn't been getting quite as much love lately. In fact, we hadn't even heard of it until we...