Table of Contents “When the industry looks out of the window” Jane Friedman: Porter’s Brain My Fellow Millennials “When the industry looks out of the window” You know me. I’d just amend Tom Chalmers‘ good line this way: When the industry! the industry! stops the internal debate and looks out of the window, it will […]
While lots of authors are fond of saying that readers don’t care whether something is traditionally published or self-published, many of them also want to tell you there’s this marching army of indie-only reading author. So which is it going to be?—they’ll read anything? or they’ll read only free-range indie books?
Table of Contents The White Noise of Falling Royalty Rates Ask the Question, Give No Answer Difficult Interpretations: “Not Your Friend” The White Noise of Falling Royalty Rates In Audible Lowers Royalty on Self-Published Audiobooks, Publishers Weekly announced it this way: Up until now, Amazon was offering an escalating rate of 50%-90% on ACX titles sold exclusively; […]
Shanna Swendson, author of the Enchanted Inc. series of books, is working what some authors might consider near-magic in a transition from traditional publishing to self-publishing. And she’s getting savvier about it fast.
Much shorter and quicker to go over than the initial report, this edition takes into account information interpreted from approximately 11,000 titles in genre fiction; 900 in literary fiction; 30,000 in non-fiction; and some 10,000 in children’s (not YA) fiction. Hugh Howey has, since the first report, adopted a more frequent use of the term “spider” for the software his still-unnamed associate is deploying.
You may be looking at the best chance ever encountered for authors—of all stripes, Ms. Rowling, as Hugh Howey tells us—to at last come together, to make common cause, and to speak as one with a force this industry has never known.
Table of Contents “To Call for Change Within the Publishing Community” “To Stand Up for Each Other” “A New Era of Openness” “I Didn’t Have a Social Life Before” “To Call for Change Within the Publishing Community” This is how a movement might start: Indie authors are outselling the Big Five. That’s the entire Big […]
Table of Contents Is Publishing a Class System? Jane and Jason: “Inclusion of All Paths” Don and Doubt: “Not the glorious revolution” Hugh’s House: “Commitment to Advocacy” Philip and the perplexity: “Amazon will roar back” Is Publishing a Class System? What is important are the ethics of publishing. If I knew what’s good for me, […]
Table of Contents Lit Smart Rebecca Hugh and Cry Combat in the Community If You See Us Running… Lit Follow that burning fuse. It runs between these two curiously different words. We may need to think about which of them is closer to us. Revolution. Pretty comfortable. Thanks to Madison Avenue, we nowadays say “revolution” for […]
Table of Contents Read It and Tweet No Anti-Social Scientists, Please “A Two-for-One Special” Our “Bifurcating Future” Read It and Tweet A funny thing happened to me on Twitter this week. I “crafted a tweet.” (Sounds so “artisanal” that way, no?) This was the kind of tweet in which I like to mention a new […]
DBW’s producers at F+W Media may take their mission even more seriously than usual: this DBW takes place in a winter without a Tools of Change (TOC) conference from O’Reilly Media.
Table of Contents Nobody Dast Blame Us Maass Production Wendigging It Nobody Dast Blame Us You know the line, right? It’s Charley, in Death of a Salesman: Nobody dast blame this man. You don’t understand: Willy was a salesman. And for a salesman, there’s no rock bottom to the life. He don’t put a bolt […]
BULL Men’s Fiction is a newly relaunched site (just this month) and a print magazine, about 130 pages, published twice a year.
Table of Contents They Three Queens of Orient Were Hope and Fear #1: Visibility Hope and Fear #2: Literary Fiction Hope and Fear #3: Rest They Three Queens of Orient Were If they’d been guys, they’d never have made it to the Nativity. Once the OnStar of David navigation system got behind a few clouds […]
If we want to count all the self-publishing authors, then we need to survey and count every hapless no-income-from-writing would-be traditionally published author who gets nowhere and ends up at the bar next to me discussing the superb color that Milan puts into Campari.
Our surveys are counting the self-publishing losers.
Our surveys are counting only traditional publishers’ winners.
Table of Contents Notes Defensive Reading “Anything Except Readerly Books” “Print versus Digital” “Where I Get Unhappy” Those Lists Notes (1) As you may know, I’ve begun a weekly feature with The Bookseller in London, “Porter Anderson Meets,” in which I interview a newsmaker each Monday, live on Twitter, and then produce an article from […]
Michael Tamblyn of Kobo was The FutureBook’s Most Inspiring Digital Dude of the Day and, I’m sure, of many days to come. In a finely arranged conference full of important and edifying detail and personality, Tamblyn seized that room’s collective intelligence with gratifying honesty, pink lightning on a bare stage.
It comes as news to no one in the industry! the industry! that self-publishing is controversial. We may tend, however, to think of it as controversial for that industry, while not looking at what it can mean for writers and writing. It is, in fact, a development full of argument not only for publishers but also for literature.
PubSmart 2014 may be creating something we’ve needed to see much more of: a conference in which not only business-conscious authors but also smaller publishing companies can start doing the logical networking they’ve needed: with each other.
As a hand-wringer here, I’m one of the “but not all” skeptics Coker mentions, unpersuaded, and how good that he’s careful to note that we’re not all mollified. For me it’s not the compensation issue, actually. I’m more concerned about how literature of all genres (don’t get sidetracked here, I mean all books) fare on the buffet.
The digital dynamic, which makes it possible for people to publish books with or without traditional publishing support, also seems to be revving many folks into a shared assumption that faster is better.
As long as we envision “the book” as that thing with pages—or its digital descendant on an e-reader or tablet—we’re not giving the original artistry and impulse behind a new body of work a chance to live as the unique content it is in the context of its creation.
Are we impatient for the “new books”? We are. Do we have to have them tomorrow? We don’t. Will they be better “new books” if we take a little time to make sure everyone is accounted for, considered, even consulted and heard before we declare digital tools our icons and traditional publishing our new parking lot? They will.
Here at the 2013 Frankfurt Book Fair this week, if we’re not actually walking past a couple of smoothly contoured bends, we may at least be able to peer around them. (1) Self-publishing. We may be seeing a widespread, collective nod of recognition going on; not a big “eureka!” moment, but a frank acknowledgment that the energies of the entrepreneurial-author community no longer can be dismissed as a faddish bubble of activity nor as negligible in their effect. Bowker has stepped in to add some new edge to this concept. (2) Amazon. Not only is there less time and energy wasted on bad-mouthing Seattle here in Frankfurt than in many such earlier gatherings, but one rant against the retailer has been met with stark derision in the publishing community, and, in a more signal moment, a major leader in the business has waved the closest thing we’ve seen yet to an olive branch.
While many legacy publishers may not like to think about how large the self-publishing movement is, it appears that making money off self-publishing authors is just fine by the traditional houses. And that is, at the least, an unattractive reality.
Table of Contents Three Valuable Views A Word for the Publishers Humming the Bookstore And Just Write It Already View from the North Ten: Poems after Mark Rothko’s No. 15 by Dave Malone Inspired by the primary colors of Mark Rothko’s vibrant No. 15 painting, these poems give life to the canvas of the rural Ozarks. […]
Jonathan Franzen, in his essay at The Guardian, wants to tell us that Viennese fin-de-siècle essayist Karl Kraus has “a lot to say to us in our own media-saturated, technology-crazed, apocalypse-haunted historical moment.”
As has happened in the past, Amazon seems to have some folks in the publishing world feeling that they didn’t get a chance to discuss things. “But…but…but…” If only we’d known the Amazonians’ Kindle MatchBook deal was coming, right?
Both from within the industry and from outside it, writerly advice flies at you, continually. Just as you sit down to write, it slams it into your inbox each day. Every time you think you’ve worked out the big kink in that chapter, you’re pelted with new guidance by a rain of tweets. You’re afraid to live without it (what if you miss something really smart and good?) but you can barely think your way through it—it awaits you in terse comments and it slaps you silly in starred rankings. We are an information economy. We’re an advice culture.
In social reading, “How much of the author-reader intimacy are we talking about trading away?” Porter Anderson in Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com
In Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com, Porter Anderson looks at allegations of bullying in the book-recommendations community in a larger context.
Table of Contents Looking for the “Comp”-etitive Edge Marketing: Not Just for Companies Anymore Wait. Who Wrote That? Looking for the “Comp”-etitive Edge Books are books but they are also containers of ideas, worlds, beliefs, philosophies, attitudes, world-views, etc. So far, so good, right? Even though I’ve hit you with the m-word here—oh, no, marketing!—we’re […]
In Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com, Porter Anderson looks at outworn ideas of publishing’s black-hatted “villains,” through the decline and practices of bookstores.
In Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com, Porter Anderson looks at a new effort to rank ebook sales in London — and at Peter Brantley’s worries in the States about e-literature’s collection and preservation.
Porter Anderson’s Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com looks at two mutually influential market forces about which we have incomplete data: ebooks and self-publishing.
In Writing on the Ether, Porter Anderson looks at the revelation of J.K. Rowling’s pseudonym for The Cuckoo’s Calling and implications for publishing.
In Writing on the Ether at Jane Friedman.com, Porter Anderson looks on the comparative dynamics of literary fiction in the marketplace, amid discussions of Twitter’s effectiveness for authors.
Table of Contents Should Authors Stop Linking to Amazon? Timing, and Interdependence Chewing Each Other’s Legs Off Mr. Smith Goes to Town “Don’t Link to Amazon.” But She Does It. Should Authors Stop Linking to Amazon? I feel angry that these authors, unthinkingly or by design, have chosen to support Amazon, W H Smith or […]
In Writing on the Ether, Porter Anderson at JaneFriedman.com looks at how literary criticism now is divided into three major camps, none fully effective.
On the Ether at JaneFriedman.com, Porter Anderson looks at Amazon Publishing’s latest strides — including $110,000 in Breakthrough Novel Award publishing contracts for authors and a new million-copy seller in translation.
Porter Anderson, in Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com looks at the mounting pressure on entrepreneurial authors to write faster and build inventory — can we sustain this?
Friend Grief and AIDS: Thirty Years of Burying Our Friends by Victoria Noe It’s been likened to a plague, but AIDS was never just a health crisis. The second of a series on grieving the death of a friend, Friend Grief and AIDS: Thirty Years of Burying Our Friends, revisits a time when people with […]
Porter Anderson looks at how six of the most prominently successful self-publishing authors are taking their own booth (#966) at BookExpo America (#BEA13), staking their claim to a new, unified presence at the industry’s big trade show.
How many authors do you know who seem more renowned among their peers than readers—not because these “thriving ink-slingers” (Michael Deacon) are writing books only other authors could love, but because their output seems to focus on these redundant how-to’s designed to crib a few more bucks from fellow would-be renowned authors?
Writing on the Ether provides selected news and perspectives on publishing. It is written by journalist and critic Porter Anderson for Jane Friedman and it appears at JaneFriedman.com each Thursday. Sponsorship opportunities are available and offer generous promotion. Ether for Authors—another gas—runs on Mondays at Ed Nawotka’s and Frankfurt Book Fair’s Publishing Perspectives. London on the Ether, a new UK-related edition of the column, has recently had its debut at TheBookseller.com
Writing on the Ether provides selected news and perspectives on publishing. It is written by journalist and critic Porter Anderson for Jane Friedman and it appears at JaneFriedman.com each Thursday. Sponsorship opportunities are available and offer generous promotion. Ether for Authors—another gas—runs on Mondays at Ed Nawotka’s and Frankfurt Book Fair’s Publishing Perspectives. London on the Ether, a new UK-related edition of the column, has recently had its debut at TheBookseller.com
Writing on the Ether provides selected news and perspectives on publishing. It is written by journalist and critic Porter Anderson for Jane Friedman and it appears at JaneFriedman.com each Thursday. Sponsorship opportunities are available and offer generous promotion. Ether for Authors—another gas—runs on Mondays at Ed Nawotka’s and Frankfurt Book Fair’s Publishing Perspectives. London on the Ether, a new UK-related edition of the column, has recently had its debut at TheBookseller.com
Writing on the Ether provides selected news and perspectives on publishing. It is written by journalist and critic Porter Anderson for Jane Friedman and it appears at JaneFriedman.com each Thursday. Sponsorship opportunities are available and offer generous promotion. Join us on Mondays at Ed Nawotka’s and Frankfurt Book Fair’s Publishing Perspectives for the new Ether for Authors column.
Writing on the Ether provides selected news and perspectives on publishing. It is written by journalist and critic Porter Anderson for Jane Friedman and it appears at JaneFriedman.com each Thursday. Sponsorship opportunities are available and offer generous promotion. Join us on Mondays at Ed Nawotka’s and Frankfurt Book Fair’s Publishing Perspectives for the new Ether for Authors column.
Writing on the Ether provides selected news and perspectives on publishing. It is written by journalist and critic Porter Anderson for Jane Friedman and it appears at JaneFriedman.com each Thursday. Sponsorship opportunities are available and offer generous promotion. Join us on Mondays at Ed Nawotka’s and Frankfurt Book Fair’s Publishing Perspectives for the new Ether for Authors column.