In the piece below, Weldon is on the money and authors should keep that in mind:
He thinks publishing a new book is a bit like running a startup company, or – in an analogy closer to this horse-racing enthusiast – a flutter at the track, where “relentless optimism” is blended with controlled risk-taking.
via Tom Weldon: ‘Some say publishing is in trouble. They are completely wrong’ | Books | The Observer.
Interesting news this. I don’t know that it will revive ereaders as a segment and I think we would be better pushing smartphone readers to simply use their current screens to read rather than making life more complicated for them, but:
YotaPhone’s makers managed to fit two devices inside one surprisingly lightweight handset. This is not just a Kindle strapped to a phone. The slim contours are even more remarkable considering the layers of protection needed prevent heat from the battery impairing the e-reader’s “ink”.
Once the basic instructions have been mastered, navigating YotaPhone becomes relatively easy – especially the central conceit of being able to” flip” content from the smartphone screen to the back e-reader.
News from the FT feed, for example, rolls down the electronic ink screen, making it easier to read and, crucially, consuming much less battery. Books and magazines can be flipped to the back to read.
via Russian state fund takes 25% stake in YotaPhone – FT.com.
Interesting piece by Stephen Page of Faber in The Bookseller:
Publishers and other media companies have always been as singular as those who invest directly with talent to license properties. This is changing. Netflix’s House of Cards demonstrates that players further down the value chain are trying to expand their role to include investment in intellectual property. Alongside this, the transformation of self-publishing has demonstrated that those upstream from larger scale publishers are also able to exploit copyright. We are all part of one continuum, and will co-exist to the benefit of readers and writers alike.
Much to think abut in the aftermath of Hugh Howey’s data dump! Thos is just one of the many god posts on it:
The reality is that publishing anything is a unique path. If you have a book, and you’re trying to decide whether to self- or traditionally-publish, there is only the apparition of help for you in these figures. It might be that you traditionally-publish and sell 100 copies, and would financially have been better off self-publishing. It may be that you sell a million copies through traditional publishing. That doesn’t mean that you’ve left money on the table simply because those million sales if self-published would have netted you more. You can’t say what might have happened had you chosen a different route – whether you would have got those 100 or those million sales or something different. This is one problem I see with Howey’s piece (and numerous others). The number of copies a book can sell is not some intrinsic part of its make-up. The way you choose to sell it, and what happens along the way, will play a huge part and can’t be discounted.
via the left room» Blog Archive » some quick thoughts on that report on author earnings.
Publishing is a complex ecosystem (something I wrote about nearly three years ago when I wrote about The Value Web that was emerging in trade publishing), one in which there is no ONE way to publish or be published. Here’s a very nice example of that reality in play:
Sandy Hall, a teen librarian from Hawthorne, New Jersey, posted A LITTLE SOMETHING DIFFERENT to the Swoon Reads site in November 2013. Within weeks, the manuscript was rated “Five Hearts” by the Swoon Reads Community and considered to be one of the most “Swoonworthy” on the site. This brought it to the attention of Jean Feiwel, Publisher of Swoon Reads, and the rest of the Swoon Reads Board. One e-mail and two phone calls later, Sandy Hall signed her first book deal for World rights.
Eoin Purcell's Blog 