The Future Of Publishing Blog by Thad McIlroy

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October 27th, 2015

Novelists Inc 2015 — a Heckuva Conference

My concern was never about the conference. I was worried about the conga line. Three hundred authors, 90% women, drawn together for four days at a deluxe south Florida resort. The TradeWinds Island Grand offers “11 unique dining and entertainment venues” including Awakening’s Lobby Bar, the Sharktooth Tavern and Salty’s Poolside Beach Bar (“what’s a beach vacation without a brightly colored…

October 1st, 2015

Novelists Inc. Day 1 Presentations

I’m at day 1 of the Novelists Inc. conference. NINC doesn’t have as high a profile as it deserves. It’s a fascinating group because the members are all “multi-published” — not just one-book wonders. And so NINC can rightly claim that they are “the professional network for career novelists.” The conference program is available online.

September 28th, 2015

The Writers in the Silos, by Heidi Julavits

In 2008, Heidi Julavits published a marvelous short piece, The Writers in the Silos, a satirical glance at where writing and publishing is headed in “our current conglomerating, lowest­-common-denominator, demographically target­ed publishing industry.” I fell in love with it and bought the rights to reproduce the article on The Future of Publishing. As it’s buried somewhere at…

September 8th, 2015

Why are Ebook Sales Falling?

Ebook sales are falling, the Wall Street Journal reports, this after languishing sales for the past several years. We’ve seen statistical examinations of a drop in ebook sales, but this is the first article to focus in-depth on a possible cause: rising ebook prices from the big 5 New York publishers.