July 11th, 2017
I do fret about the future of publishing. For all kinds of reasons. We’ve seen what happened to newspapers. And then the same thing happened to magazines (more or less). The future of periodical publishing in print is between challenging and bleak.
May 30th, 2017
…with good luck, not with a solid strategy. So writes Sam Missingham in an astute article published yesterday, called “Print sales might be rallying, but don’t get complacent.” It should to be read by the management of every traditional publishing company.
May 22nd, 2017
Self-publishing has an ill-deserved reputation for being easy. Sure, you can take a bad manuscript in a Microsoft Word file, skip editing, design your own cover, and upload the mess to Amazon. That’s easy. Doing it well, doing it successfully, is damned difficult. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Though when it works, it can…
March 30th, 2017
A few weeks ago AuthorEarnings released their latest book industry report. As always, there’s a lot of important information to grapple with—this time, even the title takes some wrangling: February 2017 Big, Bad, Wide & International Report: covering Amazon, Apple, B&N, and Kobo ebook sales in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. The…
December 22nd, 2016
I’ve become intrigued with the intersection of book publishing and machine learning, text mining, natural language processing and the like: technologies that get lumped under the rubric of artificial intelligence. Cliff Guren, who runs the publishing consultancy Syntopical, is emerging as one of the book publishing industry’s top specialists in this area. I thought it…