August 1st, 2016
This post examines the latest quarterly financial reports from the big 5 book publishers and tries to draw some conclusions from the data. The big 5 are, of course, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster. These companies are often seen as emblematic of the state of traditional trade book publishing in the…
March 1st, 2016
Catching up on my industry reading I’m facing the large effort required to try to digest the latest Author Earnings report and then wading into the vast cesspool of vitriol it engenders.
January 27th, 2016
“Reading comprehension,” Wikipedia tells us “is the ability to read text, process it and understand its meaning” (emphasis mine). I remember in Grade 5 at St. Anselm’s School when Mrs. Webber introduced our class to SRA cards, a ground-breaking reading comprehension game that help teach kids that reading wasn’t just mouthing the words and stringing the…
January 18th, 2016
It’s a great and timely idea: “Five-Minute Manifestos” for the future of the book business. Philip Jones, editor of the UK’s The Bookseller started the project as a lead-up to last December’s FutureBook Conference in London. But publication has continued since the conference. Jones first outlined the goals of the series in Those Magnificent Manifestos. Porter Anderson is serving as the…
October 1st, 2015
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.