January 9th, 2018
Over the holidays I received an inquiry from a journalist about book buying, was it more of an impulse or a plan. What’s the breakdown? Seemed like a simple enough question. From my studies on book buying I knew that the impulse percentage was fairly high, higher than many would expect. We want to think…
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…
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.