Publishing News

Friday News: Amazon responds to its customers and creates a New Adult category; Big Book to Movie Flops; Diddy in Downton Abbey?

Amazon.com: New Adult & College: Kindle Store – Amazon rolled out a few new categories to its bookstore yesterday including New Adult & College and Sports filed under Romance. I think this is a great start and I’m glad to see Amazon move away from the BISAC codes to be more responsive to the consumers. (…)

Thursday News: Apple withheld app approval from Random House says DOJ; Self published book shortlisted for Commonwealth prize; Trade sales up because of ebooks

Annoying song but fun music video using animated romance covers. Pretty interesting how they manipulated the photos to animate them. U.S. Now Paints Apple as ‘Ringmaster’ in Its Lawsuit on E-Book Price-Fixing – Apple is the only party left standing in the DOJ’s lawsuit over price fixing. Emails alluded to in filings from the DOJ(…)

Wednesday News: Google to launch Spotify competitor; Canadian writer’s union struggles with self published authors

Wednesday News: Google to launch Spotify competitor; Canadian writer’s union struggles with self published authors

Exclusive: Google readies its Spotify competitor with Universal and Sony now on board | The Verge – Today you should be hearing the news that Google is launching a streaming music service and has licensing deals with Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. This will be an additional service to round out(…)

Tuesday News: Pre order for free content now a *thing* for HarperCollins; Amazon buys screen tech company; Young blood can keep old people young (be warned young people)

Pre-order for free content – Divisions of HarperCollins are experimenting with publicity stunts designed to drive up pre orders. With three of their upcoming titles (or at least three that I’ve noticed), HC has promised to release certain unpublished writings (a certain scene from a different POV or in James’ case, a short novella) if(…)

Monday News: Mark Coker of Smashwords suggests that $3.99 is the new black; Copyright reform for consumers introduced to Congress; Gender hypocrisy exists outside romance

Smashwords: New Smashwords Survey Helps Authors Sell More eBooks – Mark Coker shares some Smashwords data with the public. How much of this can be extrapolated to overall sales is unknown. Some interesting points include that the #1 bestselling book outsells the #500 by 37 times in total revenue; longer books sell better; and $2.99(…)

Friday News:3D Gun made;Teenage lady coder solves everyone’s Twitter problems; MS may want to buy Nook Media

Friday News:3D Gun made;Teenage lady coder solves everyone’s Twitter problems; MS may want to buy Nook Media

BBC News – Downloads for 3D-printed Liberator gun reach 100,000 – So last year I started writing about 3D printing and in October, someone posited that guns would soon be built with a push of a button and how difficult that would be to police.  BBC News Some of you thought this was so far(…)

Thursday News: Library experiments; Book blog pinterest; bearded guitar playing men

Thursday News: Library experiments; Book blog pinterest; bearded guitar playing men

Library eBooks: The Role of Libraries in the Book Discovery Process – Sourcebooks in conjunction with The Library Journal is running an experiment to analyze how readers discover books through the library. It’s an admirable project although I’m not sure exactly whether any positive results will be duplicated.  Libraries will agree to do a large-scale(…)

Wednesday News: Authors should keep readers informed; Measuring the likelihood Google will kill your favorite app; Internet sales tax soon to become a law

Authors, Please Share Your Intentions – May at SmexyBooks wrote how she wished more authors would help in setting reader expectations. Being upfront about what you intend to do not only makes me happy from a “I have the insider scoop” standpoint, but it also lessens the chance that I’m going to one day be(…)

Tuesday News: Youtube premium channels close to launching and reduced priced Nook HDs

Big Bird, Caillou and Sonic could be part of YouTube’s subscription slate – Youtube is likely to be soon launching premium Youtube channels. If you run into a channel with a $ sign, it probably means that you’ll have to pay for that content in the future. Right now, signs point toward offering kids programs.(…)

Monday News: Amazon App adds accessibility features; Nook adds Google Play; Graphic Novels at libraries increasing

Revenge porn victim speaks about years of torment after ex-boyfriend put X-rated photos of her online – The article isn’t so much the story for me. Instead it was the comments that blamed the victim for her ex boyfriend’s callous vindictiveness. Holly dated a man, sent him provocative pictures. When he broke up with her,(…)

Friday News: B&N and S&S standoff doesn’t appear to be hurting S&S; AAR Lynn Spencer notices a decline in historicals; Cover Cafe Annual Contest is now on!  Go Vote!

Friday News: B&N and S&S standoff doesn’t appear to be hurting S&S; AAR Lynn Spencer notices a decline in historicals; Cover Cafe Annual Contest is now on! Go Vote!

Simon & Schuster Overcomes BN Issues with Rising Profits and Small Sales Drop | Publishers Lunch – B&N is still refusing to stock S&S books in large quantities but S&S’s position, according to PublishersMarketplace, hasn’t hurt them much. Ebooks accounted for 30% of post holiday sales in quarter one but the growth isn’t in adult(…)

Thursday News: Author Solutions subject to class action; HarperCollins launches a digital first imprint for mysteries

HarperCollins to launch digital-first mystery imprint, with monthly royalty payments – The idea of no advance in a traditional publishing world is really groundbreaking outside of romance. Yet HarperCollins is going to do this for mystery books. “HarperCollins’ William Morrow division will launch Witness, a digital-first imprint for mysteries and thrillers, this October, the company(…)

Wednesday News: On-demand marketing; Tennessee most romance reader oriented; and discrimination toward female authors, again

The coming era of ‘on-demand’ marketing – Don Linn tweeted this link out. The article describes the movement toward on demand access by consumers to all things and how marketing has to evolve to meet that. For businesses that rely on brick and mortar stores, this line may be chilling: An executive of one major(…)

Tuesday News:

Tuesday News:

Macmillan Finalizes E-book Settlement, Will Pay $26 Million – Macmillan has agreed to pay $20 million toward the refund pool along with attorneys’ fees and $1000 to the named plaintiffs as a “service award”. The settlement will be up for approval after a period of public comment. Publishers Weekly Why Still So Few Use Condoms(…)

Monday News: Fan wars and Amazon’s attempt to disrupt cloud storage

Amazon is going to do to enterprise cloud companies exactly what it did to book stores – I was contacted by a company a while back offering cloud based storage at costs that seemed to good to be true. I asked them how they were doing this and they replied Amazon Cloud storage. I really(…)