Sramana Mitra writes in a recent article that an Amazon Monopoly that eliminates the editors, agents, distributors, and everyone else that stands between Amazon and the customer (other than the author) can actually improve publishing and increase the monetary benefit to the author. The suggestion is that by eliminating the middleman, it frees up [...]

The New York Times has an interesting article about technology and how it is helping many of us work smarter and faster in the workplace but for writers it just means a longer lag time between when they submit a book and when it finally gets published. Enter us humans. “We move too [...]

Movie sound tracks make very little money in the marketplace so Mark Cuban has an idea to make better use of the music. It takes a lot of cash to promote a movie so Mark wonders how many more people would go to the movie if they knew that their movie ticket stub [...]

moar funny pictures
I have to just give a plug for my dear friend, Tina Trevaskis, who is now the new Romance/Horror & Westerns Marketing Specialist at Borders Group Inc. Tina is a huge lover of romance. I met Tina over 7 years ago (I think) due to our mutual love of romance. [...]

In the UK, there is a a move toward including marketing materials with each book checked out from the library. In libraries in Essex, Somerset, Bromley, Leeds and Southend, up to 500,000 promotional flyers will be handed out to patrons. The solicitations will be placed on the inside cover [...]

In an interesting move, Adobe is giving away two major pieces of intellectual property away for free. Earlier this year, it released Premiere Express, an online video editor. Available at YouTube (known as YouTube Remixer), MTV.com and Photobucket, the video editor allows you to upload your video and use the program to cut [...]

Stephen King has been raving about Mischa Berlinski's debut novel, Fieldwork, but berating the publisher for chosing a terrible cover. King says the cover is akin to demanding people not buy the book. It’s hard to tell from the blurry trees that this is a thriller set in Thailand. It looks like, [...]

Borders CEO, George Jones, gave a far ranging interview with Shelf Awareness.

Publishers want Borders’s buyers to travel to NY to enhance relationships.
Wants to increase the customer average of $25 which is low compared to the amount of time spent in the store
Category management is de-emphasized.
Author branding is important.
Digital technology and the internet [...]

If there is anything that I have learned being online is that many, many authors are in need of a readership. Peter Watts, a critically aclaimed science fiction novelist, is giving his book away as a last ditch effort to rescue flagging sales. At least once a week, at All About Romance, readers [...]

The advertising firm of Spiers New York conducted a survey which revealed that 18% of readers have visited a publisher’s website and 23% have visited an author’s website. So, I guess if you don’t have an online presence, you may be missing out on giving nearly a quarter of your potential readership information on [...]

Alison Kent asked last week what Wendy, Superlibrarian thought was good promotion. Promotion is largely in the hands of authors, particularly new authors. I won’t begin to speculate on why publishers don’t spend more money on promotion. I have to guess that there simply is not a high enough return on investment to [...]

Dear Authors:
This past week readers have been talking websites and how we really like them. Author websites provide us with information on what is next, what you’ve written in the past and whether we will like your books if you are new to us. Essentially, they are an online sales brochure which help [...]