Dear Author: Romance Novel Reviews, Industry News, and Commentary

Google announced a deal last week with Espresso Book Machine wherein the full panoply of out of copyright books Google has scanned and digitized can be available through the POD machines.  The books can be printed in less than five minutes. The suggested retail price for such a book is $8.00.  Maybe publishers want to [...]

276,649 new titles and editions were printed in 2007 which is a 1% increase over the previous year. Print on Demand books increased from 21,936 titles to 134,773 titles per year. It’s no wonder that Amazon is flexing its market power with requiring POD authors and publishers to use its own POD service, [...]

SB Sarah posted about the new antitrust lawsuit filed by publisher Booklocker against Amazon. Booklocker is asking for class action status. The suit alleges an unlawful tying arrangement between Amazon’s bookstore and Amazon’s printing arm (Booksurge).
We discussed a tying suit briefly in the comments when the news of Amazon’s requirement to use its [...]

In an act that will endear authors to Indiana in spite of its recent “sex registry for booksellers” law, the Indiana Attorney General is suing publisher, Airleaf aka Bookman Marketing, for accepting payment of authors and not delivering the promised services from publication to promotional services. The owner is Carl Lau and it looks [...]

Writing has been said to be a lonely endeavor. WEbook, a Maryland company, aims to put an end to that by publishing collaborative books. It’s first publication is “a 58-chapter thriller called ‘Pandora,’ was written by 17 people and will hit shelves next week.”
The collaborations are done online and the works [...]

So, this Amazon thing. It sounds bad. For those who might have missed it, Amazon decided to stop stocking Print on Demand books that do not use Amazon’s own service, Booksurge. I’m not sure who falls under a Print on Demand service. I have always viewed PODs as any publisher who [...]

In what I like to think of as the “cock block” Amazon has said to self published authors that only those POD books that use Amazon’s POD service will be for sale through Amazon. Before, if you were a POD, you could have your books fulfilled by Lulu.com or any other POD service. [...]