Friday News: Jane’s New Contributions to BNReview; Amazon sales up, profit down

JanePublishing NewsAbout-Us / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / ebook-conversion11 Comments

This is a video of a number of authors on the subject of sex in books: Erica Jong on writing about sex as a way of finding answers, Lawrence Block on the definition of erotica, Patricia Gaffney on historical romances, Suzanne Forster on the importance of sexual tension, and Eileen Goudge on the eighty-year-old woman who told her, “If I can’t do it, I want to read about it.”

Jane’s New Gig – A couple of month’s ago I was invited to contribute to bnreview.com. This is BN’s review/literary webzine. BN wanted to branch out to more genre readers (although they do have Eloisa James who contributes monthly). Once a week I will be providing a recommendation, sometimes of new releases and sometimes of backlist titles, in the romance genre. The column is called Feed The Reader. Dear Author

Sales Soar, Earnings Fall At Amazon – “Total sales at Amazon rose 29% in the second quarter ended June 30, rising to $12.83 billion, while operating income fell to $107 million from $201 million in last year’s second quarter. … North America media sales increased 18% in the quarter, to $1.87 billion, while electronics and other general merchandise jumped 41%, to $4.94 billion. Media sales include all digital content while egm includes all Kindle devices. Worldwide media sales rose 13%, to $4.12 billion, while egm sales increased 38% to $8.16 billion” PW

Additionally 20% of Kindle bestsellers are from the KDP program.

SIMBA Information’s Michael Norris on bookstores and showrooming – Norris recommends “every retailer who does sell ebooks to buy one of their own ebooks and then buy the same or similar ebook from Amazon, then think outside of themselves and about what kind of experience is going to make people come back. “ Book Business Mag

Here are a couple of great new tools on the internet:

Calc.exe Is Dead, Long Live Google’s Calculator – “Google’s search-based calculator is a bit of a God-send when it comes to impromptu math, but now the Big G has gone and extended its functionality by rolling out a full-on, 34-button scientific calculator”  Gizmodo

Convert Word Documents to Clean HTML – “Word to clean HTML is a free converter tool for documents produced by Microsoft Word and similar office software. Word to clean HTML strips out invalid or proprietry tags, leaving clean HTML behind for use in web pages and ebooks.” Fabulous Word2CleanHtml

Jane

Jane Litte is the founder of Dear Author, a lawyer, and a lover of pencil skirts. She self publishes NA and contemporaries (and publishes with Berkley and Montlake) and spends her downtime reading romances and writing about them. Her TBR pile is much larger than the one shown in the picture and not as pretty. You can reach Jane by email at jane @ dearauthor dot com

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