For Writers
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Net Neutrality’s Meaning for Bloggers, Writers, and Musicians
Last week, the FCC struck down something called “net neutrality.” You might have seen headlines and decided it was boring. Maybe, for a little while, you were curious about the ruling’s meaning. No one really knows how things are going to work in a post net-neutrality world. But there are a lot of alarm bells…
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How to Use a Blog to Sell Your Book
The government shutdown is over. For now. After so much productive and rigorous hashtagging on Twitter, complaints on Facebook, and half-plagiarised news articles looking for traffic, our representatives had no choice but to start funding things again. And agree to fund the things they passed this year already. During that time – while I was…
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Why You Didn’t Get Any Sales from Your KDP Select Promotion
You wrote the book. You did the research. You got a cover. Finally, you formatted the thing for Amazon Kindle and decided to try KDP Select. Gleefully, you set up the promotion and let ‘er whirl. You scaled your expectations accordingly. “Maybe a dozen sales, not more… but, you know, maybe it’s the next Fifty…
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Keep in Mind: 59% of Readers Don’t Care About eBooks
Ebook sales have slowed down. Flattened. Softened. Whatever word you want to call it. Worldwide sales for the first quarter this year? They declined. Over at Rough Type, Nicholas Carr speculated a little bit about why eBook sales have so abruptly become steady, rather than revolutionary. Specifically, he brought up the iPad. I’ve thought about the indirect…
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Amazon is Not Waging a “War” Against Books
Amazon is waging a war against “bookstores” and “book culture.” According to a new article from Salon, anyway. Well, if Amazon is at war, I guess I’m a soldier. Of the last three books I’ve bought, two have been through Amazon, for my smartphone. Why? Because they’re obscure business books that I was confident I…
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J.K. Rowling and the New Author’s Discoverability Problem
By now, anyone in the literary world… who reads Internet News… has learned that J.K. Rowling released a novel about four months ago under a man’s name. Robert Galbraith, to be exact. The book, The Cuckoo’s Calling, sold a whopping 1,500 copies in four months. Meanwhile, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, by contrast, sold 8.3 million…
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What Amazon’s Win Against Apple (Really) Means for Books
So, recently, the federal court in New York ruled that Apple played a “central role” in fixing eBook prices with publishers. The goal was to keep the cost of an eBook at $12.99, instead of $9.99. This has ushered in a wave of speculation about the future of both pricing and print books and eBooks.…
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