Amazon
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Hachette v. Amazon: Whose Fault Is It, Anyway?
If you’ve paid any attention to the book industry, you’ll know by now that Hachette and Amazon are locked in some kind of pricing battle. The details aren’t that well known, but the strategy is: Amazon disabled the pre-order option for Hachette books, discounts have vanished and some authors have gone completely unlisted. Meanwhile, Hachette…
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Innovation & Stagnation in the Traditonal Publishing Industry
The Tribune Company did something that surprised me the other day: it released a new product. An app, to be specific. Newsbeat converts newspapers into audio, so people can listen to them in the car, on their iPhone and in various other Mobile scenarios. Aside from Tribune newspapers like The Los Angeles Times, Newsbeat will…
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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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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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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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Publishers Are Actually Getting Excited About eBooks
The general grumbling from book publishers and bookstores alike is that the whole eBook format is going to destroy them. Smart-mouthed, tech savvy people who like Disruption are quick to agree. They call publishers “dinosaurs” who don’t get it, and other mean things. Really, publishers are trying to get quality books into the hands of…
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The Future of eBooks: Werewolf Love Stories, 3 for a Dollar
Sometimes, I like to do market research about eBooks by acting like someone looking for deals. I did that the other day and the first challenge, as usual, was finding out where I could actually find eBooks on Amazon. They don’t make it as easy as it should be… but I don’t think Amazon is that…
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How Amazon is Trying to Rescue Literary Fiction
Who’s going to save literary fiction? Prominent agents have said that big publishers these days are just focused on pushing out blockbuster titles. You know, things that will sell millions. That leaves self-proclaimed “literary authors” that write “literary fiction” biting their nails. But never fear, literary authors… Amazon is here. That’s right – the online…
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Is KDP Select Worth It? (An Example From a Real Person)
Amazon’s KDP Select program has kind of been marketed as a Miracle Grow for Books. It seems that, whenever you Google something about KDP Select, you run into another article boasting about authors who got rich and famous from just using KDP Select and barely marketing their book at all. Like a lot of authors who are…