ebooks
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How to Market Your Book as a Product Without Feeling Guilty
When it comes to the word “marketing,” writers get squeamish. Call our books a “product,” and you’re likely to catch a fist to the face. Okay, maybe not a fist. But at least a curled nose and some whispered muttering about the evils of capitalism. Well, unfortunately for your sense of social justice, capitalism is…
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How A Sci-Fi Magazine Uses Facebook to Sell Issues
When authors talk about promoting their books, the “S” word isn’t far behind. Everyone knows social media is important for writers in some abstract context, but they’re not sure how it actually works. That includes me. I’ve tried investigating it all month, first by interviewing author Holly Robinson about how she uses Twitter. Then, by taking…
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The Future of Books (Calm Down Edition)
Let’s talk about the future of books by stating the obvious: books take a long time to write. In fact, per hour, I think they’re definitely one of the top most time-consuming forms of art. Writing a book in a year is considered almost a heroic effort. Two, three years, well, that’s about normal. A…
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What We Can Learn From France and Google’s War Over Free Content
There’s a territorial dispute afoot, have you heard about it? French newspaper publishers have accused Google of deterring would-be readers by displaying the first sentences of an article in “Google News.” The working theory is that, rather than clicking into the website for the full article, readers graze and move on, like information-hungry cows wandering…
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When You Can’t Just Make Art for Art’s Sake
My last blog post, which talked about the merger between Penguin and Random House, reminded me of an important lesson that, as someone who enjoys the notion of “being creative,” I shouldn’t have forgotten. On the internet, you can’t make art for art’s sake. If you do, that’s more or less assuming that your art…
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What the Penguin & Random House Merger Means for Authors
For the past few years, authors have kind of looked on in dismay as publishing houses like Penguin and Random House lumbered like dinosaurs underneath the growing shadow of the meteoric threat known as ebooks. I was – and continue to be – part of that group, so I was proud to hear of the…
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eBooks: The Future of Writing, Once Everyone Gets Over It
Reading Time: ~5 minutes When the Kindle first came out, I remember a distinct feeling as my heart sunk into a swamp of pessimism. This is it, I thought. I am an English major, an aspiring novelist, a “writer,” at literally the worst time in American history of the world to be one. In other…
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