publishing
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An Interview with Alec Hutson on Self-Publishing, Fantasy, and the Book Industry
The battle has been going on for years now: traditional publishing vs. self-publishing. For fantasy and sci-fi, romance and young adult, a million different options are available to those brave enough to try. And whether you decide to traditionally publish or self-publish, getting your book discovered is a problem. Amazon has weird algorithms. Goodreads has merciless…
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The Big Bad Discovery Problem: How Is Anyone Going to Find Your Book?
At #FutureBook16, a conference based in London, authors, agents, publishers, and others converged to discuss the future of the book. Or, really, the future of publishing. Spoiler: the industry doesn’t think it’s that bright. In his keynote, Tim Healy Hutchinson Hachette UK said that the book market is in “secular decline.” The entire industry is…
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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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3 Ways to Measure Your Book’s Online Marketing Campaign
When it comes to online marketing, independent authors like to think they’re ahead of the curve. Social savvy, internet savvy, and savvy in other miscellaneous ways. But just because you made a Facebook Page and have a Twitter account doesn’t mean that they’re helping sell your eBook. Online marketing is a mysterious mix of luck…
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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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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…