Behold, my friends, the latest storm of idiocy striking the heart of the traditional publishing industry. I present to you Exhibit A, the announcement of a new YA novel called The Cruelty bought for six figures and sold in umpteen territories and a movie deal and......
Further Adventures in Book Binding
I decided to try out the Coptic stitch binding, and here's the result! The first notebook is tiny - maybe 3 inches by 5 inches. I made the covers from cardboard, duct tape, and an old paper gift bag. The stitching is some spare hemp cord that got hilariously tangled...
Adventures in Bookbinding
Today, I bound my first book! As you may know, I am somewhat craft-inclined, and it seems that book binding is a perfect choice of hobby for a writer. It's a really interesting thing to do and there are dozens of different ways to bind books. I followed an...
Who You Write For
I watched a video on Youtube today from the PBS Game/Show channel about crowdfunding, and the obligations of creators to the consumers of what they create. Crowdfunding causes users to be invested in the successful creation of media. The rise of Patreon.com and other...
More about Pay to Play Publishers
A while back, I wrote about Tate Publishing, a subsidy publisher that had been in the news as a result of some... rather callous business practices. I think it's a good time to revisit publishers like these in light of a recent comment on that post. (For the...
Exotic Ebook Formatting
You may have noticed that I finally got my act together and cleaned up the website. My friend Fay was nice enough to lend me one of her themes! I did some edits on it, and I think it came out okay. Being a web designer, my site is always a work in progress. Anyway -...
HarperCollins UK Boss Outs Self As Being Hilariously, Wilfully Blind
The Passive Voice brought this story to my attention today - HarperCollins UK boss tells publishers: take storytelling back from digital rivals. There are some choice quotes from this particular article that I simply must post here... Publishers have allowed...
Kobo Release Another Statement about the Purge
Guess what just landed in my inbox? Seems that Michael Tamblyn, the CCO of Kobo, is still feeling the heat from that pesky purge where they decided to rip every self-published book out of their ebook store, while leaving traditionally published titles alone. Here's...
Why Traditional Publishing Will Fail
With the merger of Penguin and Random House, we now have Random Penguin, a mega-corp that represents about half of the traditional publishing industry. The question now is where do they go from here? How do they, and the other four big publishers, take control back...
Career Control
Sometimes, I read about a particular aspect of the traditional publishing world, and I ask myself one question: would this kind of thing fly in any other industry? Most of the time, the answer is no. So here's a post from Rachelle Gardner that asks another, rather...
Hachette’s Price Hike
I can, of course, understand the need for businesses to protect their revenue streams. What I cannot understand, and likely never will, is when a business chooses a short term high revenue stream instead of a longer term low revenue stream that will be more beneficial...
So You Just Want to Write
I've heard and read this a few times. It's what every author wants, isn't it? They just want to write. There's so much work involved in getting a book to market, work that cuts into writing time. Handing it off to a publisher - or overpaying an outfit like AuthorHouse...