As the year draws to a close, numerous publications, blogs, and authors are beginning to take stock, heave a sigh, and wonder if next year will be the same rollercoaster ride as this year has been. One of the best posts I’ve come across so far is here, where Anne R. Allen gives a neat overview, delivered in an accessible and enjoyable tone, of the many recent and rapid changes. While I’m no fan of the word “dynamic”, it is difficult to think of a more appropriate word to describe events in the two main parts of the same publishing industry: Mainstream and Indie. Continue reading “Indie News Beat:
Is the Glass Half Empty or Half Full?”
Category: Indie News Beat
Our Indie correspondent from Poland, Chris James,keeps you up to date with Indie news from around the world.
Indie News Beat:
Indie News Beat: Amazon is Redefining Ownership
With a ubiquitous presence, sky-high brand recognition, and customer-first ethos, it’s been a while since “Amazon” only referred to a geographical feature, and the adjective “Amazonian” used to mean a certain type of woman.
If you’re an Independent Author, you’ve either got your stuff on Amazon or you’ve got it nowhere. So when Amazon changes the way it does business, we all need to sit up and take notice. After the hullabaloo with sock-puppet reviews this summer, over the last few weeks a number of authors suddenly noticed reviews going missing from their book pages on Amazon. This led to emails and calls and questions, but one of the first hard-and-fast pieces of evidence to turn up in the media was here, where Amazon sent an email to an author confirming deletion of his reviews of another author’s book because, in Amazon’s opinion, there is “competition” between the two authors, which thus breaches Amazon’s rules. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Amazon is Redefining Ownership”
Indie News Beat: All the Fun of Frankfurt
The Frankfurt Book Fair is one of the highest-profile fairs on the calendar. But now it’s been a few years since the meteorite of self-publishing hit the world of books, just how well are the mainstream dinosaurs coping with avoiding extinction?
Finally, they appear to be accepting that Indie Authors are here to stay. Writing for paidcontent, the interestingly-named Laura Hazard Owen began her report with the book-with-the-unmentionable-title, which, somewhat worryingly, is being held up as the perfect example of the self-published goldmines that potentially await the mainstreams. Of course, now that E. L. James’s trilogy is rumoured to have sold over 50 million copies, big-hitting mainstream people are lining up to point out that she couldn’t have done it without them, and that thanks to Random House, her “relatively modest success” was turned into a “maelstrom of money”. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: All the Fun of Frankfurt”
Indie News Beat with Chris James
The big publishing story over the last few weeks has undoubtedly been the sock-puppet scandal. First broken by the New York Times, suddenly we were drowning in stories, articles and opinions from it seemed everyone in publishing. But just as suddenly as the elephant in the room was acknowledged, so it disappeared.
The general outrage that a few bad apples in the Indie movement would actually pay for multiple, glowing reviews on Amazon, soon diffused when stories appeared reporting that some mainstream authors were also not averse to puffing their own work, while sticking the knife into their competitors. Likely the mainstream authors will suffer more in the short term, given their higher profile, but all this summer flurry really did was draw more attention to the intense competition on Amazon, and the shortfalls of its rating and review system. Continue reading “Indie News Beat with Chris James”