Indie News Beat: Goodbye to eReaders?

Every journalist has to get an angle on the story, so the reader can relate to the subject and feel informed. But sometimes, the real story is not the one being written about.

Let me explain.

In this article on The Guardian, we have a fairly straightforward but misleading angle. The title of the story, ‘Print book sales rise hailed as a sign of a fight back in a digital world’, assumes that there is a battle going on, and that one type of book is bad, and another type of book is good. As this is The Guardian, there are no prizes for guessing which are the bad books. The story is misleading because it is based on seasonal figures: in a rare statistical turnaround, the UK Christmas sales rush saw many more print books sold than e-books, likely to be given as gifts, and the biggest sellers were TV tie-ins specific to the UK market. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Goodbye to eReaders?”

Indie News Beat: Christmas Edition

Whoooooosshhh!

“What was that?”

“That was 2012, that was.”

“What? And it’s gone – just like that?”

“Afraid so.”

“So what’s next?”

“Well, 2013, of course.”

“Oh, right. Will it go just as quickly as 2012?”

“Yes, so don’t oversleep, or blink, because you might miss it…” Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Christmas Edition”

Indie News Beat: Miami Dice

Sometimes you come across a press article which is written in such a way that it makes you wonder where the journalist has been living for the last five years. Then, a moment later, the thought hits you that maybe not everyone in the rest of the world is a self-publishing author like you (although it usually feels like everyone is).

We’re off to The Miami Herald this week, for one of those stories that starts as though it was written in 2007. However, get past the headline and first couple of paragraphs, and an interesting and sobering story emerges of self-publishing successes – and the potential for failure. Continue reading “Indie News Beat: Miami Dice”

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”