Deep in the dank, dark, steamy recesses of the internet, somewhere between stories about the latest celebrity antics and pictures of cute kittens, is the stuff that matters – the stuff we call news.
News started out as an acronym for Not Especially Well Scrutinized, and we hold fast to that proud tradition here at Indies Unlimited, bringing you the very finest news we could scrounge up on short notice.
Remember, there may be a test later, so here is some stuff you might want to know:
A lot of people are excited at the news that Writer’s Digest and Author Solutions have parted ways. Though what happens behind the corporate veil stays behind the corporate veil, I am less sanguine than some that this means Writer’s Digest suddenly saw the light. The reputation of Author Solutions was there to see (for anyone who cared to look) long before this unholy union took place. That did not deter WD or Random Penguin from partnership with them.
Random Penguin Solutions may have other problems, though. Big Ink, whose motto is We’re not dead yet, posted pretty flat book sales figures with declines in a number of key areas. Looks like textbooks are propping up the crumbling walls of the ink empire. What’s going to happen when the academic world goes digital?
In the meantime, the standoff between Amazon and Hachette continues, with Hachette continuing to argue from the morally superior position that Amazon should just pay them whatever Hachette says and never mind the profit margins. Here is a play in five parts that nicely sums up the conflict between Amazon and Big Ink publishing. You don’t want to miss that one.
Other people suspect Bezos is the villain in the whole affair, going so far as to speculate Amazon is going to chop the 70% royalty rate it currently pays. Even if that were true, the 35% royalty rate is still twice what most trad publishers pay. Whether Amazon pulls the trigger on that idea or not, supporting dinosaur publishers hardly seems the correct play.
That’s it for this edition of NewsBites. Join us next time, when we answer the question: Are the penguins really as random as they seem, or is there a pattern?
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