I hope it is a mistaken impression — it certainly isn’t scientifically arrived at — but I have the feeling that there is widespread sentiment among self-published writers opposing publishers’ attempts through the agency model to keep ebook prices up. I have said before that I think agency pricing has, in many ways, saved the […]
Archives for August 2011
John Locke and S&S show us another kind of deal we can expect to see again
OK, now we know another new paradigm for book publishing in the digital age with the announcement of self-publishing author John Locke’s new deal for print distribution with Simon & Schuster. The big publishers have said for a while now that they won’t be signing up books for print rights only. That makes sense, up […]
Tim Ferriss’s deal with Amazon is both an outlier and a harbinger
News of the 7-figure Tim Ferriss deal with Amazon that hit the news this (Wednesday) morning must have leaked out to the press yesterday (Tuesday) because I got a call from a reporter asking for comment on Amazon’s “big new hardcover” book deal. The question confused me yesterday, but seeing the announcement about Ferriss today […]
If you like irony, you must love the publishing world of today
Anybody who doesn’t find the publishing business interesting in its time of digital change is simply not paying close enough attention. No matter what story we’re focused on, scratch the surface (or scratch your head) and you find you are pondering something else. This was a week for the press to be asking me (and […]
Will print and ebook publishers ultimately be doing the same books?
Recent performance reports from Simon & Schuster and Penguin, which can be taken as indicative in some ways of what’s going on at the rest of the Big Six and instructive about what’s happening across trade publishing, say that revenue is flat or down, profits are up, and the ebook share of revenue is growing. […]