The New York Times carried a story on the front page of its Friday Business section about a book. This book is a novel entitled (appropriately for this piece) “The Big Disruption” by Jessica Powell. Of course, it is about Silicon Valley, which explains its positioning and why Times columist Farhad Manjoo was interested enough […]
Words-to-be-read are losing ground to words-to-be-heard, a new stage of digital content evolution
“Words-to-be-read” must now become a content category, along with still images, video, and audio. Audio includes “words-to-be-heard”. We are in what must be the early stages of a reordering of primacy among these varieties of “content for delivery and consumption”, which is distinguished from “content for interaction”, or the world of “gamified content” along with […]
Lots of Spanish speakers in the United States, but not so much of a book market for Spanish books
Somebody somewhere reported last month that the United States is the home country to the second largest number of Spanish-speakers in the world, after Mexico. Since I am speaking in Madrid to Spanish publishers at the end of May, that seemed like something I should learn more about. The US must be a market. The […]
In an indie-dominant world, what happens to the high-cost non-fiction?
I first learned and wrote about Hugh Howey about four years ago. At the time, he was one of the first real breakthrough successes as an indie author, making tens of thousands of dollars a month exclusively through Amazon for his self-published futurist novel, “Wool”. As soon as I could track him down, I invited […]
Agents who come to Digital Book World will learn a lot they can immediately apply
The mission of the Digital Book World conference is industry education around digital change. There is a plethora of programming for this year’s event that will serve that purpose particularly well for literary agents. Of all the people in the industry, it would seem to me that agents would get the fastest and surest “return […]