When you’re trying to figure out what will happen in the book publishing business in the years to come, any prediction depends on how things work out that are beyond the control of the business, and sometimes well outside it. This will be increasingly the case if the book business, in what has remained a […]
The disruption of the disruption is temporary
There’s little doubt that the digital (r)evolution, to the degree it is measured by the shift by consumers from reading on paper to reading on a screen, has plateaued, at least temporarily. The most recent article in PW on the subject spells out that some publishers have even seen their digital sales decline, although always […]
The book world keeps changing, so Digital Book World has to change too
This post invites you to help us shape the agenda for Digital Book World 2015. It was five years ago this summer that David Nussbaum and Sara Domville of F+W Media took me out to lunch and said they thought the book business could have a more useful digital conference — one, in their words, […]
When an author should self-publish and how that might change
There is a question that every agent and publisher is dealing with, because authors surely are. And that’s this: when should an author self- (or indie-) publish? The answer is certainly not “never”, and if there is anybody left in a publishing house who thinks it is, they should think a little harder. For a […]
Getting Mark Coker right this time and agreeing with him up to a point
On Tuesday, for the first time in the five years I have been writing this blog, I did a post I would like to take back. (But in the interest of the public record, and because there were several comments of value, I’m leaving it up.) This is the post that I should have written […]