It is customary for those of us who do crystal-ball gazing to make some calls about the year ahead at around the time the celebrants head for Times Square. I am not a man to flout custom. Here are some of the things I expect we’ll see in 2010. 1. At least one major book […]
Literary agents and the changing world of trade publishing
who can see the digital book possibilities in every idea before you peddle it. I had a lunch conversation this week with three successful literary agents, who will remain anonymous for this post. They wanted to talk about the panel we’re having at Digital Book World called “The Changing Author-Agent Relationship: How Will It Affect the […]
The new Thomas Nelson self-publishing initiative; more questions than answers
The announcement was made earlier this week through the Wall Street Journal and the blog of the publisher’s CEO, Michael Hyatt, that one of the giants of Christian publishing, Thomas Nelson, will be publishing a new list under an imprint to be called WestBow Press. The books will come from Author Solutions, the provider of […]
What advice do you give a writer?
Because I am giving a keynote talk at the Writer’s Digest Conference in New York on September 18, I am thinking about “what do you tell a writer about digital change in publishing?” The view of the media world that I proselytize, which is that it is “going vertical”, is hard to accept if you […]
More evidence that the general trade business is getting harder
The shift from horizontal paths to audiences to vertical ones is a hard concept for people who have grown up in book publishing to accept. Most resistant, judging from the questions I get when I talk to book publishing audiences, are those who see book publishing as being about “writerly” books: “non-genre” fiction, belles lettres, […]