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, […]
Ebook growth explosive; serious disruptions around the corner
The news about trade ebook sales growth continues apace. The IDPF has just said that sales in June 2009 were up 136% over June a year ago. Calendar year sales to date are up about 150% over 2008. Anecdotal information from big trade houses suggests that ebook sales are approaching 3% of total sales. But […]
Aside from the publishers: how the other stakeholders fare as ebook adoption continues
In three prior posts, we’ve explored the initial conversation that surrounded the announcement that Sourcebooks would delay the ebook release of Bran Hambric; sketched out what we think are the four stages of ebook adoption; and looked at how publishers see the early “establishment” stage, which is where we are now. This post is about the […]