PW currently has a story on a forthcoming St. Martin’s book called “The Bestseller Code: Anatomy of The Blockbuster Novel” in which authors Jodie Archer and Matthew L. Jockers “claim they created an algorithm that identifies the literary elements that guarantee a book a spot on the bestseller lists.” As readers of The Shatzkin Files know, […]
Two pieces of news last week that foretell changes in the ebook marketplace
Two pieces of news this past week and how things play out with them might foretell some things about the direction of the ebook market. One news item is that reading on phones is really taking off. More than half of ebook consumers use their phones at least some of the time and the number that […]
The publishing business as we have known it is not going away anytime soon
Regular readers, please pardon me for the unusual length of this post, but it covers a lot of ground that I think is necessary to make the point. A friend who has actually been working fulltime in the book business since I was still in college and who remains active was speculating at BEA about […]
All the Amazon-Hachette coverage doesn’t seem to cover some important causes and implications
A great deal has been written in many venues about the current tussle between dominant Internet retailer Amazon and one of the three smallest of book publishing’s Big Five general trade houses, Hachette Book Group. Although neither side has been particularly explicit about the precise points of contention, both what I read and what I […]
Inevitable consequences follow from the new hierarchy of power among publishers
The current very public battle over trading terms taking place between Hachette Book Group and Amazon has brought forth surprisingly few recollections by those reporting it (an exception here) of a similar fight last summer between Simon & Schuster and Barnes & Noble. This is publishing’s near-term future. The two most powerful channels that deliver books […]