“There must be something in the water at Amazon.com, given its commitment to price-cutting whatever the short-term pain,” remarks Martin Peers in a Wall Street Journal report. He explains that “The retailer’s decision to introduce a new, cheaper Kindle, just weeks after slashing the price…
Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie must be back from vacation — according to a Financial Times report he’s issued a new threat: “a broad expansion of his digital publishing business to include up to 2,000 titles if traditional publishers refuse to improve digital royalties.” According to…
Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. It has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really…
The news seems bleaker than usual these days, observes Jessa Crispin a her newest column for PBS, “Bright Books for Dark Times.” Worse: “It’s not just that the news is bleak, it’s the powerlessness that everyone feels. When it’s a torrent of oil spilling into…
Matthew Honan holds A.J. Jacobs responsible for the rise of “stunt books” — “like when you read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica and wrote about it in your best-selling book The Know-It-All.” And then there was Jacobs’ The Year of Living Biblically (“about your attempt to…
For those of you who don’t know it, there’s a great podcast that comes out of San Francisco’s NPR affiliate KQED called Writers’ Block. It’s a weekly reading series with a little bit of everything — and we mean everything. Junot Diaz, John Waters, Audrey…
How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since? This series takes an ongoing, insider’s look at the campaign to get…
“Three iPad users claim that because the iPad will shut itself off after remaining in direct sunlight for long enough, it fails to meet the promises Apple made about using the iPad as an e-book reader. The group has filed a federal class-action lawsuit in…
Everyone seems to have shut up about the Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie – Odyssey Editions – Amazon brouhaha, but there was one new, eloquent statement about it all yesterday, from American Booksellers Association head Oren Teicher, posted at the ABA’s Bookselling This Week: The issues…
Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. It has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really…
Blonde and Wet, the Complete Story was the top-ranked ebook on the iPad‘s top-ten bestseller list Tuesday morning, reports Heidi Blake in a Telegraph story. Three other erotic novels were also on the list. By day’s end they’d all disappeared. According to the Telegraph, “analysts…
For those who have always puzzled over heavy metal bands’ umlaut obsession, Michael Schaub at Bookslut points us to this illuminating Wikipedia link for your delectation: A metal umlaut (also known as röck döts) is an umlaut mark that is sometimes used gratuitously or decoratively…
How do you market a book written in a foreign language by an author who’s now dead, that was originally published 60 years ago, and has been overlooked by mainstream publishing ever since? This series takes an ongoing, insider’s look at the campaign to get…
Don’t count him out yet: Cuba’s Fidel Castro, long considered at death’s door, has announced that he is publishing a new book. According to this CNN report, Castro will “publish a new book in August on the fighting more than 50 years ago between his…
The Andrew Wylie / Odyssey Books / Amazon / Random House story took an ugly turn yesterday when two different hashtags popped up on Twitter: @EvilWylie and @GoodRandomHouse. Among their first posts: “Sizzling summer deals! Evil Wylie just posted e-book rights to Philip Roth’s backlist…
Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. It has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really…
Today is the birthday of the great English poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, born on this day in 1844 in Stratford, Essex, England. Raised Anglican, in an artistic and prosperous home, he studied classics at Balliol College, Oxford. Hopkins converted to Catholicism in 1866, and he…
… or, rather, are teeth. British artist James Hopkins uses shelves and the things you put on them (like books! actual books!) to create his art. Try doing that with an e-book!
Fall-out from the announcement of the exclusive deal between Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie‘s new Odyssey Editions and Amazon.com continued unabated Monday. Things kicked off with a typically blithe, anti-publishing statement from the Authors Guild, saying “publishers have brought this on themselves” by paying “bargain-basement e-book…
Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. It has always been our belief that it would take a network of smaller champions across the nation for this book to really…
Is it possible to have second-hand ebooks? Maybe sorta, says Nick Harkaway in a story on Futurebook. “It does sound a bit like a bad gag or a swindle,” he notes, because “What’s actually happening, of course, is not the transfer of a physical object,…
Emperor Palpatine Pope Benedict XVI has published his first children’s book! The pope, apparently already an author of many volumes, has taken it upon himself to educate young ones about his religion. Maybe entice them to get into it a bit more. Granted, I can’t…
“Thanks to the Chicago Public Library and an outpouring of public support, Gabriel Levinson and his ‘Book Bike‘ win an unexpected battle with City Hall,” according to this post on the Tonic website. For those of you who don’t know, the Book Bike is a…
Fans of Tao Lin probably know that his 2009 novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, while fiction, was inspired by the fact that he was indeed arrested for shoplifting from an American Apparel store — and also for shoplifting from the New York University bookstore. The…
Perhaps the key component of our word of mouth marketing strategy for Every Man Dies Alone has been outreach to indie booksellers. Not that chain retailers haven’t turned out to be equally important to the success of the book. Indeed, Borders was the first to…
Last week Melville House debut author Lee Rourke celebrated the publication of his book The Canal in his adopted hometown of London, with a packed (and hot) party at the To Hell With Publishing bookstore. Meanwhile Lee has been picking up speed both online and…
“As the dust settles after all the to-ing and fro-ing over Kafka‘s papers,” observes Michael Rosen in a thoughtful report for the Guardian, “it seems a good time to ask some questions about who, exactly, owns literature.” Yes, it’s another provocative moment in our recently…
In a brilliantly provocative essay for the New Republic, Ruth Franklin describes a poetry reading she went to recently where poet Amelia Gray “took the stage and announced with a demure smile that she was going to read some ‘threats.’ As Franklin relates, Some were…
It was a fun day in the book world yesterday. First, the man everybody loves to hate, and with good reason, superagent Andrew “The Jackal” Wylie, shocked big publishing when he announced he’d formed his own publishing company, Odyssey Editions, to publish ebook version of…
First, in 2002, the Canadian government allowed Amazon.com to operate in Canada despite protectionist laws against foreign ownership that clearly indicated they shouldn’t, and despite vociferous protests from Canadian booksellers. Then the Canadian government decided to allow Amazon to operate its own distribution warehouses in…
