A blog post on Satoriworks makes reference to an article in the New York Times and muses on the present state of the publishing industry.
Television stations have created online forums for viewers and may use the information there to make programming decisions. Game developers solicit input from users through virtual communities over the Internet. Airlines and hotels have developed increasingly sophisticated databases of customers.
Publishers, by contrast, put up Web sites where, in some cases, readers can sign up for announcements of new titles. But information rarely flows the other way — from readers back to the editors.
The blog post reminds us that there is room in the industry for a new business model, something outside of digital or print-on-demand. I think there remains a way to make publishing traditional printed books profitable.
Well, yes, I think we all agree. But the question remains, how do you stop a runaway train and turn it around?
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A taster:
If he had to date it, Richard pinpoints this Thursday as the day his marriage was finally over. Even though he and Mary Jo went through the form of apologizing, even though they had more than a few drinks and smoked a joint and had dislocated, impersonal sex, nothing got fixed. Mary Jo left [...]
The Hesperus Press Blog reports on the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize award ceremony, bemoaning the fact that only 86 titles were submitted for consideration.
I simply do not understand how a tiny company, as we and some notable others are, can say ‘what the hell: this is a damned sight more interesting, exciting, than Dan Brown, [...]
The following short notice has appeared on Steve Clackson’s blog, Sand Storm. No archives are available and it looks as though Steve has closed down and shut up the shop:
Goodbye - So Long and Fare Thee Well
Sometimes in life you have to come to terms with the realization that enough is enough. When your [...]
A piece in The Guardian describes a Columbian reception for Gabriel García Márquez for his eightieth birthday. He recounted “how his wife Mercedes had to hock her jewels to pay the rent and put food on the table for their two boys during the 18 months it took him to write what many consider the [...]
Girl Friday at The Friday Project squirms over the latest news on the front of publishers’ advances:
Over $4 million for a book by a man whose personal fortune stands at around $162 million. Good God, like he needs the money. Maybe all of this obscene advance will go to his Preparatory Academy but my [...]
“If I keep listening to it, I won’t finish the revolution.”
-Lenin, regarding Beethoven’s “Appassionata” Sonata
Inspired by an article from Frederick Smock and a viewing of the German film “The Lives Of Others,” Robert Peake considers what it is that makes tyrants and warmongers silence the voices of poets and other artists.
“The U.S. Treasury Department [...]
I spent this morning, World Book Day, with a radio crew in a shop window in Harrogate giving away new books for old. Don’t ask how I got involved in it. I was offered it by a local radio station and then got swept up in the euphoria.
I write novels and publish, most of the [...]
Two of the UK’s leading independent publishers are to join forces after the acquisition of Serpent’s Tail by Profile Books.
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I’m not the biggest fan of Elvis Presley. He’s all right . . . he gets the job done. But he’s not quite 50 Cent or Eminem. British Tennis number one Andy Murray before he played a tournament in Memphis.
And, it is rumoured that the nineteen-year-old Scot has collected £1million from Random House for his [...]