The Daily Square – Walt Whitman’s Niece Edition
Daily links from Medialoper: booksquare
Open Letter To Texas Voters
While we hope beyond hope that the woefully misnamed “Fred Head”, an apparent candidate for Comptroller of Public Accounts in the State of Texas, is someone’s idea of a hoax, we can take no chances. We do believe that the fine people of Texas understand how books, specifically and generally, work, but since at least one candidate appears confused, we offer some explanation as a public service.
The Niche Rises Again
Yesterday’s news was all doom and gloom about the state of the independent bookstore — an entity that has been under siege since the dawn of the first superstore. We do not pretend to know the laws of economics (except to have a vague comprehension that projections always seem to be off for reasons nobody understands), but being independent is expensive. The problem, of course, is that there’s always a bigger, scarier monster in the closet, and even the superstores are nervous. As venerable institutions like Tower Records face the end of their storied lives, independents are growing increasingly…creative. And
Three Easy Steps To Earning Money From Your Blog
Last week, we link to an article with the grand plan of returning to the topic later that day. Days have a way of getting away from us. As do weeks. But we have been dwelling mentally on the subject, and woke up this morning ready to write about the all-important topic of making money from blogs. Lynne Scanlon notes that making money the traditional way (selling a book to a publishers, receiving an advance, earning out an advance, waiting months and sometimes years for royalties to be paid) doesn’t really work for her. Let’s all face facts: if you’re
The Daily Square – The Bitch Is Back Edition
Daily links from Medialoper: booksquare
How To Avoid The (Anti-DRM) Revolution
As most of you know, a little Book Fair is happening right now in Frankfurt. What happens there will likely stay there, and much of the news trickling out of the event seems to indicate that the conference has a bit of a “same time, next year” feel to it. Especially when it comes to digital rights management. DRM. It’s a term you need to understand. Publisher’s Weekly reports that an entire session, thrillingly (and we do mean that sincerely) called “Publishers and Search Engines: Facing the Challenge” discussed an approach called Automated Content Access Protocol, or ACAP for short.
The Daily Square – Within Your Reach Edition
Daily links from Medialoper: booksquare
Ranting and Raving, Harlequin Style
This week, the hot publishing news comes from Torstar: Harlequin will be cutting about 4% of its global workforce. This is a result of, yes, declining sales. And this, by the way, has been an ongoing theme for a few years. Harlequin, the world’s leader in romance fiction, is not selling books in sufficient numbers. It’s not that the audience doesn’t exist; it’s that the publisher can’t seem to find the readers. Looking back at our archives (we do not advise doing this without a stiff drink), we see that over and over, there’s a similar theme. Harlequin books are