Amazon
- Amazon US is offering a $5,000 flat fee to some authors to make their ebooks available in Prime Reading for six months. Prime Reading launched last October; it makes about 1,000 titles (many from Amazon Publishing) available to Prime members to read for free. Learn more in the Bookseller (subscription required).
- Amazon has launched a social media influencers program. It’s kind of like the Amazon affiliate program, only it’s exclusive and you have to apply to be considered. (Log in to Amazon before clicking the link, or it won’t work properly.) It’s unclear if Amazon influencers receive higher affiliate commissions. Read more in TechCrunch.
- Amazon is buying Souq, a Middle East online retailer. It paid $650 million for the site, which was founded in 2005. Learn more in Tech Crunch.
- For every store that Barnes & Noble closes this year, Amazon will open one. Yes, it’s true—although Amazon stores are much smaller than B&N’s. Read more in Quartz.
News
- Within 24 hours, Buzzfeed created and started selling a children’s book. It turned a photo article about Trump and a truck into a picture book available through its own online store. Take a look.
- The executive producer of Ex Machina, Slumdog Millionaire, In Bruges, The Lovely Bones, and other films says that reading novels to choose the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction was “a liberation”: no worries about adaptations. Read more here.
- Microsoft is launching its own digital bookstore this month. It’s part of a Microsoft Windows 10 Creators Update. Gizmodo wrote about the initiative under the headline “Windows Creators Update Is Full of Neat Tricks You’ll Never Use.” Learn more at Gizmodo.
- The Believer has a new owner. The literary magazine published by McSweeney’s is now in the hands of the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. Read the story.
Traditional Publishing
- Ten female literary agents have established the Agents Round Table (ART). Their goal is to pool resources and knowledge to better meet the needs of their clients. Read more in Publishers Weekly.
- There’s an independent bookstore boom in New York City. And would you believe NYC is actually short on bookstores? Read more in the New York Post.
Marketing Toolbox
- Learn how to improve your book marketing description by seeing the results of BookBub’s own A/B testing. First tip? Call out accolades right away. Learn more at BookBub.
- An ideal Goodreads marketing timeline: If you plan to use Goodreads as part of your book-launch strategy, the folks who work there have created an author timeline to follow. Check it out.
Digital Dynamic
- Not for the digitally faint of heart: This piece by Matthew Kirschenbaum at Public Books takes a hard look at what internet commoditization means to “the lifecycle of an ebook” and literature’s future. Read it here.
Jane Friedman has spent her entire career working in the publishing industry, with a focus on business reporting and author education. Established in 2015, her newsletter The Bottom Line provides nuanced market intelligence to thousands of authors and industry professionals; in 2023, she was named Publishing Commentator of the Year by Digital Book World.
Jane’s expertise regularly features in major media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, NPR, The Today Show, Wired, The Guardian, Fox News, and BBC. Her book, The Business of Being a Writer, Second Edition (The University of Chicago Press), is used as a classroom text by many writing and publishing degree programs. She reaches thousands through speaking engagements and workshops at diverse venues worldwide, including NYU’s Advanced Publishing Institute, Frankfurt Book Fair, and numerous MFA programs.