Traditional Publishing
- Penguin has closed Blue Rider Press. The line, established in 2011, will be moved to another Penguin imprint, Dutton. Read the announcement.
- Little, Brown Books for Young Readers has partnered with the Gotham Group, a production company, to develop new works for book publication, film, and TV. YA novelist Tracy Deebs is the first author they’ve hired as part of the development. Find out more at Deadline.
- 20th Century Fox now has a stake in comic book and graphic novel publisher Boom! Studios. Here at Hot Sheet, we take notice when TV/film studios and book publishers partner up—TV/film studios like building on successful intellectual property, and book publishers need the support and resources to fully exploit IP. Read more in Deadline.
- There’s a new book subscription service in town. PageHabit offers a monthly hardcover release with annotations by its author, and each shipment includes other book-related items. So far, six genres are available: literary fiction, young adult, fantasy, romance, historical fiction, and mystery. Read more in TechCrunch.
- Open Road is helping market other publishers’ backlist ebook titles. Open Road now has a direct-to-consumer database of a million names. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt is an early customer. Learn more from the press release.
Self-publishing
- Amazon KDP overhauls its sales reporting dashboard (finally). If you haven’t checked your ebook sales lately, it’s worth logging in to see the easier-to-use dashboard. Authors at Kboards have been discussing the changes.
- Calibre 3.0 has been released. Calibre is the widely used free software for ebook management and formatting. Learn about the new features.
- There’s a civil lawsuit against Rebecca Hamilton. The indie author and boxed-set organizer is charged with breach of contract and fraud, among other things. Learn more at Kboards.
Marketing Toolbox
- What you’d learn if you spent $100,000 on Facebook ads. The folks at HubSpot break down the key takeaways and offer a step-by-step process for ad development. Take a look.
- When your Facebook ad isn’t approved. An online entrepreneur details why Facebook ads might not receive approval and how to correct problems. Read at Andrew Hubbard’s blog.
- Mark Coker has released results from his Smashwords 2017 survey. They suggest that self-published authors might try $4.99 pricing as well as $2.99 and $3.99. Review his presentation.
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.