Links of Interest: October 17, 2018

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News and Trends

  • Publishers and agents are experiencing a wave of phishing scams. The perpetrators are requesting manuscripts, converting them to ebooks, and selling them online. Read Ed Nawotka in Publishers Weekly.
  • Penguin Random House is building the “perfect” publishing house. It’s been five years since the merger of Penguin and Random House, and things are going well—at least according to The New Republic. Read Alex Shephard.
  • Frankfurt Book Fair had a stable year. Attendance increased a bit on the public-facing side, but otherwise saw a 0.5 percent decline. Unsurprisingly, political issues were in the spotlight. Read a recap at Publishing Perspectives.

Booksellers and Libraries

  • How Indigo plans to compete against Amazon. Canada’s bookselling chain, Indigo, just opened its first location in the US. It will focus on providing an “experiential” destination retail model they say has yet to be cracked by Amazon. Read Suman Bhattacharyya in Digiday.
  • Independent bookstores want to sell more pre-orders. An initiative undertaken by the American Booksellers Association to encourage customers to pre-order through local bookstores has shown promising results. Read Jason Boog in Publishers Weekly.
  • Librarians react to new ebook terms from Penguin Random House. Their responses are a mixed bag. Read Matt Enis at Library Journal.
  • Amazon and libraries: complementary and not competitive. People who shop for books online are more likely to check out books from the library. Read Chris Cyr at OCLC’s Next.

Culture and Politics

  • Barnes & Noble has reported on a new indicator for the upcoming midterm elections. They analyzed sales of political books thus far this year and identified three states carried by Hillary Clinton in 2016 that are now “more likely to buy books positive toward President Trump”: Nevada, New Hampshire, and Colorado. They also found two states that Trump won in which readers now favor books critical of Trump: Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. The states most likely to buy books supporting President Trump: Texas, Florida, and North Carolina. The states most likely to buy books critical of the president: New York, California, and Massachusetts. Read Stephen Johnson in Big Think.
  • When homage becomes theft. There’s a long precedent for revisiting and recasting the work of other writers, but when does it become cultural appropriation or plagiarism? Read Ligaya Mishan in the New York Times Style Magazine.
  • An award for older writers. A new prize recognizes writers who start writing late in life. Read Gillian Slovo in The Guardian.
     
  • The publisher Françoise Nyssen lost her seat on the Macron cabinet in France in a ministry of culture shakeup. The former CEO of publishing house Actes Sud was alleged to have conflicts of interest in the books industry and to have made renovations to the press’s headquarters without permits. Read more from Olivia Snaije at Publishing Perspectives.

Marketing Toolbox

Self-publishing

  • Barnes & Noble Press is offering new features to self-pub authors. Barnes & Noble is now offering perks much sought after (particularly from Amazon KDP) by indie authors: the ability to put a print book on pre-order and the ability to secure print copies prior to publication without a proof stamp. Learn more.
  • Sessions from ALLi’s Self-Publishing Advice Conference are now available. You can view about two dozen sessions on everything from writing to sales and marketing for free online. Take a look.

Amazon

  • Retailers are struggling to make use of Amazon’s ad offerings. Amazon doesn’t help anyone who isn’t earning in the seven figures on its site. Read Michael Bodley in Digiday.
  • Despite the previous: some brands are moving half or more of their Google search ad budget to Amazon. Ad agencies have reported the shift and say Amazon budgets have grown by significant multiples. Learn more from Michelle Castillo at CNBC.
  • The Washington Post’s publishing platform is becoming a strategic business. Known as Arc, it is now used by more than thirty clients. Bezos sees its trajectory as similar to Amazon’s AWS. Read Ken Doctor at Nieman Lab.

Beyond the Page

  • The CEO of HarperCollins UK discusses the dilemma for many publishers around podcasting. “Is it a marketing tool? Or is it a revenue stream?” Read more at Publishing Perspectives.
  • The audiobook boom is just getting started. Already growing quickly in the US, digital audiobooks have untapped potential around the globe. Read Andrew Albanese in Publishers Weekly.
  • Novelists adapt to TV writers rooms. Fiction authors discuss the learning curve after joining the writing staff for popular TV series. Read Joy Press in Vanity Fair.
  • Apple tells publishers to be ready for its new audiobooks platform. Until now, Apple has been selling audiobooks fed to it from Audible. That’s about to change. Read Philip Jones in The Bookseller (subscription required).

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