The major publishers are in a difficult position: they are service companies that function like manufacturing companies -- 20th century businesses in a 21st century economy.
Imagine taking the guesswork out of publishing. Imagine a publisher printing only to fulfill orders, and with a minimum of waste; imagine further a system that sidesteps warehouses and wholesalers.
With unemployment skyrocketing, the city facing a $5 billion gap, with fewer cops on the streets and more people needing to do whatever it takes to survive, New York City is a powder keg.
These are the humbling moments in the debut author journey. The ones that remind you to hang onto that day job.
With newspapers and magazines folding left and right, book coverage has been severely impacted. Luckily, book bloggers have come to the rescue, often without the credit they deserve.
You can mourn the death of publishing or you can start bushwhacking a new book trail. These women certainly have.
"Do you think we can get Oprah?" Generally asked by an author whose book is wildly inappropriate for Oprah and who has never actually seen Oprah, but who's heard that Oprah sells books.
Editors want to take authors to the next level or make a splash with a debut. Publishers want to gain traction with new electronic formats. Sales and marketing teams want to make a splash. Everyone is desperate for a hit.
There is a word that publicists love almost as much as "yes." And it's "no." Seems counterintuitive, right? But it's true. There is little I love more than a solid "no."
A reader spends a lot of time with a book. Ads will have time to sink in. That makes the medium valuable. Google isn't getting into the book business for charity.
It may be more productive to consider the changes roiling the publishing industry evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
I've asked six of the most renowned crime fiction critics in the country to weigh in with their thoughts on the state of the crime novel. I hope you find their responses as interesting as I did.
Lance Armstrong said, "Pain is temporary. It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place. If I quit, however, it lasts forever."
Dreams from My Father had received a few impressive blurbs and favorable reviews, but had sold only a few thousand copies, so had been out of print for years.
Stop calling yourself a self-published author. You are an independent author, and you wrote an independently published book, not a self-published book.
Wherever your children are first exposed to the messy facts of our world, there will inevitably be questions about it. Luckily, young adult versions of informative books are here to help.
One wildly successful program has helped thousands of writers get published. It's called National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo. Every November writers are challenged to create a 50,000 word novel in 30 days.
Your publishing career requires maintenance. And sometimes if you want the job done right, you'd better do it yourself, or at least keep an eye out to make sure it's getting done.
What looks like a simple price war between Amazon, Target, and Walmart over a handful of bestsellers is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in the book business.
Human beings have great power over ourselves and our life's direction through the exercise of free will. "We create our realities by where we focus our attention," Trask writes.
Most self-published books are, well, um, not good. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be written, though. If you're drawn to write and you love the process, go ahead and write.
The Borowitz Report has obtained the first draft of Tiger...
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