You’ve heard all the bad news about book sales: with more and more titles available, and the world’s attention drifting from the printed page to the tiny screen, nobody but a handful of best-selling authors is selling much of anything these days, no matter how good it is. As writers, our competition today aren’t just the […]
Continue Reading...Business as usual is no longer possible. Not in publishing, anyway. The book publishing world is in a never-ending state of turmoil. The industry’s margins are thin. The business is highly complex. New technologies constantly appear, morph, and disappear, only to be followed by yet newer technologies. Meanwhile, other media proliferate, some of them growing […]
Continue Reading...You’re gonna love this. Once upon a time, back in the distant reaches of the twentieth century—well, actually it was 1984—one of my clients assigned me to ghostwrite a fundraising letter that Isaac Asimov had agreed to sign. I approached the task with some trepidation, both because I knew Asimov’s reputation as a prolific author […]
Continue Reading...Today the popular website Virgin Disruptors, one of Richard Branson’s innumerable activities, posted the following article of mine under the title “Innovation — Look beyond Silicon Valley.” I had answered the challenging question, “Have entrepreneurs lost the will to innovate?” Innovation is alive and well among entrepreneurs—but not so much where you’d expect. Take Silicon Valley, […]
Continue Reading...If you’ve ever written a book, you might be shocked by the vanishingly small sales, whether your book was fiction or nonfiction. Like me, though, you’ve probably imagined that winning a big prize such as a Pulitzer or a National Book Award would make all the difference in the world. Here, then, as a cold […]
Continue Reading...Most of the time I turn to the New York Times Book Review when I want to know which books are selling best. Today, on a lark, I checked out Amazon’s list. Boy, was I surprised! First, understand why I decided to do this. The reason is summed up in a sentence from an online […]
Continue Reading...If you’re convinced that the combination of television, video games, social media, longer work hours, and accelerated lifestyles has caused Americans to read fewer books, you’re right. Recent polls reveal that around one in four U.S. adults read no books at all last year—a proportion that is three times as great as the eight percent […]
Continue Reading...These numbers may surprise you. According to UNESCO, which compiles the total number of books published in every country, there was a total of 2.2 million books issued in the most recent year available. That year was 2011 or 2012 for the top producers, much earlier for small nations, in many cases as far back […]
Continue Reading...These days it’s fashionable to predict the demise of the traditional bound book – not just because of continuing inroads by the e-book but also because, we’re told, people these days simply don’t have the time or the attention span to read a 300-page book, much less one that runs to 600 pages or more. […]
Continue Reading...A maverick publisher — Steve Piersanti of Berrett-Koehler in San Francisco — reveals the 15 “secrets” that continue to make his company one of the most successful in the industry.
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