This week! Books! Now that Workman has been acquired by Hachette and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has been acquired by HarperCollins, where have all the midsized book publishers gone? Jim Milliot at Publishers Weekly surveys this dying breed and cites the difficulty of building a backlist, the capital needed to grow into midsized publisher, and ongoing […]
Jane Friedman
Amazon to launch…department stores (This week in books)
This week! Books! In a bid to prove that time is a flat circle, Amazon is developing plans to launch…department stores. Yes, really. The first stores will reportedly be in Ohio and California and will sell all sorts of things and facilitate returns. In yet another step in the publishing industry’s long, long history of […]
RIP Eric Carle, creator of “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” (This week in books)
This week! Books! Lots and lots of links from the past few weeks, but first, in case you’re not a newsletter subscriber, a quick heads-up that I’m offering special “Get your writing back on track” discounts, including 25-35% off coaching sessions and a special editing package to get you unstuck. So if you’re not yet […]
Legislation introduced for a new Federal Writers’ Project (This week in books)
This week! Books! A brief scheduling note that I am going on a post-vaccination blog holiday for a couple of weeks, and I’ll be back with fresh content on May 24. Hope everyone who has access to a vaccine gets one and please consider donating to countries in need if you have the means. I’ll […]
98% of books released in 2020 sold less than 5,000 copies (This week in books)
This week! Books! A factoid this week about the publishing industry certainly got some eyeballs popping. In an article about how the publishing industry is weathering the pandemic, Alexandra Atler and Elizabeth A. Harris noted that 98% of the books newly published in 2020 sold fewer than 5,000 copies. Sales have inexorably drifted to the […]
Watch out for these publishing scams (This week in books)
This week! Books! Well. It was a week. How are we doing out there? Publishing scams are pretty much as old as publishing, and they’re proliferating in our digital and gullible age. Anne. R. Allen has a good roundup of publishing scams to watch out for in 2021, including new ones (manuscript phishing!) and old […]
