Historical and Contemporary Romance Author
Today, Hugh Howey provided an update to yesterday’s data by looking at print sales and what impact giving up those sales might have on authors’ bottom lines. (Sorry, I have to link to the information on The Passive Voice because the firewall here won’t let me load Howey’s site directly. Can’t help wondering if my employer is in collusion with…
One of the statistics that’s commonly batted around these days in publishing is that 70% of book sales in trade publishing are in print. This figure is commonly touted by the AAP (no, not the American Association of Pediatrics, but the American Association of Publishers). And I’d bet it’s pretty accurate. Yesterday, however, Hugh Howey posted some data on his…
Some comments on another blog got me wondering which digital books are more profitable for Amazon to sell–those from Big 5 traditional publishing houses or those put out by authors/publishers using KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing). At first blush, you’d think it would be the traditionally published books, since they generally sell at a higher price than self-published books, but I…
In the past few days, I believe I’ve given some people the impression that I hate traditional publishing.1 I don’t. I don’t think publishing houses are evil. I don’t believe authors who choose to go with the traditional model are doing anything stupid or wrong. I don’t want print publishing to die. None of those things are remotely true. What…
Offered without comment or interpretation: Royalty Statement – Page 1 Royalty Statement – Page 2 Note: You can click the pictures to embiggen them. I know the quality’s not great, but I don’t have a scanner.
I have been debating for the better part of the day whether I should type up this post or not. If it gets me into even more trouble than I already am, I’m blaming Cecilia Grant, Kinsey Holley, and Olivia Waite. I’m not going to bother you with the background here. There’s a lot of it. Most of which it…
I’ve been thinking a lot this week about print books, book sales, and bestseller lists. My thoughts have been spurred by several blog posts/discussions, primarily these: A Note on Historical Romance Sales in Print on Courtney Milan’s blog. USA Today released its list of the top 100 bestselling books of 2013, and Publisher’s Weekly noted that not a single self-published…
Meoskop wrote a very thought-provoking post over at Love in the Margins the other day that she titled Reading While White (The Finicky Reader). In it, she admitted that one of the reasons she might not be finding as much ethnic and cultural diversity in romance as she wants is because she isn’t actively seeking out works by non-white authors.…
Yesterday, I got into a brief Twitter conversation with Rose Lerner, Isobel Carr, Ros Clarke, and Cecilia Grant. Cecilia had just posted a link to her book, A Gentleman Undone, on Booklikes, where the lovely (and sexy!) cover had been inexplicably replaced by the cover of a scholarly Polish language book with a similar title. (Alas, Booklikes has fixed the…
If there is one thing I think authors could benefit from understanding about Goodreads, it’s the fact that it is first and foremost a book discovery/recommendation engine. That means that its software is constantly evaluating each user’s ratings of books and using that information to display books that are “similar.” But, of course, “similarity” only goes so far, which means…