Online retailing

"I see them as kind of a great white shark. You don't really want to mess with them." The words are those of a former manager at Amazon - and she is describing her former employer.

It is an apt analogy. Amazon is huge - worth $740bn (£530bn) at Monday night's share price - but it moves fast and is a lethal predator.

LAST March, Amazon quietly changed the way it sells books. An obscure and seemingly harmless modification to its website has opened the door for some third-party sellers to deceive Amazon's customers by selling books as "new" that may not come straight from a publisher or its wholesaler, thus depriving authors of royalties they should have earned from the sale of a new book.

As an increasing percentage of book sales move online-whether for print, e-book, or audio editions-marketing can involve and rely upon authors executing today's best practices for websites and digital media. This is true for traditional authors as much as it is for independent authors.  Read more

Sometime in early 2013, in Dallas, Texas, a generous reader donated his impeccable first-edition copy of Philip Roth's Our Gang to the local Goodwill store, its royal blue dust jacket gleaming as brilliantly as it did in 1971.  Read more

Sure is quiet out there.

I mean seriously, with a gabillion people online these days, wouldn't a few even accidentally stumble across your website?

Isn't it statistically impossible (or at least, improbable) that you should have so little traffic to this darn blog that you've spent hours coaxing into existence, one precious post at a time?  Read more