Writing in the Digital Age

For Allen Lau, it turns out that sometimes the biggest decision in a business can be to stick to your original idea and build on it.

That's his story, anyway. It's the story of Wattpad Corp., a Canadian company that started in 2006 as an online reading room and now attracts 70 million users a month to its site and app in more than 50 languages.  Read more

Ebook sales are dying. EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. http://www.ebooks.com/ are insanely popular.

If the short definition of cognitive dissonance is holding two contradictory ideas to be true, ebooks are about as dissonant as digital content gets.  Read more

Last weekend I spent a lot of time around aspiring authors. On Friday, I ran a 'trade secrets' workshop for writers at Chipping Norton Literary Festival. The day after I headed to Leicester University to deliver a plenary talk to the audience at the sixth national Self-Publishing Conference.  Read more

A simple, easily searchable website is one of the most potent tools in the indie author's marketing arsenal.

There's no need to ask, ‘Do I need an author website?' The answer is a resounding ‘yes.' A simple, easily searchable website is one of the most potent tools in an indie author's marketing arsenal.

Inkitt, which bills itself as "the world's first reader-powered book publisher," has raised $3.9 million in pre-series A funding, in a round led by Redalpine, with Frontline Ventures, Speedinvest and a number of private investors also participating. The Berlin-based startup is part writing and reading community, and part publishing house, with one aspect feeding the other.