Amazon's latest figures are astounding and cement its dominance of the book business, particularly self-publishing, as well as the huge inroads it is making in many other areas. Read more
Coming from the tech arena is a fairly hostile view of traditional publishing, which assumes that it is dead and will shortly be totally replaced by indie publishing. But is this really what is happening at present? It doesn't seem so clear-cut. Read more
Amongst the predictions springing up as we move into the new year, a hard figure is the most astonishing. The slowing-down of ebook sales is well-documented but it is quite startling that the first figure of 2017 is that the UK print market sold 195 million books in 2016, an increase of almost 7% on 2015, and volume increased by 4.5%. Read more
The question of how to price ebooks is still of great concern to indie authors and to publishers alike, and recent research from Good e-Reader reveals that readers are prepared to pay disappointingly little. Over the last two months they asked 553 Americans how much they were prepared to pay for a new e-book and the results are sobering. Read more
So what can we say that's positive about the big changes in the situation for authors over the last few years? It's really a matter of the way writers now have the opportunity to get out there and shape their own destiny. Read more
There's been a lot of discussion recently about how things have changed for writers over the last few years. In some ways it's a radically different picture, in others not so much so. Read more
The growth in self-published books reported last week comes from Amazon, whose DIY print business CreateSpace has become far and away the biggest self-publishing platform in the United States. In a week when the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies reported major declines in sales of trade books, there's also been talk about whether depressed digital sales are hurting Amazon. Read more
Bowker has published a huge report on self-publishing in the US and, although the detailed figures are rather dry, some of the conclusions are quite explosive in their picture of a rapidly growing self-publishing scene. And where America goes, other countries tend to follow, although not at a uniform speed. Read more
There was a time when the main concern of writers coming to the site was how to find a publisher. That's when series such as Inside Publishing were created in order to answer the demand for information about publishing, so that writers could find out about what actually went on behind the scenes. Read more
The battle rages on about whether self-publishing or traditional publishing is best from the author's point of view and it all seems to come down to your own experience. If you're happily settled with a publisher and content with what they're doing for you, then of course you'll advocate that. Read more
'I think a writer's natural style will dictate the form they write in. Some writers can easily bang out a doorstopper - I prefer short, dense and intense, which is why I was drawn to short fiction in the first place. Writing a short story means creating a tiny universe for you, your characters and your readers all to live in for a brief time. It's an intense experience for all involved!
When I first saw the news that Caffè Nero is establishing a new set of writing prizes, I was thrilled. Since the Costa book awards came to an untimely end last year, it's been obvious there is a gap that needs filling, a mechanism to celebrate titles which have the potential to reach a bigger than expected audience. Read more
The author of Babel and The Poppy War, Rebecca F Kuang, has said she finds the idea that authors should only write about characters of their own race "deeply frustrating and pretty illogical".
Translating is complex. First in the work, which requires writing without writing, finding voices that are not ours: being invisible and leaving no trace of a new voice but reflecting the voice of the original author. The irony is that we are not really invisible because readers can spot a bad translation.
The list of past guest speakers at Crit, the writing workshop that author Tony Tulathimutte runs out of his Brooklyn apartment, reads like a veritable who's who of 21st-century literary greats. Jonathan Franzen, Hua Hsu and Carmen Maria Machado have all popped by as guests at the eight-week course. Read more
I'm the author of two books, but I'm used to writing on the side of other jobs. Maybe that means it's a hobby-or maybe it's what knits my whole life together.
It's almost a cliché that spy novels should be dark, gripping, ambiguous. Espionage, after all, is the shadowy business of stealing high-stakes secrets, of manipulation, deception, and betrayal. But after six years of spying for the CIA-then writing my first spy novel-I found the profession was defined by something more fundamental: the enduring weight of unanswered questions.
The UK's first Black woman publisher discusses how the industry has changed since she embarked on her career in the 1960s-and where progress is still required.
Should there be an international conference for publishing professionals in the United States? It is a question numerous people have asked since the demise of BookExpo in 2020. It's no secret that the bright-lights-big-city buzz that made BookExpo so much fun and so essential for so many years had fizzled out, and booksellers and publishers alike were finding it of limited value. Read more
In exclusive research undertaken by The Bookseller, data shows the number of bestselling books by Black authors has fallen after encouraging signs in the wake of Black Lives Matter.
Amazon's main UK division has paid no corporation tax for the second year in a row after benefiting from tax credits on a chunk of its £1.6bn of investment in infrastructure, including robotic equipment at its warehouses.