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
Submission guidelines: BIO (By Invitation Only). Authors can get in touch via email with a synopsis of between 500 - 1,000 words. Authors should then only send in manuscripts if invited to do so. Hard copy manuscripts sent in without invitation will not be read. Read more
'Over the past 20 years, some of the best novels written, as it were, or writing that serves the function of a novel, have been on Netflix and HBO. The writing is complicated, the plotting is complicated. It has subtext, and people are really responding to it in a way that, unfortunately, is not happening with books...
I have a small confession to make: I've never been told I need to cut words from my manuscripts. In fact, I'm the author envious of anyone who needs to do so because I'm the one struggling to get my manuscript up to my target word count. And for a long time, I feared I was the only writer with this issue. Read more
Alice Hoffman, author of numerous adult and young adult books including Practical Magic and Aquamarine, has a new middle grade book, When We Flew Away, a historically based imagining of Anne Frank's life before the family was forced into hiding. Young Anne is grappling with her developing identity within her family and community, at times blissfully happy and others deeply contemplative. Read more
In 2007, after my manuscript had been rejected for the 44th time, a colleague offered to introduce me to a published novelist. It turned out to be Mantel - and I was fortunate enough to soak up her wisdom for the next 15 years
My debut psychological suspense novel, The Bookseller, sold to Harper in 2013 in a pre-empt. I'm not going to lie-it was an amazing deal. The type of deal that compelled me to ask my husband, when I called to break the news, "Are you sitting down?"
'An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.'