Archive for the 'Relevant culture news' Category

Editor to Author: Letter to a Memoir Writer

Dearest Author, I've been thinking about worth lately. What's your story worth? At a recent writers conference I taught a workshop on how I saw publishing changing. Modern publishing, the only time in history when we've had separate "markets" for books, has begun to fracture and redistribute. I've shared several times about how The Shack has shifted things. It isn't
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At holidays, ebooks sell more than print

In a move that had Asia’s trees all a-flutter, this season during the holidays it happened: ebooks sales of the top 6 bestsellers outsold print. Thursday’s USA Today bestseller list (1/6/11) “will show digital’s new popularity: E-book versions of the top six books outsold the print versions last week. And of the top 50, 19 had higher e-book than print sales.”
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How Publishing Is Changing

Author Tim Ferriss on debuting at #1 on the NYT list: "We’re at the dawn of the creators’ age, when you don’t have to dumb down your material to have a bestseller; you don’t have to kow-tow to big media that wants to dilute your message so that it offends no one and interests no one.  The publisher — you
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Why the New Books Want to Be Free

Convergence. Moving toward union or uniformity; especially coordinated movement of the two eyes so that the image of a single point is formed. We might hold such truth to be self-evident, but convergence, the merging of distinct ideas, people, industries, and technologies into a unified whole balanced in equality, is the basis of our government, healthy relationships, of spiritual lives,
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Some good reading

Two worthwhile reads: "If publishers feel unable to 'make' a book and increasingly depend on word of mouth and the new bottom-up zeitgeist it will surely complicate a publishing business model that makes massive bets on progressively fewer books in the hopes that those books readh the 'phenomenon' status that pads margins and launches careers." and How to Write a
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