David Gaughran's Blog, page 14
December 16, 2014
How Jessica Mitford Exposed A $48m Scam From America���s Literary Establishment
Jessica Mitford took on the American funeral industry, the California Department of Corrections, and the Ku Klux Klan, but it was her 1970 expos�� of The Famous Writers School which led to Time calling her ���The Queen of the Muckrakers.��� And if a courageous editor hadn���t reversed his decision to kill her story, it might never have happened.
Mitford had been aware of The Famous Writers School���s existence for some time. Anyone who was a frequent reader of newspapers, books or magazines wo...
November 21, 2014
Author Solutions Steps Up Global Expansion, Penguin Random House Integration
Penguin Random House is speeding up the international expansion of its vanity press operations, while also seeking to integrate them more closely with the traditional side of the business – hoping to counteract flat growth for Author Solutions at a time when self-publishing is booming.
Author Solutions launches a new self-publishing service company for the Spanish market next Tuesday – MeGustaEscribir – which contains the usual mix of crappy publishing packages and ineffective, overpriced mark...
November 12, 2014
Amazon Opens Dutch Kindle Store, B&N Moves Into Author Services
Amazon launched a Kindle Store in the Netherlands this morning, as anticipated by The Digital Reader yesterday.
Kindle devices are nowon sale for prices ranging between €59 for the basic model, up to €189 for the Voyage, and the store has opened with over 3m titles. However, only 20,911 of these titles are in Dutch and only 1,221 of these e-books are by Dutch authors.
That may change now that KDP has launched a local portal for Dutch writers and small presses. The opening of the Dutch Kindle St...
November 7, 2014
Aiming for the NYT Best Seller List
Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last week – with no wifi! – you are probably aware we released The Indie Author Power Pack on Monday, with the aim of hitting the New York Times Best Seller list.
We won’t know the resultuntil next week, but I’ve had a few tweets and emails asking how we were doing, so I thought I’d give you anupdate.
Before that, if you somehow missed the blanket promo we have been conducting, The Indie Author Power Pack is a stonking deal – only 99c – and contain...
October 28, 2014
New Release: The Indie Author Power Pack: How To Write, Publish & Market Your Book
For the last few months I have been secretly planning an assault on the New York Times bestseller list. Today, I can finally announce the release of the book I’m hoping will do the trick.
The Indie Author Power Pack: How To Write, Publish & Market Your Book contains three top-rated guides:
Write. Publish. Repeat by Sean Platt and Johnny B. Truant
Let’s Get Digital (2nd ed.) by me
How To Market A Book (2nd ed.) by Joanna Penn
+ Bonus Content!
It’s only available for a limited time, and you can pre-o...
October 22, 2014
What���s Next for Authors United?
Authors United has been spectacularly unsuccessful in its supposed mission to get Amazon and Hachette to agree a deal.
By contrast, Simon & Schuster was able to agree a deal in just three weeks ��� without the intervention of Douglas Preston���s group.
To be fair, Authors United has been very good at one thing: getting media attention.
Perhaps it���s time for Douglas Preston to widen the aims of the group and start campaigning on issues which actually matter.
It would be great if Authors United c...
What’s Next for Authors United?
Authors United has been spectacularly unsuccessful in its supposed mission to get Amazon and Hachette to agree a deal.
By contrast, Simon & Schuster was able to agree a deal in just three weeks – without the intervention of Douglas Preston’s group.
To be fair, Authors United has been very good at one thing: getting media attention.
Perhaps it’s time for Douglas Preston to widen the aims of the group and start campaigning on issues which actually matter.
It would be great if Authors United could g...
October 21, 2014
Amazon and S&S Agree Terms. Who’s The Bad Guy Again?
Simon & Schuster has agreed a multi-year deal with Amazon covering both e-books and print books.Business Insider reported that negotiations only took three weeks and were concluded two months before the original contract expired.
I’m confused, does this mean the end of literary culture or not?Someone needs to run up to Douglas Preston’s quaint writer shack to find out. (If you get lost, it’s at the back of his 400-acre estate).
It also begs a question: what exactly is Hachette holding out for?...
October 3, 2014
Building A Better Industry
From BoardGameGeek.com
Mike Shatzkin is confused. He can’t seem to understand why self-publishers spend so much time documenting the ills of the publishing industry.
Or, as Shatzkin puts it in one of his typically snappy headlines, “The motivation of the publisher-bashing commentariat is what I cannot figure out.”
I did a fair bit of bashing myself last week when I said that “Publishing Is Rotten To The Core.” I had intended to follow that up with a more positive counterpoint in a couple of week...
September 30, 2014
Don���t Wait For Permission: Why Authors Should Be Entrepreneurs
The self-publishing blogosphere usually focuses on making money from genre fiction, and tends to advise producing as much quality work as you can as quickly as possible, and then marketing it aggressively.
That’s not bad advice at all, but there are many other types of books, several different kinds of authors, and multiple ways you can approach making a living.
Joanna Penn (writing as JF Penn) has hit the New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists with her fiction, but also has an extremely...
