In Publishing News this week
This week has seen rumbles of discontent through the publishing communities. At issue is the freedom to express your opinions and or the truth without being labelled with racist slurs. Finding and keeping the middle ground in the rhetoric over the Gaza crisis is becoming increasingly problematic. This week Pen America cancelled its award ceremony as many finalists pulled out citing a lack of support from Pen America. This is the American branch of the organization which supports writers in prison and the freedom of ideas and speech.
In Italy, the publisher’s association has come out swinging over perceived censorship when a prominent writer was refused a broadcast appearance on the way to the studio, for criticizing the government. Their statement “A country that is strong in its democracy should never fear the opinions of writers, whatever they may be.”
On the Bookfair front, Publishing Perspectives has a breakdown on the deals that were done at Bologna. The comics group can’t have been eating or sleeping with so many deals done in their genre.
Publisher’s Weekly reports that Entangled Press is flying high with a blockbuster on their hands but they insist nothing will change at their little Indie press.
London Bookfair has another change of director. This revolving door or ‘poisoned chalice’ as Mark Williams calls it, is not helping the industry in any way. He makes good points in his acerbic take down of London Book Fair’s governing body.
Meanwhile, Elle Griffin, writing at The Elysian has spurred discussion with her provocative article No One Buys Books. She read the book based on the big Department of Justice trial over Penguin Random House wanting to buy Simon and Schuster. She pulls out charts and statements made by publishing executives to illustrate her article and opinion that publishing is broken but no one has told the writers.
Taking the opposing point of view, Kathleen Schmidt with her article Please Stop Bashing Book Publishing. Here she shows who is buying books and why they aren’t being noticed in book sales lists.
After all this you might like to drop in to Kris Maze and read the excellent article 7 Super Mental Health Hacks for Writers To De-Stress.
Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur has another deep dive article full of information over the changes to Audible's categories. With Spotify grabbing increasing market share- The Amazon owned audio publishing company is tweaking the metadata.
Sandra Beckwith has a roundup of the interesting book promotion days in May. Check it out if you want inspiration for your Social Media posts.
Caroline Leavett has an interesting guest post on Jane Friedman’s blog on writing fact as fiction. This can get very tricky and could involve lawsuits. Caroline talks about the ways you can disguise the Fact in your Fiction so nobody ever knows it’s a true story.
In The Craft Section,
Writing character appearance- Michelle Miller
Motivating emotionally challenging characters-Becca Puglisi- Bookmark
How to use symbolic settings in your story- K M Weiland- Bookmark
Tropes to the left of me- Terry Odell
Adding a listening pass to your edit- Suzy Vadori-Bookmark
In The Marketing Section,
7 Social Media Best Practices- Draft2digital
Book Marketing strategies- Dale Roberts- Bookmark
Analyzing your book marketing niche- Colleen Story
Chirp- free marketing tools-Bookbub- Bookmark
Facebook ads – Written Word Media- Bookmark
To Finish
It’s that time of the year when I look back over sixteen years of weekly blogging on the publishing and writing industry where change is constant. Ebooks to Kindle to Subscription publishing services to Print on Demand to Audio Books to Direct Sales to AI. In the next year the Publishers will be coping with the avalanche of AI generated novels and the disruptive impact on the industry. For the Writers it will be the insistence that they are human and human interaction with fans will be the most important strand in their writer business.
This human is about to look for a big drink and cake!
Maureen
@craicer
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Pic Photo by Julien Photo on Unsplash
