The publishing blogosphere
has been angsting this week over the demise of the Tools Of Change Conference.
In an unexpected move Tim O’Reilly decided that publishing knew all about
digital and he had other things to do with O’Reilly Media. This came as a big
shock to the community which didn’t agree with Tim’s viewpoint. Has publishing
really embraced digital? What about the community aspect of TOC ? What replaces
all those cutting edge conferences just before Bologna? Brian O’Leary looks at Tim’s decision and wonders if he just sold himself out.
Two of the hardest
working people in community building for TOC are now out of a job. Joe Wikert wonders what he should do now, given what he knows.
Google are finally in court to answer the big question... where are those royalties from all those
books that you digitised? The second attempt by the Writers Guild class action
lawyers to finally get some answers may have worked.
Maureen Johnson took alook, this week, at gender bias in book covers. Did having a female or male
name as the author on the cover change the way it was marketed regardless of
the content? She asked her followers to flip the covers to reflect the opposite
gender and opened a can of worms on twitter. Women authors seem to be getting a girly cover treatment
on their book which doesn’t warrant it given the subject matter
inside it...Great article...and check out the book covers that her followers
came up with.
Rachelle Gardner had
the comments flying with her blog post Will My Publisher Let Me Self- Publish too? Her post looking at what was in it for the Traditional Publisher struck a
real chord among Hybrid authors and there were many arguments for and against
her views and much anguish over non compete clauses in contracts. Take the time
to read the comments. Self Publishing could be seen by your Trad publisher as
competition...which means contract breaker....
Passive Guy takes Mike Shatzkin to task over the next Publishers Launch conference, Scale. Has
Mike missed the boat completely with his focus on big publishing companies
changing publishing in the future...in the tech world it’s the little guys who
scale up successfully.
In Craft,
Be Your Own BookDoctor...Janice Hardy tells you what to look for.
In Marketing,
Who are you Online and is it different from who you are. An interesting article on the effects of
marketing yourself from the Literary Journal VQR.
A list of children’swriters who blog...and how they approach their audience.
To Finish,
Hugh Howey seems to be
the flavour of the month for journalists trying to understand what’s happening
in publishing. As he wanders Down Under (NZ and Aussie) he is being hounded for press interviews by the folks back home.
His replies add to
their angst.
