A lot of people won’t go free with their books, they think it’s degrading. They’ve worked hard, sometimes for years (I know I have) and it just breaks you inside to give away the result of your sweat and tears for nothing. Plus we all know that anything not paid for is not taken into…
Tag: E-book
To Publish AND Perish – Will the Tsunami of e-books Destroy our Culture?
This article was published on Impakter (under my real name, Claude Forthomme): To Publish and Perish Claude Forthomme on 20 August, 2014 at 09:00 Amazon and its 3.4 Million E-Books: the End of Culture? For a long while now, people have debated how many e-books Amazon carried it in its Kindle Store, because Amazon has…
To Self-Publish and Perish: Buried Under 3.4 Million E-Books
I finally found where Amazon reveals a hidden (and juicy) statistic: the number of ebooks available in the Kindle Store. If you’re an Amazon Associate, you can easily find it too but to make it simple I took a screen shot of the page where it shows, this one dated August 16, 2014: Look at…
Digital Revolution Act Two: TheTrue Nature of Amazon Revealed?
Fascinating report from Author Earnings (see here). In the traditional publishing world, the reaction to that report was rather negative (according to the UK Guardian), putting into question the methodology. But even taking into account all the limitations of this report, it still reveals a lot about about Amazon, keeping in mind that 120,000 books…
Readers vs. Watchers: The Digital Revolution is Not Over
Lately a huge controversy has developed around the theme “Indies are Beating Traditional Publishers”, and one publishing guru, Mark Coker, the father of Smashwords, has loudly predicted that self-published authors will outrun traditional publishers by 2020, see here. Indie authors, carried forward by the digital revolution that has lowered production costs and leveled the field,…
Amazon’s Latest Gimmick, the Book Countdown Deal: Does it Work?
The idea of a book countdown is fun: set the price at the lowest level allowed on Amazon, 99 cents, and watch it rise each day by one dollar – until it’s back to the original price. There is an element of game betting: you, as the customer, have to beat the clock in order…
How to promote your book and win reviews at the same time
Reviews sell books, right? But the problem is to get them. Ads are easy, you pay for them but they tend to be ignored unless you tie them to a promotion, making your book free or at 99 cents for a short period. The grand-daddy of book promoters is of course BookBub, recently joined by…
Is Amazon Supremacy in eBooks Threatened?
Wow, super star Bella Andre has given full confidence to, no…Not Amazon Kindle Select but Kobo! See here: For me, this is surprising news. I’ve always thought of Amazon as the giant e-retailer whose supremacy could not be threatened – not yet and not for a long time. I guess I was wrong. What we…
The Digital Revolution: What Published Authors Really Want
Best selling author Hugh Howey has set up a really cool website to encourage authors, both traditionally and self-published, to come together and (eventually) form a “guild” – or some sort of association to defend authors’ rights against publishers and e-distributors. To visit, click here. To reade his latest report on author earnings and the…
Two Good Reasons Why You Should Do Audiobooks
Should you do audio books of your titles? The answer is YES! And there are two very good reasons for doing so, but before I get to them, here’s a little introduction to the world of audiobooks. It’s a new aspect of the digital publishing industry, now worth $1.6 billion (still peanuts) but growing fast….
Is Traditional Publishing Headed for a Smash-up?
Dear Readers, Some of you may know me from my site on blogspot.com and I’ll try to keep you posted on both sites, with comments on politics, books, art (everything I like) and economics (everything I dislike!) – in short, our world as I see it. But since this is just a bunch of personal…
Claude Forthomme 