#Books#BookPublishing#BookPublishers#Antitrust#Competition: "The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).
But let’s dig into everything they said in detail."
#InternetArchive#DigitalLending#eBooks#BookPublishing#Copyright#IP#Rentism#Feudalism: "Supporting the archive could be seen as a denial of the unstable financial position of people in the book world and the hard, sincere work of the people who make and sell the books. But the suggestion by the four publishers that offering expensive and complex licensing deals to libraries is the only solution for more income and a better situation for authors, is incorrect.
There’s a hidden income that the authors do not profit from: by participating in the systems that publishers and distribution platforms offer the readers also pay by giving access to their data. This is not a source of revenue generation that authors have an interest in preserving. Furthermore, there is little evidence that library lending has a negative effect on book sales. Expensive licensing deals, the proposal put forward by representatives of the Big Four publishers, mean that libraries will have to offer fewer e-books to their readers, which in turn means fewer readers, which is not benefiting authors. Finally, the licensing structures are a vehicle for censoring and retracting books. In 2022, Wiley withdrew thirteen hundred academic e-books from libraries right at the beginning of the academic year, forcing students to buy the expensive books they needed for their studies."
Lately I have been noticing that a lot of newer paperbacks and especially fairly recent (new to 1 year) paperback Graphic novels - trade collections of single issues - are only available via Amazon and seem to be out of stock everywhere else?
I'm in the UK - wondering am I just having a string of bad luck or is there still a book distribution issue for anyone not Amazon ?
#AI#GenerativeAI#Amazon#Books#BookPublishing: "Sleazy book summaries have been a long-running problem on Amazon. In 2019, The Wall Street Journal found that many used deliberately confusing cover art and text, irking writers including entrepreneur Tim Ferriss. “We, along with some of the publishers, have been trying to get these taken down for some time now,” says Authors Guild CEO Mary Rasenberger. The rise of generative AI has supercharged the spammy summary industry. “It is the first market we expected to see inundated by AI,” Rasenberger says. She says these schemes fit the strengths of large language models, which are passable at producing summaries of work they’re fed, and can do it fast. The fruits of this rapid-fire generation are now common in searches for popular nonfiction titles on Amazon.
AI-generated summaries sold as ebooks have been “dramatically increasing in number, says publishing industry expert Jane Friedman—who was herself the target of a different AI-generated book scheme. That’s despite Amazon in September limiting authors to uploading a maximum of three books to its store each day. “It's common right now for a nonfiction author to celebrate the launch of their book, then within a few days discover one of these summaries for sale.”
Writer Sarah Stankorb is one such author. This summer, she published Disobedient Women: How a Small Group of Faithful Women Exposed Abuse, Brought Down Powerful Pastors, and Ignited an Evangelical Reckoning. Summaries appeared on Amazon within days. One, which she suspects was based on an advance copy commonly distributed to reviewers, appeared the day before her book came out."
In this special end-of-year interview, Leanpub co-founder Len Epp talks with Dan Holloway about some of the major events in the book publishing industry in 2023, including many of the questions raised and opportunities presented by the rise of AI services => https://youtu.be/_PlQzmI7E-I#books#AI#bookpublishing
"Writing books is generally not a way to make a living. Instead, you might want to think about how you can leverage your book to serve your other income-generating purposes, such as being seen as an expert to help bolster your consulting business, bring you more clients, or get you your next job or promotion."
Dear author aspiring to be published:
Proper punctuation in the title of your manuscript is crucial. We'll forgive you for messing up on page 2 or 25. But get the title right, for crying out loud!
Hint: Know the difference between plurals and possessives.