bookselling

Apr. 6, 2011

The end of the shy author?

Laura Miller wonders about what is lost in the new publishing model of author-as-promoter. (link)

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Mar. 22, 2011

Seth Godin: Ten Bestsellers

Seth Godin’s memorable presentation at the O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing Conference in February 2008: *10 Bestsellers: Using New Media, New Marketing, and New Thinking to Create 10 Bestselling Books.* (video)

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Nov. 3, 2010

No such thing as a bad review

A study uses negative book reviews to test the old saw that “all publicity is good publicity.” The result: for the most part, it is better to be trashed by the Times than ignored by it.

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Jul. 6, 2010

R.I.P. Inkwell Bookstore

Another one bites the dust: the wonderful Inkwell Bookstore, an indie in Falmouth, Massachusetts, the Cape Cod town I have been visiting in summer for 35 years or so, has closed. I will miss it. If you have a favorite independent bookstore, support it!

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Feb. 27, 2010

How to design a book advertisement

An advertising copywriter has a thought about how to improve ads for books.

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Feb. 11, 2010

The Perils of Advertising

Rummaging through my computer recently, I came across this ad (PDF) for The Strangler. It ran in the New York Times and the Boston Globe on February 6, 2007, and in the weekly Boston Phoenix at the same time. There was a radio spot airing that week, as well, which was very fun to hear [...]

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Oct. 19, 2009

Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” Tiles

Cory Doctorow and his publisher, Tor, have a neat promo for Doctorow’s forthcoming novel Makers. The novel will be published in November but is currently being serialized online in 81 installments. For each installment, Tor has commissioned a small square illustration. These illustrations fit together like tiles in any arrangement you like. Tor has assembled [...]

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Aug. 21, 2009

Why authors should (and shouldn’t) blog

Blogging will probably never help me sell books, but to me it’s worth doing anyway.

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Aug. 2, 2009

Kate’s Mystery Books closes (for now)

Kate’s Mystery Books in Cambridge closed on Saturday. Kate Mattes held an event with an army of volunteers who helped pack the place up. I stopped by and chatted briefly with Kate, who told me she plans to spend the next year or so getting her enormous inventory properly cataloged online, as well as digitizing [...]

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Jun. 24, 2009

Publishers as booksellers?

In a long and interesting interview with Poets & Writers magazine, Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, has an interesting prediction for the future of book-selling: publishers, not online retailers like Amazon, will profit from selling directly to readers. It makes a lot of sense, especially as book-selling transitions more and [...]

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