News

Howls of outrage are bound to accompany next month’s unveiling of Granta’s list of top 20 young writers. Here a former Granta editor and veteran of the 2003 judging panel reveals how the list takes shape

Ten years is a long time in the literary game: it can easily take someone until then to finish writing a decent novel – although that’s less and less likely to wash with contemporary publishers. But a decade is also more than enough time for a writer’s fortunes to change dramatically.

Take Hilary Mantel. In 2003 she was a highly respected novelist and critic,

This is pretty bad news for self-publishers, given that many self-publishers are digital-only:

Sixty-one percent of book purchases by frequent book buyers take place online, but only seven percent of those buyers said they discovered that book online, while physical book stores account for 39 percent of units sold and 20 percent of discovery share: the stats come by way of new research from Peter Hildick-Smith, the founder and CEO of the Codex Group, which tracks frequent readers’ book-buying behavior. At the Digital Book World conference in New York on Thursday, he said that discovery and availability are

Recently it was reported that the Douglas County Library system bought 10,000 Smashwords titles to add to its collection of ebooks. An interesting piece from Library Journal shows just how hard this was to work out, especially considering many Smashwords titles are NC-17+.

“It was a lot more complicated for us than we expected,” said Smashwords founder Mark Coker, “We’re giving libraries the option to slice and dice by multiple categories and multiple filters. And, along the way we discovered some cool ways to surface titles more accurately, that we think better reflect the interests of readers.”

The list began

An interesting announcement by Lulu, posted on their blog.

Effective January 15, 2013, Lulu will no longer offer Adobe’s Digital Editions DRM as an option when publishing or revising eBook content in EPUB and PDF formats. DRM works best when administered by those who control how content is purchased and viewed. Companies like Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble integrate a reader’s experience from purchasing to downloading and finally to reading. These companies do a fantastic job in this area, and eBooks published through Lulu and distributed through these retail sites will continue to have the same rights management

Via the New York Times:

Big publishers have been tentative about entering the market, partly for fear of tarnishing their brand by allowing content they have not reviewed to be published under their name.

But Simon & Schuster has gotten around that problem by teaming up with Author Solutions Inc., a company based in Bloomington, Ind., that already has a robust self-publishing business. Author Solutions also has partnerships with several smaller and niche publishers including Harlequin, which specializes in romance books, and Thomas Nelson, which focuses on Christian books.

The two companies have created a separate house called Archway