The ABA announced that member in-store book sales over the Thanksgiving holiday long weekend, as tracked by Bookscan, increased 15.5 percent over the same week in 2010. Sales in store websites powered by ABA IndieCommerce also increased by 60 percent for the same weekend (plus Cyber Monday) as compared to last year. Ann Patchett’s STATE OF WONDER and Laura Hillenbrand’s UNBROKEN topped the Indie bestseller lists for hardcover fiction and non-fiction, respectively, in 2011. Indie Bestseller Lists page Also from the ABA, this year’s Winter Institute 7 in January will feature a new One Institute, One Read program. Tying in […]
Archives for December 2011
Darcie Chan, Recluse No More
Last week the NYTBR featured Darcie Chan, author of the self-published success The Mill River Recluse, in the Inside the List column, where she noted “I would still love to have a book traditionally published, be it Recluse, my second novel (currently in progress) or a future work.” Now the WSJ has a long feature on her path to success, and continuing discussions with publishers via agent Laurie Liss at Sterling Lord Literistic. Unfortunately the article suffers from some NYT-esque pejoratives and errors of fact, so the account of publisher discussions is open to some interpretation. “A few major publishers” […]
More On the KDP Select Fund
We have an update related to our point yesterday that the cash pool Amazon is paying out to KDP authors who make their ebooks exclusive to Amazon and elect to make titles available for borrowing through the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library is determined at Amazon’s discretion. Spokesperson Sarah Gelman tells us that “KDP will announce each month’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library fund amount by the 25th of the preceding month. The announcement will be emailed to participating authors and publishers and posted on the KDP website.” As Amazon now says on their site, in a FAQ about the program, “the […]
People, Etc.
PGW will distribute four new clients as of Spring 2012: Paper Punk Books, Tara Books, Readers to Eaters, and Watershed Media. Watershed will also use Constellation for ebook distribution, as will existing PGW client Night Shade Books. Pauline Hsia has joined the Doris S. Michaels Agency as an assistant. She was most recently with the Queens Ledger. Novelist and film critic Gilbert Adair, 66, died earlier this month. Novels by Adair were the basis for the films LOVE AND DEATH IN LONG ISLAND (1997) and THE DREAMERS (2003), and he also wrote film columns for the Sunday Times and the Guardian. Obit
More Picks for 2011 from iTunes and Time
Apple’s iTunes Rewind has published their annual lists of favorite downloads. They pick Tea Obreht’s The Tiger’s Wife as best novel; Michael Lewis’s Boomerang as best nonfiction; Ruta Sepetys’ Between Shades of Gray as best teen novel; and Jaqueline Kennedy as their best enhanced book. The lists (which you will have to fire up through iTunes) also include their bestselling ebooks for the year. Among their Top 10s: Fiction The Tiger’s Wife, Tea Obreht 1Q84, Haruki Murakami Once Upon A River, Bonnie Jo Campbell Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson The Prague Cemetery, Umberto Eco The Paris Wife, Paula McLain The Hottest […]
KDP Select, The $6 Million Fund For Kindle Direct Authors, Is Live
Amazon now made official what we reported was in the works last month: Authors who publish their work through Kindle Direct Publishing exclusively have the option of putting their titles into the Kindle Owner’s Lending Library, compensated through pro-rated shares of a fund “expected to be at least” $6 million for all of 2012 (beginning with $500,000 allocated for the month of December). Titles must be exclusive to the Kindle store for a minimum of 90 days (which is a reduction from the 180 days Amazon initially sought from some authors). If books are currently available through multiple retailers, authors […]