Recent articles in Book Riot (It’s Not Funny, It’s Racist) and the Huffington Post (…Isn’t Just Offensive, It’s Bad Comedy) that were amplified on social media led publisher Abrams to the withdraw the book under fire, Bad Little Children’s Books — “respecting the author’s request” to do. Initially, Abrams had responded online two days to support the book, saying: “It was never our intention as publisher, nor the author’s, to spread or support hateful messaging. Some reviewers and commenters on social media have taken elements of the book at face value, which, we believe, misses the point of the book […]
Authors
Kindle Unlimited Pool and Page Rate Rise, As Pages Read Declines
In their latest retroactive allocation of funds, Amazon has decided to give Kindle Unlimited participants a slightly larger pool of funds to share for October — $16.2 million (up from $15.9 million in September), with the per page payment rate jumping to $.005189 (up from $0.00497397). But at least some authors continue to have concerns about whether the software that tracks page reads is functioning correctly, as previously reported in October. Total pages read declined for the second month, to approximately 3.122 billion, down 2.3 percent from the 3.197 billion pages counted in September.indle
People
The Zora Neale Hurston Trust is now being represented by the Joy Harris Literary Agency. (Hurston’s work was previously represented by Victoria Sanders & Associates.) Singer-songwriter, poet, and novelist Leonard Cohen, 82, died Thursday. Jared Bland at his longtime publisher McClelland & Stewart said in a statement, “His work, in all its forms, touched our hearts, informed our lives, and made our world better. It is almost impossible to imagine a world without his singular voice. His presence will never be forgotten. His profound art will endure.” Literary agent Ed Victor celebrated 40 years in business at a party in London on […]
Kelly Denies Her Book SETTLE FOR MORE Says What NYT Reported
In advance of the book’s publication on November 15, NYT book critic Jennifer Senior also obtained a copy of Megyn Kelly’s SETTLE FOR MORE — first written about by Radar — and ran an early review (rather than a news story). Senior writes about Kelly’s accounts of president-elect Donald Trump’s behavior towards her, and adds to the story of Kelly’s allegations against ousted Fox chief executive Roger Ailes. She writes that Ailes “engineered hit pieces about me online” after she declined to defend him this summer, presenting her with this option: “I could ensure that the owners of Fox News Channel — […]
As Amazon Investigates, Kindle Unlimited Page Reads Drop In September
Amazon announced their retroactive payment pool for Kindle Unlimited authors for September, set at $15.9 million — up $100,000 from August — paying $0.00497397. As we noted last week, many of those authors have been very concerned about sudden drops in page reads (and some have reported notable declines in Amazon ebook sales as well). The complaints were significant enough that Amazon responded three times with official messages. The first acknowledged that “we uncovered one timing-based reporting issue affecting less than 0.2% of pages read which we fixed on 9/28.” A day later, they reported, “We regularly monitor pages-read systems for […]
Rumblings of Kindle Limitations for Self-Published Authors
The latest Author Earnings report is surprised to find declining sales of self-published books in their October survey, as traditional publishers registered small gains and Amazon Publishing continues its steady rise. In the measure that publishers follow — gross ebook dollar sales — AE found traditional publishers with about 65 percent of Kindle revenues, and Amazon Publishing at about 10 percent of sales. They put self-published authors at just under 20 percent of sales (down from 25 percent in the last two surveys earlier in 2016) and “uncategorized single-author publisher” sales at just above 5 percent. And those figures include […]