Bloomsbury issued a brief trading update on the first four months of their fiscal year, through June 30, still “in line with its expectations” for the year. Sales were up 3.7 percent with the recently-acquired IB Tauris — and 2.1 percent without two months of Tauris’s sales. The company said they had “a particularly strong…
Direct publishing
Barnes & Noble Press Replaces Nook Press
Barnes & Noble’s self-publishing platform has officially changed from Nook Press to Barnes & Noble Press (after changing in 2013 from PubIt! to Nook Press). Most notably, they have increased the royalty offered for higher-priced ebooks; titles listed at $10 or more, up to $199.99, now qualify for a 65 percent royalty, up from 40…
Pottermore Reports Another Big Loss, Still Promising Turnaround
A year ago JK Rowling’s representatives were insisting the worst was behind them after reporting a significant annual loss for Pottermore, citing “recording breaking sales in December 2015” — and now the turnaround story is being pitched again. They are “on the path to profitability” for the fiscal year ending March 2017, but as for…
Briefs: Amazon’s Inspire; Nook Press’s Print Platform
Attentive readers will remember that back in February we were the first to write about Amazon K-12 Education, a unit working on “improving the education of students with services for teachers, students and parents.” Those efforts were focused on “building a large discoverable library of open educational resources for K-12 teachers across the country, using Amazon’s…
Pronoun Launches Free eBook Distribution Service
The relaunch of a pivoted Vook/Booklr/Byliner under the new name Pronoun.com that was announced in May is now live, at least for “early access” authors. The company’s author terms are posted; they require exclusive distribution to Amazon, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Google Play as a group while authors work with them, but promise to…
Scouting the Bad and the Very Bad in Kindle’s Reader-Powered Platform
Katy Waldman at Slate has a look at some of the featured titles in the recent Kindle Scout initiative, where readers are supposed to sample excerpts from unpublished manuscripts and recommend them for publication through Kindle Press. Her theme is: “This kind of writing is unabashed. It is breathtakingly, gloriously bad. And it raises a question:…
