How Indie Genre Fiction Ebooks Are Thriving Online – Forbes
Adam Rowe
(via The Shifting Landscape of Book Reviews)
This is a nice little overview of a handful of popular book review blogs. I do have a question about the graphic, though. I can’t quite tell whether the reader is reading:
(a) an indie book;
(b) a book review blog;
(c) the ebook bestseller list; or
(d) today’s price for pork bellies.
Bowker: self-published e-books 12% of sales | The Bookseller
Self-published titles make up 12% of all e-book sales, according to new findings from Bowker Market Research.
The popularity of self-published titles rises when looking at certain categories, with the self-published share of e-book volume sales more than 20% in areas such as crime, science fiction and fantasy, romance and humour.
The research is based on Bowker’s regular Books & Consumers survey, which holds monthly interviews with book buyers, questioning around 3,000 consumers each month. The findings were unveiled today (June 7th) at The Literary Consultancy Conference by Steve Bohme, UK research director at Bowker.
He said: “It’s one of the first times we have looked at self-publishing in this depth to find out what part it plays. It’s interesting to have this data, as it allows self-published writers to understand more about the market they are operating in.”
Are libraries offering enough self-published ebooks? | Digital Book World
A self-published novel, The Bet by Rachel Van Dyken, was the best-selling ebook on Amazon and at Barnes and Noble during the week ending April 13, 2013. This statistic demonstrates a major shift in our literary ecosystem—self-published books have become culturally important.
Our society is now producing relevant books—books worth reading, books impacting our culture—from individuals, not just publishing houses. This is a significant change and has real ramifications for libraries.
“Are we offering enough self-published titles?”
Librarians are taking notice of the phenomenon of self-published bestsellers, and asking themselves, “Are we offering enough self-published titles?”
The Agent as (Sort of) Publisher
A sure sign that the paradigm is shifting:
While there has been some grumbling in the industry about the ethics and logistics when literary agents start acting as publishers, many firms are now offering a suite of services in this area. Only a handful of agencies are actually publishing titles by their clients through in-house divisions, with more offering publishing services to clients who (usually) can’t land an offer from a traditional house. The one consistency: many of the agents working in this arena say what they’re doing is not “publishing.”