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Gloomy but True?

Well, I have to admit when I think of the future of the publishing industry, this blog post on PandoDaily "Confessions of a Publisher" is where I think it is heading. I've been saying Amazon is going to turn the Big Six into the Big Seven for a number of years now. But when a publisher says that Amazon is going to take it all, that makes my record skip. Couple that with some cocktail party buzz I overheard in Amazon's home state confiding that an Amazon manager boasted they'd already won the war but New York didn't know it yet, and it sends a shiver down the proverbial spine.

This blog post is not for the faint of heart. But it sure is an interesting perspective. Time will tell if it comes true.

Coliloquy "Active Fiction" Launches Today

Publisher's Weekly has a great story on a new digital publishing company that is launching today: Coliloquy. (Note: I recently sold a client's romance to them, so my incredibly positive view of them is biased.)

PW said: Coliloquy, a Palo Alto-based startup launching today exclusively on Amazon Kindle E-Ink devices, has a new take on digital publishing. Explained simply, it’s an e-book-age version on choose-your-own-adventure, allowing readers to make choices within a book that affect its outcome; in some cases, with continuing serial novels, those choices can actually be sent back to the writer to consider as he or she is writing the next chapters of the book."

Romance eBook stats from Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin's Idealogic blog is phenomenal. I've been an avid follower for years. He is a consultant to the publishing industry, so it may be a bit technical for some of my subscribers, so let me cut and paste a snippet of his preview of Digital Book World after this intro as it relates to romance eBooks, then I'll give you a link to his blog if you want the full story.

Self-Pubbing with iBooks?

Well, this is quite the news story to start off the new year right! 

Apple has scheduled an announcement later this month and it is speculated that they will debut a self-publishing option, similar to Kindle Direct Publishing at Amazon and Barnes and Noble PubIt! That means you can upload your own self-published eBooks directly to Apple's iBookstore (or is it iTunes now, I forget) without having to go through other distributors such as Smashwords.

See the full speculative story here at GoodeReader.