News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Book News
- AuthorEarnings releases “Definitive Study of Amazon Author Earnings”. Using a software spider, they looked at almost every ebook title sold on Amazon, whether traditionally published, published by Amazon, or self-published, and evaluated the sales data for each author. They also looked at a lot of print books, and made some effort to account for non-Amazon and print sales as well. The results are interesting, and suggest that more indie authors are earning over $10K, over $25K, and over $50K than traditionally-published authors.
- Pam Muñoz Ryan’s Echo wins NY Historical Society’s 2016 Children’s History Book Prize. (School Library Journal) The book was named a Newbery Honor Book earlier this year. Find Echo on Goodreads here.
- BookCon expands to New York Comic Con in Fall 2016 (Publishers Weekly) BookCon will also continue to run a 2-day event following BEA.
- ALA 2016: Librarians Say Patrons Are Mostly Satisfied With E-book Service based on survey data. 2/3 of libraries surveyed estimate that only 10% or fewer of their patrons check out ebooks. (Andrew Richard Albanese, Publishers Weekly)
- New nonprofit Colophon Center hopes to turn Denver into publishing hub (Annise Gross, Publishers Weekly)
Worth Reading
- Stealing Books in the Age of Self-Publishing (Joy Lanzendorfer, The Atlantic) is about plagiarism rather than piracy as the title might suggest. Specficially, self-published books that have been plagiarized — often almost word-for-word — from traditionally-published or other self-published books.
- Dear Broke Reader: Your Sense of Entitlement is Killing Me. Author Sarah Madison’s response (on her blog) to a Facebook poster who wants to download pirated/illegal copies of books because she’s “too broke” to buy them. Madison’s post went viral.
- The Snobs and Me. The literary snobbism of her Ivy League alma mater made author Jennifer Weiner wary of going to her 25th reunion. (New York Times)
- The Wonderful and Terrible Habit of Buying Too Many Books (Gabe Habash, Publishers Weekly). Although I had to laugh when I realized he only has 371 physical books. I don’t even know how many I have: at least 1500, maybe upwards of 2000. And that’s not counting ebooks and audiobooks.
Awesome Lists
- Working Titles of Famous Novels — or, what those novels almost ended up being called. (Infographic by Jonkers Rare Books)
- The Most Translated Authors in the World (Infographic by Translate Shark) This looks at authors, not books, so the Bible isn’t included. Agatha Christie tops the list; her books have been translated 7,233 times.
Bookish Quote
That’s it for this week!
Katherine @ I Wish I Lived in a Library
I saw the Dear Broke Reader post and really enjoyed it. I thought Madison did a fabulous job of saying what she meant without getting too mean. I’m not too surprised that only 10% get ebooks from the library. I do get some but if I’m getting a book from their it’s usually a regular book or an audio. He things 371 books is too many books? That’s so adorable. I think I have 371 books crammed under my bed!
Katherine @ I Wish I Lived in a Library recently posted…The Year of Cozy – Book Review + Recipe
Lark_Bookwyrm
That was my reaction to 371 books – oh, how cute! Granted, it sounds like he’s in a small apartment, but still. Maybe he needs to try ebooks from the library! 😉
Heather @ Random Redheaded Ramblings
Oh my goodness, Trimelchio in West Egg, that is a mouthful!! I love that post on what those books could have been called!
Heather @ Random Redheaded Ramblings recently posted…BLOG TOUR REVIEW – All Together Now by Gill Hornby
Lark_Bookwyrm
In most cases, I think the published title is better than the working title. It definitely is in that case!
Lexxie @ (un)Conventional Bookviews
Thanks for sharing, Lark 🙂 I hadn’t seen any of these before – no idea where I’ve been hiding, but I’ve had a very lazy week 😀
Lexxie @ (un)Conventional Bookviews recently posted…Sunday and Weekly Wrap-up #87
Lark_Bookwyrm
Thanks, Lexxie! A lazy week sounds heavenly to me.
Charlie @ Girl of 1000 Wonders
Indie authors are making more than traditionally published authors? That is impressive! If you’re too broke to buy the ebooks, sign up for review tours, NetGalley or Edelweiss. It’s not hard! You don’t even have to have a blog. You can review on Goodreads and it’s so easy! There’s really no excuse. None.
As for plagiarism, I think that is the pits. Just terrible.
Lark_Bookwyrm
I do think that survey covers both nonfiction and fiction authors, and I’d love to see it further broken down to look at differences between fiction and nonfiction author earnings. And of course, most of the data is coming from Amazon — but then, so are over half the sales. So it is interesting as well as surprising.
I agree with you on the piracy front, and also on the plagiarism issue.