The Places You Will Go

 

 

This week in Publishing News

 

It’s Queen’s Birthday Honours at the moment in the UK.

Arise Sir Quentin Blake (I can just imagine the fabulous illustrator's whimsy portrait of the event.) 

Arise Sir Ian Rankin- (Can I borrow that sword for my next murder mystery?) 

Across the pond the number one bestselling book is Oh, The Places You Will Go by Dr Suess. It must be graduation time. This illustrates the power of the Suess backlist for keeping publishers afloat.

 

Amazon is pulling out of China. They are shutting up shop for Kindle eReaders immediately and will close their e-bookstore and app down next year. Could be tricky times ahead if you sell into China.

 

This week the New Statesman business magazine published an article looking at the rise of independent bookshops and compared them with Amazon’s increasing prices for books.

Are they really losing out against bookshops? 

 

Publishing Perspectives reports on the latest numbers from Italy. Heading into Summer, visits to bookstores are up which means print sales are up. Everything is looking good but what is really behind the numbers… comics?

 

Publishers Weekly has an interesting report on the Readmagine conference, an annual publishing futures conference in Europe. The first sessions looked at current global trends in reading. There are lots of intriguing ideas to unpick here on reading, its communities, and opportunities to mix it up with other forms of communication and streaming, and its only day one! 

 

Mark Williams of The New Publishing Standard has an interesting opinion piece on how Kobo’s move to add the Arabic language, which I reported on last week, is a potential game changer for the predominantly English language based eBook industry.

 

Kris Rusch attended the 2022 Licensing Expo and shares her initial thoughts. If you can remember way back before Covid, Kris was fascinated by the opportunities licensing had for content creators (writers). She is still optimistic but cautionary.

 

Joanna Penn interviewed Tammi Lebrecque (NewsletterNinja) this week on The Creative Penn podcast. This is a power house interview that should be mandatory listening/reading for authors. Yes, I know it’s scary but you can adapt ideas for your genre.

 

Julie Issac has a written a great guest article on Sandra Beckwith’s Bookbuzz blog, When ‘good enough’ is not good enough. This is a thought provoking post on what not to do when you are thinking of adding value to your readers.

 

In the Craft Section,

9 ways to approach relationship dynamics in fiction- K M Weiland - Bookmark

The art and importance of ambiguous writing- Becca Puglisi

How to sharpen your first sentences- Carolyn Dennis- Willingham

5 solutions when you are stuck- Bang2Write- Bookmark

Your microcosm is our world- Donald Maass- Bookmark

4 tricks to transform scenes- Zena Dell Lowe

 

In the Marketing Section,

6 strategic benefits to publishing an ebook- Penny Sansevieri- Bookmark

7 ways to build an author platform- Reedsy

9 things learned from tracking 150k books on Amazon- Ingram- A deep dive into detail.

Prize ideas for book promo- Bookbub

6 ways an author bio sells books – Ruth Harris- Bookmark

 

To Finish,

The writer’s imagination - where would we be without it? Sometimes it lets us down, cue writer's block. Sometimes it keeps us up all night. Di Anne Mills has an interesting article on how we can enhance our imaginations, so our readers get a better experience from our writing.

 

 

Maureen

@craicer

 

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Pic: Photo by Rumman Amin on Unsplash