Weekly News Roundup for April 17th
Here’s this week’s publishing and writing news.
Amazon is dealing with backlash over the removal of gay and lesbian lit books from their sales rank statistics. Their reason? They’ve deemed them “adult” content. The big question now is why they didn’t do the same for a collection of Playboy centerfolds? An article over on The Guardian offers a good overview. Here’s Amazon’s response to the whole thing (they’re calling it a glitch on their part) and here’s another article where a hacker/troll is claiming responsibility (though Amazon appears to deny this claim). The whole thing has been one giant mess, but I’m glad to see it’s being sorted out. Here’s another article from seattlepi.com that offers up an insider’s account of what happened.
Write to Done has a great post about energizing your creative writing.
If you follow me on Facebook, you may have already seen this one. Fast Company had a short article about HarperStudio, a newish imprint from Harper Collins. It’s a very interesting business model and hopefully one that will catch on.
My favorite post on this blog this week was Why Self Published Books Fail. It’s a look at the reasons why so many self published books tend not to do as well as those put out by traditional publishers. And here’s a hint: it’s not because they’re self published.
