Book subscriptions are showing little sign of slowing down after their boom during lockdown, those behind the services say, despite a spike in the cost of living. Read more
The subscription newsletter platform Substack announced on Wednesday it had signed an exclusive deal with Salman Rushdie - but he is just the latest in a growing number of authors making the leap to write serialised fiction delivered straight to the inboxes of subscribers who pay a monthly fee.
Can a ‘gateway to worldwide subscription services' for self-published authors up the ante for those services? Two Danes think curating indies is the way forward.
Love conquers all ... and it's certainly causing problems for the online book subscription service Scribd, which has announced it is slashing its romance and erotica offer because readers are gorging themselves. Read more
Penguin Random House UKPenguin Random House have more than 50 creative and autonomous imprints, publishing the very best books for all audiences, covering fiction, non-fiction, poetry, children’s books, autobiographies and much more. Click for Random House UK Publishers References listing CEO Tom Weldon might not have understood the subscription business model in November 2014, but that hasn't stopped him from signing a deal to distribute audiobooks to Scribd as well as the Danish subscription ebook service, Mofibo.
In October of last year, news broke on The Digital Reader that Adobe Digital Editions was taking a significant amount of user data and sending it back to their servers. Adobe Digital Editions (ADE) is a program that allows readers to put ebooks onto their reading devices from retailers and libraries alike. Read more
"BEWARE of the person of one book," said Thomas Aquinas, a medieval friar and author. The risk of encountering such unscholarly types is rarer in modern times. Digital devices can hold dozens of e-books, so people can carry around a whole shelf of reading material with them. Read more
EbooksDigital bookstore selling wide range of ebooks in 50 categories from Hildegard of Bingen to How to Write a Dirty Story and showing how the range of ebooks available is growing. http://www.ebooks.com/ are feeling a bit hungover heading into the new year. The 50 Shades of Grey exuberance of 2011 and 2012 feels long ago. The first seemingly viable ebook subscription services launched at the end of 2013 (Scribd, Oyster) and Amazon launched its own ebook subscription service, Kindle Unlimited, mid-2014. Read more
Publishers have expressed outrage that their titles were included in Amazon's Kindle Unlimited subscription service against their wishes when it launched in the UK last week. Read more
Unpublished authors 18 years old or over resident in the UK.
Entry fee £8
Prize:
Book contract with HQ with advance of £7,500 and agent representation
The Primadonna Prize for unsigned and un-agented authors will, for the first time, offer the winner a book contract with HQ with an advance of £7,500 for world English rights. Read more
‘It's a big part of the job. Being able to put yourself in their shoes is really important. I'm not a writer, but I watch a lot of author content online and I read a lot of stuff from authors. Having that perspective is really important for me to be able to give my authors context. Their emotions are important. If they're disappointed we didn't sell, so am I.
Something interesting has been going on in publishing this year. Not the thumping increases in overall revenue - up 5 per cent to £6.7 billion across digital and physical books in the UK and Ireland. And not the surge in export markets: despite Brexit, exports are up 8 per cent to English language domains. Read more
People from many different industries have watched the rapid erosion of Twitter. While it remains up and running as of this date, millions of people have abandoned or shut down their accounts for reasons ranging from owner Elon Musk's reinstatement of former president Donald Trump's account to overall disenchantment with the role social media plays in our lives.
"Everyone always asks, so here you go," Aaliyah Aroha wrote in the caption of what would go on to become one of her most popular TikTok videos. She appears, lip-syncing to a song from the app-favorite Unofficial Bridgerton Musical and holding a stack of books, as the words "Enemies to Lovers book recommendations" float overhead. Read more
It was a dreary day in October, and the baby that was supposed to have arrived was already late. Maybe that means nothing to you, but to me, it meant that my out-of-office had long ago gone up and instead of holding my new baby, I was Googling the rates of stillbirth for post-term infants and the mortality rate of the women who carried them. Read more
At 91, Robert Gottlieb is perhaps the most acclaimed book editor of his time. He started out in 1955 and has been working in publishing ever since - serving as editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and The New Yorker. The list of authors he's edited include Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, John le Carré, Katharine Graham, Bill Clinton, Nora Ephron and Michael Crichton.
Author and screenwriter Fay Weldon has died "peacefully" at the age of 91, her agent Georgina Capel has confirmed.
The writer was best known for her novels exploring society and class. She penned more than 30, including The Life and Loves of a She-Devil (Sceptre) and Praxis (Coronet), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
Happy New Year, book lovers! For me, January 1st came and went like a flash, and my TBR pile hasn't budged one iota since the start of 2022. Not ONE. SINGLE. MILLIMETER. In fact, it's grown even taller. And the pileup on my e-reader? At this stage it's reached monumental proportions-a traffic jam of delectable books just waiting to be unleashed.
'Writing a novel can feel like hacking away at a rock face - and it takes two or three years - whereas short-story writing is much faster. Either it arrives or it doesn't.'