Matt Haig: ‘People like your books more if other people like them’ Photo: Canongate
Novelist Matt Haig had an insightful and amusing list of things he has learned after ten years as a published author in The Telegraph:
Matt Haig: 30 things that every writer should know
Definitely worth a read if you’re a writer.
Amazon (Photo credit: edgeplot)
I’ve been too busy with a family wedding and a staycation for a proper post. But since I’ve written previously about the Dorchester Publishing bankruptcy, I wanted to mention this news: Amazon Publishing buys 1000 titles from Dorchester.
The best news for the authors involved is that Amazon is going to pay the authors their back royalties. This is about the best case scenario for these authors. Amazon could probably have negotiated to avoid this if they wanted to (they were the only bidder).
I’m sure this will buy Amazon much goodwill. I’m curious to see if there’s any way that the anti-Amazon crowd can spin this into something negative. I don’t see how, but they can be quite creative.
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Boston, Massachusetts (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Another publisher bankruptcy. I saw this last Friday in this post on the Passive Voice blog: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Enters Bankruptcy Process.
The article blames the bankruptcy on debt from leveraged buyouts in 2006 and 2007. It seems they were in trouble almost right away, having temporarily stopped acquiring new books in 2008. No mention of e-books or self-publishing playing a role.
This also seems a bit unusual in that a Chapter 11 deal was pre-negotiated with over 70% of senior lenders and bondholders (those with first dibs on assets in a liquidation) to convert their $3.1B debt to equity. I suspect the “negotiation” was along the lines of “your only alternative is to take five cents on the dollar in a liquidation” (they have $135M cash on hand, 4.4% of their debt; not sure of other assets but the lawyers and accountants would chew up a large chunk).
No word on what their current shareholders think of this massive dilution in their investment. But again, it’s likely a case of “you can take a haircut or a beheading.” Continue reading
Writer Wordart (Photo credit: MarkGregory007)
What am I? A writer? An author? Aspiring or actual?
In an earlier post I mentioned the issue of “aspiring writer” versus just “writer”, and chose to refer to myself as aspiring, because I’m not yet published.
Joel Friedlander has a different point of view, described in his post From Writer to Author to Publisher to Marketer. He says that we are a writer when we start writing, and we become an author when we’ve finished writing a book. Makes sense. I’ll go with his definition of author. Of course his main point is that self-publishers have to also become publishers and marketers (although if the progression is from author to publisher and then marketer, I would have reversed the evolution image at the top of the article 8^).
Now this third article I hesitated to link, Continue reading
