In this second of two articles on a panel at Berlin’s Klopotek Publishers Forum, we hear from Michael Bhaskar, Nathan Hull, and Andreas Gall on the question of fandom and how the books industry can leverage it.
While some indie authors seem to see self-publishing as a crusade to convert other writers to their approach, other voices warn that lack of preparation and the sheer difficulty of the work are often understated and overlooked.
Amid writer-advocacy efforts this summer in the US and UK, the States’ Authors Guild’s new effort on contract reform reveals potent resistance from some in the indie author community.
A couple of decades after their inception — and three years after 2012’s fake book-review scandals — online consumer-written reviews are still a tricky topic. As a new investigation is launched in the UK and as new measures come into play at Amazon, author Jeremy Duns says that “fake reviews are still rife.”
Prescribed music as a boy to curtail his nightmares, Michel van der Aa today is one of Europe’s most compelling auteurs. His newly recorded Violin Concerto lives, he tells us in Music for Writers, in the performance of Janine Jansen. “She grabs you by the collar.”
As the authors’ community puzzles over what to expect when Amazon’s mighty Kindle Direct Publishing loan programs change payout strategies, readers may be able to look forward to better writing meant to hold their interest.
In a rich signal of a maturing self-publishing sector, the author Hugh Howey opens a new dialog on the unthinkable: the importance of quality control — if the readership writers need is to be expanded.
In launching its “Fair Contract Initiative,” the Authors Guild intends to take advantage of the new digitally enabled rapport between writers and their readers, calling readers’ attention to what it says are publishing contracts long unfair to their favorite writers.
The NOW Ensemble’s new ‘Dreamfall’ album gives us a chance to hear new music from composer John Supko, whose ‘divine the rest’ is a “generative” work — different each time its human musicians and computer software get together to make some Music For Writers.
Famed in China for his work’s sexual sensibilities — “almost my trademark” — author Feng Tang’s ‘Beijing, Beijing’ is available for the first time in English, in a translation by Michelle Deeter from AmazonCrossing. A celebrity at home among the boyfriends and girlfriends he writes about, Feng calmly tells us that his newest novel “will sell one million copies.”