When I wrote about a recent survey of Canadian author income last week, I pointed out that this type of report is almost always flawed in that the survey...
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Category: DeBunking
Survey of Canadian Author Incomes Shows Retired Authors Aren’t Earning Much
One of the favorite pastimes of the publishing community is sharing author income survey reports, and wringing hands over the results. The reports are usually bullshit for various reasons (more...
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Quartz Uses AI-Written Article to Show Problems With AI-Generated Fiction
There's a lot of hype surrounding AI right now, and not much in the way of substance. In many cases a purported AI system is little more than a...
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Watch as the Legacy Publishing Industry Invents a New Myth (Why Fiction Sales Are Down)
Remember a few weeks back when I mocked Publishers Weekly for using AAP revenue stats to ask the question why fiction sales were down? (It was in a Morning...
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A Million Indie Titles Were Published Last Year, and Other Nonsense
There are two frequently repeated misconceptions about the ebook market that continue to be repeated no matter how often they are debunked. The first is that AAP publisher ebook...
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How to Misuse Stats and Cite Bogus Projections, and Make the Publishing Industry Love You
Another one of those "ebooks didn't kill print" is being passed around again, and this one is far worse than the dreck we have been seeing about every five...
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Millennial Reading Habits Have Changed the Definition of a Classic , and Other Lazy Writing
Millennial-bashing is popular among the media, and this is a problem not just because it's lazy writing but also because sometimes it distracts from what is actually going on....
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Republican Congressional Candidate Shamed for Allegedly Writing Bigfoot Erotica
The 2018 election cycle has taken a turn for the obnoxious. There's a story going around that the candidate for a Congressional district in central Virginia has written about...
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Forbes Deleted That Ridiculous Anti-Library Piece
On Saturday Forbes published a poorly-researched, badly-argued piece that failed to convince anyone that Amazon Books stores should replace public libraries. According to Quartz, the piece was deleted Monday...
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Updated: Amazon Books Should Replace Local Libraries, and Other Publisher-Serving “Solutions”
Do you know how companies sometimes like to buy editorials that support their position (I see this a lot in the WSJ), or even go so far as to...
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Amazon Claims to Accurately Measure Pages Read in Kindle Unlimited, Neglects to Mention There’s no Standard Page Size
Earlier this week Amazon released a statement tangential to the ongoing problem of cheating in Kindle Unlimited, but as with many of Amazon's statements the bigger story is what was...
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Authors, Don’t Be Taken in by the Blockchain/Bitcoin Hype
If you have been following tech news then you've probably heard the term blockchain mentioned more than once. This word is rarely explained in non-technical terms, but it is...
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Cockygate: Faleena Hopkins Has Registered a Trademark on Cocky, and is Using it to Threaten Other Romance Authors
Trademark bullying is a pox on industries ranging from breweries to whatever over-priced junk Monster Cable is making this week. A trademark bully's ostensible goal is to keep consumers...
Continue readingAmazon to Spend a Billion Dollars to License “The Three-Body Problem”?
The Three-Body Problem is one of those books that many people have heard of but few have read. Originally published in Chinese, the English translation of this SF novel...
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Major UK Booksellers Throw Up Their Hands When Accused of Selling Far-Right Titles
Remember last year when everyone wrung their hands over Amazon selling Holocaust denial books and completely ignored the fact that you could find those same books in just about...
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