If there's one constant in the news industry it's that there's no end to bad coverage on any given topic, including ebooks. Sometimes the bad reporting is the result...
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When the Publisher Drops the Ball, Or, YA Author Pulls Debut Novel Following Criticism of Its Depiction of Slavery
Q: When is an outrage not an outrage? A When the publisher screws up, and hands reviewers a book that wasn't ready. The hot story this week in the...
Continue readingThe Authors Guild Claims Author Income is Down
Sorry to keep beating an old drum, but a new survey report on author incomes was released late last week, and it is just as useless as the previous...
Continue readingPSA: Good e-Reader Fact-Check
It has come to my attention that there is still some doubt as to whether a certain blog has a reputation for being less than reliable with its reporting...
Continue readingReport Shows Retired UK Authors Are Earning Less Than the Minimum Wage
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...
Continue readingSurvey 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...
Continue readingQuartz 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...
Continue readingWatch 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...
Continue readingA 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...
Continue readingHow 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...
Continue readingMillennial 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....
Continue readingRepublican 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...
Continue readingForbes 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...
Continue readingUpdated: 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...
Continue readingAmazon 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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