There’s no escaping conflict in politics—or in publishing. The new normal in publishing means someone’s mad at Amazon, someone favors print over e-books or vice versa, and book sales are slowing or growing.  Before we get to the new normal, let’s look at what’s going on with literary agents and agenting In a blog post [...]

Happy New Year! I’ve organized this longer-than-usual post to optimize its usefulness. One section is dubbed “Last Year in Publishing,” another is “The Year Ahead,” and a third, in a shameless rip-off of Oprah, is “Your Best Writing Self.”  You’ll find information about traditional and  indie publishing, links to insiders and to those proud to call themselves [...]

Goodreads has acquired Discoverreads.com to recommend books to readers. It will be interesting to see how that works out. Penguin reports solid gains in the U.S. and the UK markets. Penguin CEO John Makinson credits digital books and books by Nora Roberts and Charlaine Harris. Harlequin reports that digital sales are up and print sales [...]

Looking for a holiday gift for a writer friend? The Writer’s Guide to Psychology: How to Write Accurately About Psychological Disorders, Clinical Treatment and Human Behavior by Carolyn Kaufman is available just in time for the holidays. You can read about it here. Amazon announced their fourth annual Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition. You can [...]

I have lots of links today, partly thanks to Jane Friedman (who shares links from Twitter) and Kristen Lamb’s blog on Social Media, which she publishes every Wednesday. Brenda Hiatt has updated her Show Me the Money! page. Mark Shatzkin posted a chart on royalties. As a bonus, there’s a debate about royalties in the [...]

Eighteen authors have banded together to form a collective at www.AWritersWork.com where they are selling e-book formats of previously released titles as well as new work. The list of authors includes Barbara Freethy, Holly Jacobs, Lori Handeland, Ken Casper, Patricia Rice, and more. How smart to keep the royalties for themselves, minus the costs of [...]

Is your agent entitled to a commission on your option book — even if you’ve fired the agent? Find the answer here. Nathan Bransford talks about dialogue tags. Best-selling writer David Morrell explains why he decided to go digital with out-of-print books and one new one. Morrell goes into deeper detail on J.A. Konrath’s blog. [...]

The last WordPress for Non-techies post is up on Romance University. Blogger Carrie Spencer’s next group of lessons will be for Super Bloggers. Here’s a fun site for writers: Wordnik, the online dictionary and language resource , has “launched a new, smarter online thesaurus that shows related words in context to help writers find the [...]

If you’re a coffee drinker, you’ll be happy to know that as of July 1st Starbucks will have free WIFI at all US locations. On Chuck Sambuchino’s Guide to Literary Agents blog, McIntosh & Otis agent Rebecca Strauss posted Allie Larkin’s query for her women’s fiction book, STAY, which Ms. Strauss ended up representing and [...]

With his agent’s permission, Boyd Morrison published 3 thrillers on Kindle and sold 7500 books in 3 months, which his agent used to sell to Simon & Schuster. Ballantine Books and Harlequin Teen “plan to issue short standalone digital works intended to serve as ‘bridges’ to coming novels.” Author Mitchell Reiss, a former diplomat, says [...]