I read Publisher’s Weekly every week as part of my job. There’s always a little graph showing the ups and downs of book sales. Sometimes there is good news and overall sales are up. Sometimes sales are down. But almost every week there’s one figure that constantly declines, and it’s been doing so for years….
Tag: Readers
Plotting Whiplash
I remember reading Stephen R. Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever as a teen and feeling frustrated. At the time, I didn’t have the experience to define the source of that frustration, but later in life I was able to put my finger on it. I was reading good-sized books about epic fantasy adventures,…
Addictive Storytelling
The other day I downloaded a book from Amazon onto my Kindle and began to read. About 50 pages in, I suddenly got a vague sense of deja vu, and as I read further, I kept getting that feeling and it kept getting stronger. Finally, about halfway through I couldn’t escape the realization that I’d…
How to Keep Your Newsletter from Sucking (Part Two)
When I left you on January 8th, I promised to tell you how to build your mailing list and actually sell books using your newsletter, after I screamed about people doing just that on the last post. But I promise to also share with you just how to do it without people hating you. But…
Writing Shorter
Romance Writers of America recently had an article in their online newsletter about the impact of e-books on the book market. As someone who buys e-books for a library (and helps people set up apps to access them), I can definitely say that even if sales of e-books are down slightly, the number of readers…