somersault

Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) reports that “unit sales of print books fell just over 9% in 2012 at outlets tracked by Nielsen BookScan, roughly the same percentage decline posted between 2010 and 2011."

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The Globe and Mail’s (@globeandmail) John Barber (@JohnBarber14) thinks “the true dinosaurs of the new age are authors.”

Once happily enclosed in the “stables” of publishers willing to nurture and develop their talent, even if they never wrote a major bestseller, droves of so-called “mid-list” authors now find themselves roaming among the ever-present throng of wannabes flogging unpublished work in an indifferent market. And that throng is most likely to produce tomorrow’s bestsellers, even if they begin life as obscure, self-published digital texts that, only after they find a following, are taken up and heavily marketed to mainstream prominence by major publishing houses.

Many mid-list authors have fallen victim to increasingly sophisticated, widely available sales data, according to agents and publishers. Publishers can now assess every author’s lifelong sales thanks to such services as Nielsen Bookscan in the United States and BookNet Canada.

And once reduced to pure numbers, those track records determine the fate of proven writers looking for cash advances to begin their next books. “Everybody knows the numbers now,” Toronto literary agent Denise Bukowski said in an interview. “You can’t lie about the numbers.” Retailers don’t order books from authors whose previous work sold indifferently, she added, so publishers respond by cutting them loose.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Author Mark Sullivan (@MarkSullivanBks) shares his learning experiences writing novels with James Patterson. Sullivan says, “I thought I knew what I was doing when it came to commercial fiction. Working with Patterson, however, I discovered quickly that I didn’t.”

Characters, especially heroes and villains, were to be thought about carefully. They had to be human, above all, and then we had to subject them to terrible ordeals that took them to the brink of their capacities and beyond….

Exposition was severely limited. The old adage—show, not tell—was critical, and the element of surprise was paramount….

The sum of this advice was to sacrifice all for the story and the characters. Outlines were trusted navigational charts, yet we were free to sail in other directions as the novel evolved. But if you were going to change something, it had to be a terrific change….

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “James Patterson Explains Why His Books Sell Like Crazy.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Christine D. Johnson, editor of Christian Retailing (@ChristianRetail), summarizes the year in Christian publishing: “Fiction marks a first-printing milestone; heavenly nonfiction still tops.”

Nonfiction titles including new release To Heaven and Back by Dr. Mary C. Neal (WaterBrook Press) and 2010 title Heaven Is for Real by Todd Burpo (Thomas Nelson) continued their heavenly sales in 2012.

Jesus Calling by missionary Sarah Young remained strong on best-seller lists, leading the way for her new devotional title, Jesus Today (both Nelson).

Thomas Nelson drew media attention in a different way upon choosing to pull David Barton’s The Jefferson Lies from publication after it reached The New York Times best-seller status. The decision was made after alleged historical inaccuracies came to light.

Pastor Rick Warren tailored his top book for a generation of readers who were too young to read it when it was first published. In November, Zondervan released The Purpose Driven Life: What on Earth Am I Here For?, celebrating the 10th anniversary of the original release.

New nonfiction imprints added by publishers this year include Tyndale Momentum (@TyndaleMomentum) (Tyndale House Publishers), Passio (Charisma House Book Group), Jericho Books (Hachette Book Group), Convergent Books (Crown Publishing Group), and Praxis and Crescendo (InterVarsity Press).

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

The Oxford Dictionaries (@OUPAcademic) USA Word of the Year for 2012 is GIF (pronounced with either a soft or hard “G”). GIF the noun has been around for years. GIF the verb (“He GIFed the highlights of the debate”) is derived from GIF the file extension.

“The GIF, a compressed file format for images that can be used to create simple, looping animations, turned 25 this year,” notes Oxford University Press’ Katherine Martin, “but like so many other relics of the 80s, it has never been trendier.” (Listen to Studio 360’s (@Studio360show) “'Tis the Season for GIF-ing.”

Word of the Year runners-up include Eurogeddon, Higgs boson, MOOC (massive open online course), nomophobia (anxiety caused by being without one’s mobile phone), super PAC, superstorm, and YOLO (you only live once). Oxford Dictionaries also announced its British “Word of the Year”: omnishambles. Officially defined as a situation “characterized by a string of blunders and miscalculations.”

Read the USA Word of the Year announcement in full.

Read the UK Word of the Year announcement in full.

In its 23rd annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society (@americandialect) selected "hashtag" as the 2012 word of the year. Hashtag refers to the practice used on Twitter for marking topics or making commentary by means of a hash or number symbol (#) followed by a word or phrase (#WOTY12).

If you’re a word lover, also see our previous blogposts,

• “'Lolz', 'Ridic' and 'Mwahahaha' Added to Oxford Dictionaries Online”
• “Scrabble Champion Named”
• “The Story of English in 100 Words”
• “A Future of Fewer Words?”
• “Word Warriors' 2012 Top 10 Expressive Words”
• “Words of the Year 2011”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

NPR reporter Zoe Chace (@zchace) says conventional wisdom about publishing is that ebooks are destroying the business model.

People expect them to be cheaper than physical books, and that drives down prices. But the story's not that simple. For one thing, digital publishers have the same problem that record labels do: piracy. And there's just not the same stigma attached to pirating an ebook as there is to holding up a Barnes & Noble.

It turns out, though, that some publishers are doing pretty well despite the piracy problem.

Read this in full.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard.

On NPR Books (@nprbooks), correspondent Lynn Neary explains how self-publishing, once considered to have a negative connotation, has now become a legitimate endeavor.

Read the transcript in full.

The Wall Street Journal similarly covered the topic in its article, “’Vanity’ Press Goes Digital.” And read The Globe and Mail's "Goodbye vanity: Self-publishing goes mainstream."

Also see our previous blogpost, “Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book,” and others in our Self-Publishing archive.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Publishers tab.

The New York Times (@nytimesbooks) book section asked people in and around the world of graphic design to name one of their favorite book covers from 2012 and briefly describe its appeal. Do you agree with their selection?

See all 19 covers.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Christian Publishing's 2012 Best Book Covers.”

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically design your book covers.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard, especially the Innovation tab.

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) reports that “another audiobook publisher is getting into the print and ebook business.”

Brilliance Audio, a division of Amazon (@amazon), will begin publishing hardcover, trade paperbacks, and ebook originals next year under the Grand Harbor Press inspiration imprint. Grand Harbor will focus on self-help and inspirational categories, and will release 10 titles in its first year.

An Amazon spokesperson said Brilliance is expanding its portfolio because readers are looking to a variety of formats for new works, and "we found the best way to serve our customers is to take the comprehensive approach of being a full-service publisher."

Earlier this year, Tantor Audio (@TantorAudio) began publishing print books and ebooks to accompany its audiobooks.

Grand Harbor Press’s tagline is “Be inspired. Be enlightened. Be happy.”

Read this in full.

It will be interesting to see if booksellers will stock titles by Grand Harbor Press.

Contact Somersault (@smrsault) to help you strategically publish and market pbooks, ebooks, and audiobooks.

Learn about SomersaultSocial, our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

Add our Facebook page (http://facebook.com/SomersaultGroup) & Twitter stream (http://twitter.com/smrsault) to your Flipboard account on your iPad, iPhone, or Android. 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Book Discovery Sites tab.