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A report in Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) says “Barnes & Noble is phasing out its PubIt! self-publishing service and relaunching it as NOOK Press, an upgraded ebook self-publishing platform offering an array of new services to authors and publishers.”

B&N is partnering with the self-publishing platform FastPencil (@fastpencil) to supply NOOK Press with its proprietary online authoring technology, while also offering FastPencil authors access to a variety of marketing opportunities via B&N’s NOOK platform.

While B&N is encouraging PubIt! authors to synch their accounts to new NOOK Press accounts, B&N is also planning to phase out new PubIt! accounts and transition new self-publishers to the NOOK Press platform, which essentially builds on PubIt! by adding new services. Indeed, sales of self-published ebooks continue to grow on the NOOK Platform and the company said they represent about 25% of all ebook sales on NOOK devices. According to B&N, PubIt! titles grow by about 20% each quarter and general self-published titles offering through the NOOK are growing by 24% each quarter.

Read this in full.

Read the news release.

Also read our previous blogpost, "Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book."

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

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), our Web-based author online marketing education modules.

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Publishing professional Mike Shatzkin (@MikeShatzkin) writes on his blog about the news that Hyperion plans to sell off its “backlist” to focus its attention on new titles it will develop in conjunction with its corporate cousins at Disney and ABC. He says this follows Wiley’s selling a lot of the most bookstore-dependent parts of its list, including the sale of Frommer’s Guides to Google, in 2012.

Both Hyperion and Wiley are showing us what the publisher of the near future is going to look like. They will be more focused. They will be shedding overheads so they can expand or shrink their offerings more readily to respond to opportunities and circumstances. They will be less dependant on the trade bookstore and book review trade networks. And Hyperion’s decision says something more about the future that Wiley’s doesn’t: book publishing will increasingly be an activity operating in tandem with or in service of other objectives of the owning organization. (There is a parallel here in retailing, where Amazon and Google and Apple fit this description, and Kobo and Barnes & Noble do not.)

...the current state-of-the-art for merchandising and presentation of books online is not very helpful to backlist. Most retailers return a limited number of books (10 or 20) per screen to any query. Customers have limited patience for refreshing screens, so the number of titles an online purchaser “browses through” is far fewer than the number that would catch the same eyes in an equivalent amount of time in a store. This appears to be pushing sales more and more to newer books and books on bestseller lists.

This problem of concentration will probably just get worse as mobile devices become more ubiquitous and the shopping takes places on ever-smaller screens.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, “Publishing Must Reinvent Itself.”

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

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), 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. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

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.

The People’s E-Book (@peoples_e) is a new epublishing service being built by Greg Albers, the founder and publisher of Hol Art Books (@holartbooks) with funds from 920 investors through Kickstarter. It will be a DIY tool anyone can use for free.

The People's E-Book seeks to be a lab, an incubator, an e-book creation platform for artists, authors, and alternative presses who want to try new things, publish new books, and push into new territories. The People's E-Book will handle ebooks of all sizes and scope, but it will excel in areas that no one else has cared to consider — the very small, the quick and dirty, the simple and the experimental.

The People’s E-book is a super-simple online tool with an intuitive visual interface to allow anyone to make e-books quickly and for free. This is barebones ebook publishing. What the photocopier was to zines, we hope The People’s E-book will be to digital books.

Read this in full.

Also see our previous blogpost, "Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book."

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

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), 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. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

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.

The website BuzzFeed (@BuzzFeed) offers to re-title a few Dr. Seuss books based on their possible underlying meanings. Perhaps the exercise shows how important the correct title is to the success of a book ☺

The Butter Battle Book ≈ The Tragic Futility of the Nuclear Arms Race!

The Sneetches and Other Stories ≈ Racists and Other Stories

The Cat in the Hat ≈ The Virtues of Autonomy, Efficiency, and Skepticism

The Lorax ≈ The Importance of Environmental Awareness in Industrialized Society

Yertle the Turtle ≈ Why Hitler is Dangerous and Other Stories

How the Grinch Stole Christmas ≈ The Psychological Implications of Holiday-Motivated Materialism

Green Eggs and Ham ≈ How Fear of the Unknown Hinders the Developmnet of Informed Opinions

Horton Hears a Who ≈ The Inherent Ethical Issues of Isolationism!

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), 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. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

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.

O’Reilly’s Tools of Change 2013 (@toc) (#toccon) kicked off Feb. 12 with the first-ever Author (R)evolution Day, cosponsored by Publishers Weekly, designed to inform authors, content creators, agents, and indie author service providers about the promotion of books in the digital age. Blogger and author Cory Doctorow brought up the concept of the “hybrid author” — the author who publishes traditionally and self-publishes.

One of the most talked about points of the day was discovery. During an afternoon panel, Kobo’s Mark Lefebvre started by saying to authors: “Don’t wonder how you will get discovered — think about what you're going to do to deserve being discovered.”

The panelists agreed that author investment is very often tied to author discovery. In relation to social media, Elizabeth Keenan of Penguin’s publicity department said, “It’s a full-time job to make it work.” (See our SomersaultSocial training program for authors.)

Lefebvre said the most important thing in getting someone to buy a book is still the opinion of someone the reader trusts, and all panelists agreed that — especially in the digital age when curation becomes more and more important — getting reviews for your book is essential.

The “power of free” was discussed; attracting your audience by offering them something, whether it be an excerpt or author expertise on a subject, and giving that audience an answer to the question every reader asks when picking up a book: “What’s in it for me?”

Read this in full.

See TOC articles tagged Author (R)evolution Day.

Read coverage by Good E-Reader (@Goodereader).

Also see our previous blogpost, "Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book."

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), 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. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

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.

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) reports, “Stepping up its support of self-published and independently published books, the Apple iBookstore has launched a new category called Breakout Books.”

While the iBookstore has always accepted self-published works, the new iBookstore category gives publishers and authors a new platform for marketing and promoting their books and highlights both the growing sales of self-published titles and the increasing significance of the category.

Read this in full.

From The New York Times (@mediadecodernyt):

“Apple is helping to shape a brighter, more democratized future for book publishing,” said Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords, a leading distributor of digital books.

Read this in full.

The bulk of the titles featured in the Breakout Books promotion are distributed by Smashwords. Read all about it on Mark Coker’s (@markcoker) blogpost, “Smashwords Authors Gain Seat at the Merchandising Table with the Apple iBookstore’s Breakout Books Promotion.”

Also see our previous blogposts, “Can Ebooks Succeed Without Amazon?,” “A New Publishing Ecosystem Emerges,” and “Guy Kawasaki's New Self-Publishing Instruction Book.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), 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. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

Get our blogposts delivered into your email inbox.

And be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard; especially the Publishers tab, which includes links to Self-Publisher services.

The book The 10-Second Rule (@The10secondrule) (#T10SR) by Clare De Graaf (@ClareDeGraaf), has just been released by Simon & Schuster (Howard Books). Somersault helped Clare self-publish the book prior to Simon & Schuster taking it on.

Clare explains the book’s origin this way:

Years ago I noticed that during the course of my day I’d have these impressions to do something I was reasonably certain Jesus wanted me to do. It could be an impression to either do something good for someone or a warning about a sin I was about to commit. It might be to stop for a car broken down on the highway, speak to a co-worker about Jesus, or simply turn off my computer before I ended up at a site where no Christian should go.

Almost simultaneously I would sense another voice whispering to me. “You don’t have time to do that – helping that person could get messy – you can’t afford to help them right now – it’s okay, one more time won’t kill you – send it, you’ve been wronged!”

If I listened to this other voice and thought about it long enough, the moment for obedience would pass, often to my relief. It finally dawned on me that by procrastinating, I was unintentionally teaching myself the habit of disobedience. Why is that?

Read this in full.

Congratulations, Clare!

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), 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. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

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.

HarperCollinsChristianPublishing, comprised of both Thomas Nelson, Inc. (@ThomasNelson) and Zondervan (@Zondervan), is now making its titles available through On Demand Books’ (@espressobook) growing Espresso Book Machine (EBM) “digital-to-print at retail” sales channel.

Tom Knight, HarperCollinsChristianPublishing senior vice president of sales, says, “The Espresso Book Machine will significantly enhance a customer’s in-store experience by giving bricks-and-mortar retailers the ability to offer an almost endless supply of books.”

The EBM is the only digital-to-print at-retail solution on the market today. With the push of a button, a title can be printed with a full-color cover, bound, and trimmed to any standard size. In a matter of minutes, it emerges from the EBM as a bookstore-quality paperback book, which the customer can pay for and carry out the store immediately.

Content from publishers is fed to the EBM via EspressNet, On Demand Books’ growing digital network of titles (currently numbering over 7 million). Much like an iTunes for books, EspressNet retrieves, encrypts, transmits, and catalogs books from a multitude of English and foreign language content providers, including public domain, in-copyright, and self-published titles. Through the SelfServe software, writers can format, design, edit, and upload their books for printing through the EBM, and for inclusion in EspressNet. SelfServe will soon also be able to convert print files to the ePub format suitable for ereaders.

Read this in full.

See the pdf news release.

See the pdf news release, “Penguin Titles Coming to an Espresso Book Machine Near You.”

Also see our blogposts tagged “Print on Demand” and “A New Publishing Ecosystem Emerges.”

Download our white paper, “Tech, Trends, & Retail Success: See the Future and Act Now,” in which we detail the elements of creating extreme retail in-store experiences.

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

Learn about SomersaultSocial (@SomersaultHelp), 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. Or download our blog as an ebook to your ereader (http://goo.gl/3nTtN). 

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.

The annual Digital Book World Conference (@DigiBookWorld) (#DBW13) has concluded. DBW editorial director Jeremy Greenfield (@JDGsaid) offers a quick summary:

Publishers are grappling with the possibility that bookstores might not exist in the future; that some authors have a very low opinion of them; that agents are pushing them for more advantageous contract terms for their clients; that the landscape of book discovery is changing; and much more.

See DBW’s links to coverage of the event. (Digital Book World’s YouTube channel | Slideshare site)

Photos and tweets on Eventifier

Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly): Kobo, Book Discovery and More at Digital Book World 2013

GoodEReader (@Goodereader): My Thoughts on Digital Book World 2013 by Paul Biba (@paulkbiba) and complete coverage

Publishing Perspectives (@pubperspectives): 3 Key Ideas from Digital Book World 2013

Education, Publishing, & Technology (@toddols) summaries: Day One | Day Two

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. 

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Two journalism professors from Christian universities have teamed up to make a short ebook for iPad or iPhone that uses interactive content to help new writers snag a byline.

A One-Step Guide to a Byline is designed for new writers who want to know the bare minimum for writing an article for the popular press. It uses roll-over features, an interactive quiz, and 8 videos to help writers succeed, says Michael Ray Smith, project director and professor of communication from Campbell University, Buies Creek, NC.

Smith joined Wally Metts (@wallymetts), director of graduate studies in communication at Spring Arbor University, Spring Arbor, MI, to make a fun, user-friendly book with enhanced content about the basics of writing. The “one-step” is finding the essential conflict that drives a good story.

Read this in full.

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

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.