firstwriter.com's database of book publishers includes details of 2,009 English language publishers that don't charge authors any fees for publishing their books. The database is continually updated: there have been 34 listings added or updated in the last month. With over a dozen different ways to narrow your search you can find the right publisher for your book, fast.
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Academic publisher Springer Nature has unveiled what it claims is the first research book generated using machine learning.
The book, titled Lithium-Ion Batteries: A Machine-Generated Summary of Current Research, isn’t exactly a snappy read. Instead, as the name suggests, it’s a summary of peer-reviewed papers published on the topic in question. It includes quotations, hyperlinks to the work cited, and automatically generated references contents. It’s also available to download and read for free if you have any trouble getting to sleep at night.
Arcadia Publishing has agreed to acquire a “significant” majority interest in the New Orleans–based house Pelican Publishing. The purchase, due close in May, will be the first acquisition since Michael and Lili Lynton and David Steinberger formed a group to buy regional publishers and bought Arcadia last May.
As a San Diego high school student in the early 1970s, Rick Christian was frustrated when he heard radio commercials for best-sellers that ended with the words “available wherever books are sold.”
The books he wanted to read — Bibles, concordances and other Christian works — were hard to find in regular bookstores.
“I thought, ‘Someday I would love for Christian books to be available wherever books are sold,’” he said. In 1989, he set out to make that dream a reality as founder of Colorado Springs, Colo.-based Alive Literary Agency.
As publishing ambitions go, they don’t come much loftier than those held by Rana DiOrio. In 2009, DiOrio—a lawyer, investment banker, and private equity investor—founded Little Pickle Press, a cutting edge children’s book publisher dedicated to “helping parents and educators cultivate conscious, responsible children through media, technologies, and techniques.” Her latest venture, Creative Mint, is arguably her most cutting edge yet: it seeks to leverage the power of blockchain technology to “democratize and decentralize” rights transactions.
The platform that underlines bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, blockchain is already taking a transformative role in supply chain management, music licensing, and even health care recordkeeping. And the publishing world is intrigued, as evidenced by a packed session at last year’s London Book Fair that detailed both the technology’s significant promise—and its myriad challenges—for authors and publishers. But blockchain enthusiasts like DiOrio are convinced that the technology will have a transformative impact on publishing—and DiOrio’s track record suggests she enjoys good odds for success with Creative Mint.
Articles
This is a story about a book that just kept selling, catching publishers, booksellers and even its author off guard. In seeking to understand the reasons for the book’s unusually protracted shelf life, we uncover important messages about our moment in history, about the still-vital place of reading in our culture, and about the changing face of publishing.
The book is Sapiens, by the Israeli academic Yuval Noah Harari, published in the UK in September 2014. It’s a recondite work of evolutionary history charting the development of humankind through a scholarly examination of our ability to cooperate as a species. Sapiens sold well on publication, particularly when it came out in paperback in the summer of 2015. What’s remarkable about it, though, is that it’s still selling in vast numbers. In its first two and a half years of life, Sapiens sold just over 200,000 copies in the UK. Since 2017, when Harari published Homo Deus, his follow-up, Sapienshas sold a further half million copies, establishing itself firmly at the top of the bestseller lists (and convincingly outselling its sequel). Sapiens has become a publishing phenomenon and its wild success is symptomatic of a broader trend in our book-buying habits: a surge in the popularity of intelligent, challenging nonfiction, often books that are several years old.
In April 2011, Marion Grace Woolley found her first publisher through firstwriter.com's database of publishers. A year later, she has published three books with two different publishers, both from our listings.
Never judge a book by its cover. So the saying goes, yet consumers do it all the time. Every publisher and bookseller knows that covers sell books. But do consumers also form expectations from looking at the cover? Well, based on the results of some of the initial reader analytics data at Jellybooks, we think they do.
Signing a contract with even a brand-name traditional book publisher initially feels like a ticket to Nirvana. You may expect, for example, your new publisher to set you up with a big fat advance, a multi-city promotional tour, your very own personal PR rep and multiple copies of your book on every bookshelf in the nation (and Canada) for as long as you and your book shall live.
But to understand how book publishers really work, study this list of what I call the four great “myths” of traditional book publishing. Then, by all means, proceed to seek out a publisher if that’s your goal but do so with your eyes wide open. Your relationship with your publisher will run much smoother if you recognize its pitfalls as well as its glories.
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