on Indie Kids Books:

Do you remember Y2K? When the century turned from 1900 to 2000, computer programs were in trouble. For many programs, the date had been programmed as 19__ and there was no easy way to re-program it to 20__ or just ____. The book industry is having its own version of a computer programming meltdown.

ISBN – International Standard Book Number

The ISBN is a unique identifying number assigned to a book title/format. That is, each format—hardcover, picture book, ebook, audiobook—needs its own identifying number. The number is tied to both the title and format.

About fifteen years ago, the 10-digit numbers that had been used since the inception of ISBNs was becoming too full. To alleviate this, the industry converted to 13-digit numbers, starting with 978. But they warned that when that series of numbers was used up, they’d move on to 979 and other series.

One of the worst crimes publishing scammers perpetrate on new authors is bullying them into buying junk “book marketing packages.” Often these cost astronomical fees — $10,000 and more.

The useless book marketing the scammers push involve Tweets (which haven’t sold books for over a decade), presence at book fairs (where they will be completely ignored), never-to-be-read news releases sent to random publications, and unwanted missives sent to bookstore owners who will toss them in the bin. Yes, even though the missives are printed on elegant, luxurious stock with gold leaf accents. That’s not how bookstore owners choose their inventory.

There are also paid interviews on podcasts and magazines with no audience, and reviews on sites nobody reads. Some of these places claim they have X number of social media followers, but the “followers” are usually paid for or stolen from Facebook profiles.

But you need marketing!! And you don’t…

On Kindlepreneur:

Have you ever been in this situation: you publish your book, you spend a lot of money on the cover, you spend even more money on advertisements to drive traffic to your book, you put a lot of time into writing the book description, not to mention the book itself, you put that book out into the world and…nothing.

Don’t worry, you are not alone.

Very often a book will have poor sales, and this can be extremely discouraging to authors. Sometimes there is little you can do about this, but other times there are glaring issues, that if corrected, can result in better sales.

That’s what we’re going to talk about today: how to diagnose a book’s sales problem.

I will give you a list of the top problems that authors run into, ideas on how to diagnose the problem, and potential solutions to these problems with…

on Writer Beware:

Hi, everyone. My name is Michael Capobianco, and although I’ve been an adjunct member of Writer Beware for some time now, this is my first official blog post.

I’m also the Chair of SFWA’s Contracts Committee, which means I see a lot of bad contracts, both for book-length and short fiction. I’ve gotten used to much of the unfortunate and often contradictory clauses in these contracts, but last week I ran into something that caught my attention: a virtually identical terrible clause in two separate small publishers’ book contracts, a clause that I had never seen before.

Both contracts were for original fiction, but aside from the fact that neither paid an advance, they looked fairly different from one another until they came to this clause. To save you any further suspense, here it is:

Continue reading HERE