Author Archives: Laura Hazard Owen

Welcome, Daily Dish Readers

If you are coming to us through the Daily Dish, welcome! Learn more about Publishing Trends and book publishing consultancy Market Partners International here. Here are some articles from our archives that you may enjoy: How to Get a Job in Publishing Taking on Ebook Bestsellers and how we beat the New York Times The…Continue Reading

Bloggers Weigh In on the Kindle Swindle and New Fraud

Our story and Mike Essex’s original post have sparked discussion across the Web (oh yeah, and the spammers weighed in too). Ben Metcalfe wonders why Amazon “continues to prioritize on penalizing its customer base [shutting down sites like Lendle, for instance] while practically ignoring the rampant content abuse and fraud that is going on further…Continue Reading

The Kindle Swindle

Now that Google has gone after content farms, the next frontier for spammers is e-books. Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Koozai, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote…Continue Reading

What a Load of…Content

Google was getting worse. Complaints about its search results began to appear regularly online slightly over a year ago. In December 2009, venture capitalist Paul Kedrosky blogged about the difficulty of finding helpful dishwasher reviews online. He said the experience reminded him of the pre-Google era when search was “completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.”…Continue Reading

The New Review

The once-staid Kirkus is launching an iPad-centered initiative; BlueInk Reviews is helping the industry find the best self-published titles; and a mysterious startup based on a Rotten Tomatoes-like site for books is crashing in the Simon & Schuster building. This is the book review in 2011. Kirkus Reviews Kirkus (which was acquired a year ago…Continue Reading

TOC 2011: Making Better Apps

“Value-Added Apps” brought Gus Balbontin, Global Innovation Manager of Lonely Planet; Michel Kripalani, President of app publisher Oceanhouse Media; and Pete Myers, co-creator of the BirdsEye iPhone app, ogether with moderator Neal Hoskins, founder of digital publisher WingedChariot, to discuss the current challenges and opportunities of app development. (One challenge: Toddlers! We’ll get to that…Continue Reading

Taking on E-Book Bestsellers

In November, the New York Times announced that it would begin publishing e-book bestseller lists (fiction and nonfiction) in early 2011. “We wanted to be able to tell our readers which titles were selling and how they fit together with print sales,” said Janet Elder, NYT Editor of News Surveys and Election Analysis. The tracking…Continue Reading

Bestselling E-Books, 2/1/2011

Methodology: We calculated each title’s points score based on its position on the respective e-book retailer’s top sellers list, that retailer’s market share, and the average sales ratio between each title in the print book hardcover fiction lists for the past 20 weeks (based on Nielsen BookScan data). Market share was tricky to calculate, especially…Continue Reading

Holiday Books Survey Results Are In

For more results from this survey, check out Book-Giving Etiquette Guide and I Love You, Keith Richards. “My siblings assume that every book I get is free, so they expect books AND a ‘real present.’” “Any time I give a book, I fear it will be assumed that I did not pay for it, so…Continue Reading