If it’s February it must be the Amar Ekushey Boi Mela in Bangladesh, an annual festival of books that runs the entire month of February. Last year the boi mela sold books to the USD equivalent of just shy of $10 million. But hands up anyone who has Bangladesh on their book market bucket list? Read More …
With the announcement in December that Amazon-owned Audible was sponsoring the prestigious Sunday Times Short Story Award came the prospect that the winners would not just earn some extra cash but would have their entries published as an audiobook that would reach a still wider audience. Which all sounds great. The Sunday Times Short Story Read More …
Subscribers to book tech consultancy website The Literary Platform will have been surprised to receive an email today stating the site is being archived. Sophie Rochester explained, I’m starting off the New Year with a Kondo-esque digital spring clean and this means shutting down The Literary Platform after nearly 10 years! I’ll be concentrating all Read More …
What are the chances? You self-publish a comic book. Someone finds an old copy in a trash can. He happens to be a TV director. Next thing you know, your self-published comic book is a TV series. Now try count the odds for it happening twice! Okay, so there was no trash can involved the Read More …
Amazon is also a major customer – and many of those books in the Amazon packaging are coming to you straight from Gardners. That will be news to many indie authors reading this, as will the news that Gardners handles ebooks. Head over to ALLi for the tour. At which point just to Read More …
The Hot Sheet is a publishing industry news-sheet for authors, produced every two weeks by Porter Anderson and Jane Friedman, and reviewed here every other Sunday (when possible) as one of the best bi-weekly industry overviews available to authors. We’re not interested in delivering breaking news, but perspective on stories that are likely to retain meaning for your Read More …
We Start The Day Global today with e-visits to Botswana, India, Brazil, Kuwait and the UK. First, this from twitter. This is Sebilo Books advocating its readers to head along to Goodreads to find their next read. We’ve all heard of Goodreads, of course. Sebilo Books? That’s a small publisher in Botswana in southern Africa. Read More …
South Africa, Canada , the USA, the UK and Nigeria are on the travel map today as we start the day global today in what you may or may not consider the USA: Puerto Rico. If we outside the US and Caribbean think of Puerto Rico at all it is probably in relation to the Read More …
We’re into our second year here at TNPS and rolling out a new feature, Start the Day Global, which will be a ragbag of international stories that pass my desk each day that I don’t have time to devote a dedicated post to. Here’s today’s curation. It was World Literacy Day earlier this month, and Read More …
Here’s a summary of TNPS posts from the past seven days. Sao Paulo’s Avenida Paulista bookstore closes – Fnac Brazil now has just one bookstore standing Setswana? Indonesian? Can you tell the difference? Nor can Microsoft A mermaid wearing a bra among the books banned in Kuwait, but protests are gathering momentum Big Bad Wolf Read More …
I usually tend to shy clear of US and Uk book festivals, which get plenty enough coverage elsewhere, but make an exception for those that drive home a key theme of TNPS – that we are witnessing a digitally driven Global New Renaissance quite unparalleled in human history, and that, far from books being the Read More …
The UK’s Bradford Literature Festival launched in 2014 with a two-day event that attracted 968 people. As we all know, no-one reads books anymore because they are all too busy bingeing on Netflix or wasting their time on social media or (insert latest fashionable nonsense). So one can only guess at why the Bradford Literature Read More …
The Bookseller reports today that British and international smaller publishers are finding many UK bookstores raising the barrier to getting coveted shelf-space. Bigger chains in particular appear reluctant to risk shelf-space for debut authors with no track record, or for titles from “ethnic” authors or with “diverse” content. London-based publisher of African writing, Cassava Republic, Read More …
There’s a clue in the word “international. The Edinburgh International Book Festival may not be the biggest book event in the world, but it is one of the most respected. Or rather, it used to be. But in the insular world of Brexit chaos and intolerance that is today’s Britain it seems the Edinburgh Festival Read More …
A month ahead of schedule, Bookbeat, the audiobook and ebook subscription arm of the Swedish publishing giant Bonnier, has reached its milestone of 100,000 subscribers, reports Boktugg’s Sölve Dahlgren., who says the company is on target to to reach SEK 150 million ($17 million) in revenue for the full year 2018. Bookbeat CEO Niclas Sandin Read More …
The Bookseller breaks the news today that Amazon’s Audible UK has partnered with the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts (LAMDA) in a three year deal worth £150,000 ($195,000). Explains The Bookseller, The two organisations will develop the next generation of acting talent through scholarships and training opportunities in audio entertainment, while original audio Read More …
Against strong competition from Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine and Paula Cocozza’s How to Be Human, a retelling of Shakespeare’s King Lear, set in modern-day India, took the coveted Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction this week. Preti Taneja collects £10,000 for We That Are Young, a novel that, according to Outlook India, Read More …
It would be impossible to try cover even a fraction of the publishing news that lands on my e-desk each day, but there’s so much happening in our industry that passes unnoticed. So here’s a selection of some of the best publishing stories from the past 48 hours or so. Apologies if some are behind Read More …
A recurring topic here at TNPS is the rise and rise of global book fairs and festivals, as the proliferation of smartphones and social media allows booklovers across the planet to share information about books and literary happenings. As the prestigious London Book Fair got underway last month the headline here at TNPS was While Read More …
The global publishing market has never been more exciting, and every day myriad publishing stories cross my screen that I’d love to develop here at TNPS, but there simply isn’t time. But if you’re reading TNPS in the first place you probably share my obsession with all things international publishing, and would no doubt enjoy Read More …
