Friday, August 7, 2009

Book News, In Brief

TheBigMoney.com has a two page article detailing the simple, yet time consuming, yet ultimately futile methods for getting your book on Amazon's best-seller list.


Sales suck all over. Simon & Schuster's profits dropped 58%, HarperCollins' adjusted income fell 89.4%, and if you really want to depress yourself, check out the long list of links that pop up when you Google the words 'bookstore' and 'closing.'


Hoping to raise their profits through the fleecing of young wallets, Borders will soon be opening 'Borders Ink' boutiques in their stores. The boutiques will feature graphic novels, manga, and tween/teen books featuring angsty vampires and British wizards.


Goodreads has knocked all indie bookstore links off of their main pages, offering one-click sales service solely to Amazon.com. Goodreads claims that this is due to Amazon's new 'Terms of Service', but still, it's hard not to see this as a slap in the face to all of the indie booksellers that Goodreads initially used to help promote their site.