Thursday, November 10, 2011

Industry News

Heartbreakers to newsmakers and everything in between.

Big news (and more competition) on the e-reader front:
- Barnes and Noble announced Monday their new tablet and pricing structure for the Nook. The pricing structures are more competitive with the Kindle and Vox even though the actual 'tablet' is priced $50 higher. One 'big' difference right now is that the Nook Tablet is much more limited in content than either the Kindle or Vox.

-The Vox has had shipping/fulfillment issues as of late. Many customers have complained about lack of communication with Kobo in regards to their orders.

Which leads to this eye opener... Rakuten, a Japanese based company has acquired the Canadian-based Kobo for $315 million. Many are looking favorably on this acquisition as Rakuten brings with it much deeper pockets than Kobo previously had. The hope is that not only will customer service improve, but the competition will heat up even further.

-Amazon is not sitting on its heels. It has announced a new book lending plan for Kindle customers who are also Prime Members. There are over 5,ooo books currently available in this lending program. It will be interesting to see if Amazon tweaks its pricing structure before the holidays as the Nook has matched Kindle prices and without the adverts.

Whew! So are you ready to buy an e-reader if you don't already have one?

*

Hard feelings abound as M/M author, A. J. Llewellyn, has been 'outed' for being a woman. Female authors writing in the M/M genre is not uncommon but the outrage is stemming from the fact that Llewellyn, a pseudonym, posted regularly on his blog and others, as a gay man sharing his advice and experiences. Llewellyn has apologized on his blog.

*

Not in the romance genre but worthy of note, Q.R. Markham‘s debut spy novel Assassin of Secrets, which garnered positive reviews from Publisher's Weekly and has blurbs by two well known authors on its cover has now been pulled by its publishers under allegations of plagiarism.

*

Ending on a lighter note...Is this the future of marketing?
What do you think of this cover?





2 comments:

Jackie said...

I hope I'm not seeing things! Are there effects on that cover?? And by how much would the book cost then, I wonder?

CalistoKerrigan said...

Nope. Not seeing things. It is effects and you can increase it with the ripples with the mouseover. Yes, gimmicks like that don't come cheap. There are publishers spending upwards to 50K on book trailers now so by comparison gimmicky cover might be the cheaper alternative. LOL.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...