8 Reasons Why People Buy Books
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve been reporting on observations that Jellybooks has made about readers after collecting data about when, where and how they read. Do readers rant or rave about books? Do...
View ArticleData Vs. Instinct – The Publisher’s Dilemma
It might as well be time to address the elephant in the room. The pachyderm that is causing fear, uncertainty and doubt among authors, agents and publishers is the prospect of how data, and reading...
View ArticleIt’s the Cover, Stupid! Why Publishers Should A/B Test Book Covers
Never judge a book by its cover. So the saying goes, yet consumers do it all the time. Every publisher and bookseller knows that covers sell books. But do consumers also form expectations from looking...
View ArticleForeign Rights and Reader Analytics
Next week the London Book Fair will take place at Olympia in Kensington. This is one of the preeminent events for trading foreign rights in literary works, and I will therefore take the opportunity to...
View ArticleThe Great Amazon Page Count Mystery
How Amazon pays authors for work included in Kindle Unlimited (KU) made headlines across the inter-webs recently. Ann Christy’s post “KU Scammers on KU – What’s Going On” even made it on to the...
View ArticleReader Analytics Is No Silver Bullet
The title of this post may surprise some readers. Why is the author, who is the founder of reader analytics company Jellybooks, saying that reader analytics is not a silver bullet that solves all the...
View ArticleWill an Open Web Liberate Reading Data?
At last week’s BEA, it was announced that the IDPF, the standards body for ebooks and responsible for the current EPUB specification, is considering merging with the W3C, the standards body for the web...
View ArticleWho’s Afraid of Reader Analytics?
There are authors and publishers who fear reader analytics. This has been a fact since my first presentation on “Project Crowberry” in spring 2014, since followed by Project Honeyberry, Project...
View ArticlePronoun(s) and Data
It was announced last week that MacMillan, one of the Big Five publishers, bought Pronoun, the New York-based publishing start-up—but not the right to the exclusive use of pronouns in the English...
View ArticleIs It Possible to Predict the Next New York Times Bestseller?
The upcoming book The Bestseller Code is getting a great deal of buzz, forcing many of us to ask the question, Can one genuinely predict what kind of book will become a New York Times bestseller...
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