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As reported in Publishers' Weekly and many other news outlets, the number of titles self-published in the US in 2018 increased by a staggering 40%! The total number of books self-published last year was 1.68m with 8% of those published digitally with the remainder in print.
Part of the Books Are My Bag campaign, and seeks to celebrate independent bookshops in the UK and Ireland. Events, celebrations, reading groups, storytelling, author signings, literary lunches and face painting! See Twitter – @IndieBound_UK – for IBW updates and @booksaremybag for all things IBW and bookshops. IndieBound is an umbrella independent campaign to promote healthy high streets, shopping local and the benefits that a diverse high street - with a bookshop at its heart of…
Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival 20-23 July 2017 | Old Swan Hotel, Harrogate | home of crime The world class, award winning Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival, now in its 15th year, celebrates the very best in crime fiction at the magnificent Old Swan Hotel each July. The Festival is a firm date in the literary calendar and has achieved international acclaim for the programming, organisation and atmosphere. “The Theakston Old Peculier Crime Festival is the best in…
Programming at this year’s BookExpo fell into 5 tracks: independent bookselling, marketing and engagement, business of publishing, readers and authors, and global insight. While the bulk of the programming seemed to be for readers and authors, particularly on Friday, there was a smattering of panels about business and networking. But really, the big focus of Friday was on readers, authors, and librarians. Given the chance to roam the floor and panels as I might, I wandered…
Northern Short Story Festival 03 June 2017 The Northern Short Story Festival is a partnership venture between Carriageworks Theatre and the Leeds Big Bookend.Celebrating Northern writers and Northern talent on Saturday 3rd June. It promotes the short story form through workshops and events. Popular and published authors come together to share their stories, expertise and wisdom with you. Tickets: ?Day Ticket: £20, Workshops: £9, Events: £5. Day Tickets are not available to book…
On Thursday 18th May, the UK’s first Muslim Cabinet Minister, Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, will deliver a free lecture at Leeds Trinity University about her new book, The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain. THURSDAY 18 MAY 2017, 6.00pm - 9.00pm LEEDS TRINITY UNIVERSITY, BROWNBERRIE LANE, HORSFORTH, LS18 5HD http://leedstrinity50.co.uk/events/trinity-talks-baroness-warsi/
The 2017 festival includes: music and poetry collaborations | readings from UK and international poets | workshops | panel discussions | films | exhibitions | book signings | food stalls | Basil Bunting Poetry Award announcement For further details and tickets see: http://www.newcastlepoetryfestival.co.uk/events/
The 2017 festival includes: music and poetry collaborations | readings from UK and international poets | workshops | panel discussions | films | exhibitions | book signings | food stalls | Basil Bunting Poetry Award announcement For further details and tickets see: http://www.newcastlepoetryfestival.co.uk/events/
29th April, Various venues around Leeds Award-winning metropolitan new music festival held annually in Leeds. Over 180 artists performing on over 20 stages across the city on Saturday 29th April. Line up: Rag ‘n’ Bone Man, Slaves, Wild Beasts, White Lies, Nothing But Thieves, DMA’s, Gabrielle Aplin, Jagwar Ma, Teleman, Temples, The Hunna, The Pigeon Detectives, Black Honey, Clean Cut Kid, Fickle Friends, Honeyblood, Jake Isaac, Jaws, Let’s Eat Grandma, Lewis Watson, Superfood, The Amazons, The Big…
Read Regional 2017 March to June 2017 Read Regional – Leeds 27 Apr 2017, 18 May 2017, 25 May 2017 The annual Read Regional campaign celebrates selected new books from the North of England. At libraries and literary festivals across the North, authors take part in events where you can hear about their writing and talk to them about their work. http://newwritingnorth.com/events/
MUSIC/ MOVING IMAGE/ TECH/ FRINGE http://leedsinternationalfestival.com/
International Haiku Poetry Day was initiated as a project of The Haiku Foundation in 2012. HOW TO OBSERVE Celebrate by writing a haiku poem of your own and post it on Social Media using #NationalHaikuPoetryDay. http://www.thehaikufoundation.org/national-haiku-poetry-day/
Read Regional are looking for writers to take part in Read Regional 2018. Read Regional is run by New Writing North in conjunction with 23 library authorities in Yorkshire, North East England and North West England. Each year 10-15 new books by authors based in the North of England are selected and promoted widely through libraries and festivals. All participating libraries purchase bulk book orders and receive supporting marketing campaign materials. The authors visit libraries to give readings…
Writers News March-April 2017
When? 10am - 5pm, Wednesday 6 April Where? Leeds Trinity University Cost? The cost for the day is £10. (Leeds Trinity University students and alumni can attend for free). ‘On Wednesday 6 April, students, staff and members of the local community will come together to explore the range of possibilities opened up by working with professional writers at the annual Leeds Trinity Writers' Festival. What's happening? Now in its 12th year, the Leeds Trinity Writers' Festival comprises workshops led by professional…
York Literature Festival 16th-30th March 2017 ‘The festival promotes the arts in York, with an emphasis on literature, spoken word and poetry. We also feature music, comedy, cinema and theatre in our programme. The festival takes place annually in March. This year we have the largest programme we have ever delivered, with more than 60 events in two weeks!’ http://www.yorkliteraturefestival.co.uk/ Twitter @YorkLitFest The line up of speakers includes: Mark Gatiss, Michael Palin, Ann Widdecombe, Jonathan…
Authors -Poetry -Drama -Talks - Performance -Readings -Film -Competition for Writers. ‘The LitFest is run by a group of people who are local to Headingley and our idea is that we develop a literature festival that draws on the strengths of our local community to entertain, enlighten and delight us all. But, while our roots lie in our community, it is also our pleasure to invite and offer hospitality to people of the word from around the country and the world. The LitFest takes place in March each…
Can a Computer Judge a Book By Its Cover? And could software design book covers that could be judged—correctly—by humans? Research in Japan says maybe. At MIT Technology Review, an article from Emerging Technology from the ArXiv looks at work being done by Brian Kenji Iwana and Seiichi Uchida at Kyushu University in Japan. According to the report, they’ve trained a deep neural network to study book covers—to see if the network can identify genre. Their methodology is remarkably straightforward.…
‘The world of publishing has evolved one small step and then stopped,’ says a digital entrepreneur, one of three whose Israeli start-up is collaborating with the venerable Oxford University Press. Buying the Book Becomes a Deterrent to Readers: Total Boox may look like any ebook store, but it isn’t. It allows you to search for and read books, and create your own reading shelf. The twist is that you pay only for what you read. Total Boox employs 13 people and has a turnover of $4m. Yoav Lorch, founder…
The Kyodo News reports, “A decades-old trend in Japan of ‘strong magazine sales, weak book sales’ might have finally come to an end.” A major Japanese wholesaler bookseller, Nippon Shuppan Hanbi, Inc, has announced that its “unconsolidated” books sales for fiscal 2015 through March 2016 “grew slightly” from the previous fiscal year to 247.6 billion yen ($2.42 billion)—topping magazine sales, at 243.5 billion yen, “for the first time in 32 years.” A senior official with the company is quoted as saying…
Book trade weekly Publishing News is to close, with the issue of 25th July to be its last. The 29-year-old magazine attributed the closure to advertisers moves to shift their spend to online and direct sales The closure has meant eight redundancies across the editorial team, with editor Liz Thomson, deputy editor Roger Tagholm, Rodney Burbeck and Ralph Baxter all set to lose their jobs PN founder and chairman Fred Newman said that all other activities of PN Ltd were unaffected by the closure of…
The Australian government is once again entertaining proposals to turn the country into an “open market,” thus allowing booksellers to import U.S. and U.K. titles without restrictions. Currently, booksellers must wait 30 days after first publication of the overseas edition before importing the title, and can only do so if an Australian edition is not published during that period. But, in an unprecedented move, the Australian Booksellers Association has joined with the Australian Publishers…
After the arrival in Mexico of Amazon and Apple, ebook sales growth has slowed and some wonder what all the fuss was about, according to editors, publishers and entrepreneurs. Source: http://publishingperspectives.com/
On a yearly basis, the Cultural lab “Mexico-España” and the Santillana Foundation join forces to organize a forum, the goal of which is to focus reflection on a specific field in the arts. Many experts gathered at the hall of the European Institute of Design (IED) in Madrid last Thursday (May 12) to discuss bookstores. Despite the romanticism that surrounds these places, they are maybe the ones paying the highest price in the evolution of the entire book value chain. The conversation opened with…
The Oberlin Group, a consortium of university libraries across the United States, has started a new project called Lever Press, which allows academic authors to publish on an open access digital platform. Production costs will be taken care of by supporting academic institutions, and readers will access content for free. source: digitalbookworld.com
The sales channel that increased the most was the internet bookstore which increased its sales by 6.9 percent. Physical bookstore also increased its sales by 1.9 percent. Humanities and general literature was the literary genres that grew the most, by 9.8 percent and 7.4 percent, and the hardcover book was the style that grew the most, by 7.5 percent. - For the first time in many years increases book sales both in monetary terms and in the number of volumes. The increase in kronor was 3.2 percent…
There is no shortage of digital distribution platforms that want content from publishers. Whether it is Facebook’s Instant Articles or Apple News, Flipboard or the digital newsstands, these efforts by tech companies depend on one thing: that publishers remain desperate to find a winning strategy to reach digital readers. Apple’s latest effort in this area is, of course, Apple News. The aggregated content app, like just about everything Apple does, was opened to a very select group of media partners…
The educational publishing sector in Germany has seen a tremendous growth within the last year. The demand for learning materials has risen by more than 30 percent, according to a survey of the Verband Bildungsmedien. “German as a foreign language” (GFL) is a particularly strong segment right now, due to the huge number of refugees coming into Germany. The survey, published at last week’s Didacta—the German Book Fair dedicated to educational publishing—showed an estimated turnover of 550 million…
Get Reading — a campaign for 2016 that will celebrate great authors and their works, created to get the people of the UK reading and sharing the books they love.Get Reading will include a Get Reading Weekend, a digital and social media campaign from BBC Learning, as well as specially-commissioned programs that will be available across BBC TV, Radio and online.The campaign kicks off in spring with the BBC Shakespeare Festival 2016 – a major season celebrating the genius of William Shakespeare, 400…
According to the AWA 2015 study, 8.5% of Germans read ebooks, while an additional 11.5% are interested in trying out digital reading. The number of people being opposed to digital reading is much higher: two thirds of the people polled (69.1%) are not at all interested in reading ebooks. Age is a great differentiator in this matter: only 56% of the 14 to 29-year-olds are uninterested in digital reading, compared with 86% of people over 60 years old. Corresponding to those findings is the number…
Children’s books: china has 30 publishing houses specialised in children’s and YA books. Many other publishers also have children’s and YA books in their programme. Over the past few years, sales in the children’s book market is growing. Bookselling: There are three main distribution channels: the state-run Xinhua Bookstores, private bookstores and online bookstores. Reading: in 2014 Chinese readers consumed a total of 1.4 billion digital titles, with young readers accounting for more than half…