authors

Daily routines

The Daily Routines site is a wonderful time waster. It has pulled together writers, artists, and interesting people from all walks of life and notes their daily routines for working and playing. Here's an excerpt from Benjamin Franklin:

franklin

ISBNs for authors

Sounds like a good idea! The ISNI is a name authority project.

The International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) is a draft ISO Standard (ISO 27729) whose scope is the identification of Public Identities of parties: that is, the identities used publicly by parties involved throughout the media content industries in the creation, production, management, and content distribution chains. The ISNI system uniquely identifies Public Identities across multiple fields of creative activity. The ISNI provides a tool for disambiguating Public Identities that might otherwise be confused. ISNI is not intended to provide direct access to comprehensive information about a Public Identity but can provide links to other systems where such information is held.



The Syntax:
An ISNI is made up of 16 decimal digits, the last one being a check character.
Example: ISNI 1422 4586 3573 0476


The future of publishing, and how do we reach the authors?

There are lots of next-decade projections, but I think Mark Coker is right about some of this:

1. 95% of all reading will be on screens

2. There will be fewer bookstores, though books will be more plentiful than ever before.

3. The entire book supply chain from author to customer will become atomized into its component bits. Value-adders will continue to find great success in publishing. Dinosaurs, leeches and parasites will be flushed out of new publishing ecosystems faster than ever before.

4. Most authors will be indie authors

5. Successful publishing companies will be those that put the most total profit in the author's pocket. No, not the highest per-unit royalty percentage


I don't know about the screen percentage, but I think 2 and 3 and 4 will have to come to pass. 5, I don't know about. Watching my sis-in-law try to market her books (and she has had 17 published, so it's not like she's new to this) and watching the industry just not work any more in the traditional way means that she is going to have to become Indie to survive. I don't know how many other authors are waking up to the same realization.

So, indexers, do we start marketing to authors? How do you reach Indie authors?

I don't think I agree with this list at all

Lauren Leto's images of the types of people who read each author: (and there are a lot more in the list at the link)

editors