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Warning Zoe’s audio is a bit shitty in places. Her mic is evil but the information and opinions she shares are worth it!
Welcome to the Roundtable Roundup, where we invite a guest or two to join us live to discuss the previous month’s news and views from the self-publishing and indie industry. This is SPRT’s last monthly podcast
This month we were joined by everyone’s favourite Romance author, Zoe York!
Zoe York, Chrishaun Keller Hanna, Robert Chute and Erica Conroy discussed the below topics:
Didn’t Amazon do well this Thanksgiving?
American Thanksgiving has been and gone and of course Amazon has reported their best ever holiday shopping weekend–especially for Amazon devices. Last year’s sales were impressive but this year they made over twice the number of sales.
The Echo Dot, Amazon Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote, Fire tablet, and Amazon Echo were not only the best-selling Amazon devices, but they were the best-selling products from any manufacturer in any category across all of Amazon.
See the full story: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161129006288/en/Best-Ever-Holiday-Shopping-Weekend-Amazon-Devices%E2%80%94Top-Selling-Products
Also at Amazon – a number of authors have reported seeing their KDP dashboard now includes their print books and some additional information is available. This seems to have first popped up in July this year. No word yet on if it will be rolled out wide. There is also a different set of rules most of which are not yet reflected in the posted guidelines.
AMS is now open to all and not limited to those in KDP Select, however, the requirements can be a limiting.
Facebook has been exaggerating the truth…
Facebook recently admitted to flaws in the metrics they report to advertisers–that they overstated the reach of Pages and Instant Articles, as well as its count of referrals to apps from ads. This is the information that advertisers use to determine their return on investment and the success of their FB advertising. The company said page owners should be prepared to see their “28-day reach” fall by 55 percent.
Facebook have promised more transparency going forward.
See the full story: https://www.wired.com/2016/11/facebooks-stumbles-expose-flaws-plan-rule-advertising
Barnes & Noble still exists and they’re trying really hard!
- The new Barnes & Noble store opened in Eastchester, New York (pop. approximately 33k in 2010)
- A new $50 Nook has been released!
- Update to the Nook app for iOS 10, which is good but Apple released theirs in September
- B&N Nook revenue down 19% in second quarter, which they’re blaming on the election
Vulnerability to WordPress has been fixed
In early September Wordfence–an IT security company that specialises in WordPress and WordPress related plugins–reported to Automattic (WordPress) that they had found a major vulnerability that could have compromised the majority of WordPress sites. It was fixed within a matter of days and the fix sent out as an update. But if it hadn’t this is how your WordPress site could have been compromised.
The vulnerability was in the server(s) api.wordpress.org. That server is what your WordPress contacts every hour to see if there are any updates for WordPress or plugins. If there are then it provides a url to download and install the latest software. Compromising this server would mean that any url could be provided as wordpress does not signature verification of the software being installed. It will trust any url or package supplied by api.wordpress.org and that’s how your WordPress site could have been compromised–along with perhaps 27% of the websites on the internet that are believed to run wordpress.
But it’s been fixed, they just reported it now to the public 🙂
See the full story: https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2016/11/hacking-27-web-via-wordpress-auto-update/
ZOMG The end is nigh! SPRT to end!
We regret to inform you that the Self-Publishing Roundtable will be closing at the end of this year. Our final episode will be at the usual time on Thursday 15 December. We look forward to seeing you all there live. If you can’t make it live we’ll have the youtube up for you to watch later and the audio available for you to download. We thank you for following us over the years and hope that you’ll follow our projects in the new year as between us we’ll be running 3 – 4 podcasts. More information about those will be available on the 15th.
Our schedule for the rest of December will be:
- 5 December @ 3pm PST / 6pm EST – PEARL HARBOR AND MORE: Stories of WWII-December 1941
- 8 December @ 7pm PST / 10pm EST – Bob Mayer
- 15 December @ 6pm PST / 9pm EST – Chris Fox
- 15 December @ 7pm PST / 10pm EST – Our final episode with some special guests!
Alternatively please feel free to leave a comment 🙂
