Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | RSS
Welcome to the Roundtable Roundup, our fourth weekly podcast where we go back to our roots and have brought back the Roundtable aspect. Each Sunday (American time) we’ll invite a guest or two to join us live to discuss the latest news and views from the self-publishing and indie industry.
Onwards, to our fourth podcast…
Patrick Stemp from the To Be Read podcast and Chrishaun Keller joined Erica to discuss the below topics:
Amazon announces KENPC 2.0
At the beginning of February Amazon announced Kindle Edition Normalized Page Count (KENPC) 2.0. They’ve made changes on how they standardize font, line height, and spacing used to normalize the length of each book. They’ve also introduced a cap of 3,000 KENPC which will only effect the longer books or bundles. For most people this means they’re KENPCs have gone down, sometimes quite drastically. For a tiny few it has gone up a little.
See the full story: https://kdp.amazon.com/community/ann.jspa?annID=957 and https://kdp.amazon.com/help?topicId=AI3QMVN4FMTXJ
New York Times Best-Seller List ignores authors 20k+ book sales
Autumn Kalquist recently reached #16 on the USA Today Best Seller list by selling over 20,000 copies of her book bundle and making it to the number two spot in the entire paid Kindle store! Surely this would qualify her for a spot on the New York Times Best Seller list? But when it came out, she saw her book wasn’t listed but what irked her was that those who had ranked lower than her on the USA Today list had made it! After checking the data, Autumn contacted the NYT and asked WTF? And they just said they looked at all the raw data and she just didn’t qualify.
See the full story: http://www.autumnkalquist.com/20k/
Also related: http://observer.com/2016/02/the-truth-about-the-new-york-times-and-wall-street-journal-bestseller-lists/
Young Adult finally recognised
Book Industry Study Group has integrated new BISAC code subject headings and has finally acknowledged the Young Adult fiction and Young Adult non fiction genres. Publishers have welcomed the change and retailers like Amazon and Overdrive are all set to accept the changes. What it won’t help with is getting accurate information on the audience’s age as approximately 80% of YA is purchased and read by adults.
See the full story: http://publishingperspectives.com/2016/01/bisg-implements-new-subject-headings-for-young-adult-books
Google’s new “Digital Book” may be digital, but is it a book?
Google has teamed up with London-based print book designers Visual Editions, to create future concepts of a new kind of book. What they’ve come up with is a digital ‘book’ that is actually a website and utilises pretty html5 to tell the story in a visual way. It is, however, not able to be viewed on all devices and this seems like a large limitation.
What does this mean for the future of the ebook as we know it? Would you use it if it was available to you? How would you use it?
See the full story: http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/02/04/googles-future-of-the-book-cannot-be-printed-and-it-also-cannot-be-viewed-on-many-devices/
Steam has an interactive story called Emily is Away
Emily is Away is described as an indie visual novel. Think of a digital version of choose your own adventure or text adventure games. Would this be something you would be interested in? Would it work better for certain genres than others?
Play/read the full story: http://store.steampowered.com/app/417860
If you have a second, an iTunes review would be VERY appreciated!
Alternatively please feel free to leave a comment 🙂
See you next week!
