News today that Indigo has sold off its rising star and dark horse, Kobo, to the Japanese e-commerce company Rakuten, came as a bit of a surprise to the publishing industry. During the past year-long restructuring at Indigo we’ve seen: the reduction of floor space for books; the decision to carry a title only for 45 days before returning to the publisher (meaning the customer only gets to see best-sellers and new releases); the increase…
Barb Geiger From our humble beginnings in 2006, we’ve now expanded to 11 authors, with 11 books presently published, 12 books in various stages of editing and revision, and another five in negotiation. You might say we’ve been a bit busy. Robert Runte joined us as Editor in Chief three years ago. Earlier this year Amy Bright joined we happy few as an Editorial Intern. We’re now pleased to have Barb Geiger join us here…
A colleague of mine commented on the recent announcements from both Kobo and Amazon morphing into publishers, ‘What if Amazon gives preference to its own titles over other publishers’ titles in its distribution arm.’ In my opinion, given Amazon’s enormous marketing capability, and corporate culture of obfuscating facts, the potential to monopolize the entire beast of publishing, not just the long tail, is something to monitor. Kobo, it should be noted, is the silent but…
In an agreement reached late last week, Toronto-based author, Michael R. Fletcher signed his first novel, entitled 88, with Five Rivers. The novel deals with humanity’s ever-growing need for intelligent machines. Though the dream of artificial intelligence lies dead, biological intelligence, once migrated to a more useful platform, has supplied the answer. Black-market crèches, struggling to meet increasing demand, deal in the harvested brains of stolen children. But there is a digital snake in that fractally modeled…
We’re launching a new eBook only imprint, which will feature short, entertaining works both fiction and non-fiction, from 20,000 to 80,000 words. And we’re calling the imprint: The concept is to capture the commuter and mobile market with quick, easy to read stories, from purely commercial fiction (romance, SF&F, thriller, horror, historical, suspense, but most definitely not porn), to self-help, biographies and the eccentric overview of an arcane subject. We’ll be paying a royalty of…