We’ve all heard the sentiment, I think. Independent bookstores are better than those inhuman chains, whose employees don’t even know books and whose policies made it impossible for new authors to break into the market. A few months ago, a friend made these same familiar claims, that chains of bookstores, especially Barnes & Noble, are [...]

For the complete list of columns in this series, click here.
A couple of months ago, I was listening to an interview on NPR with someone who was talking about the death of mass marketing and mass media. I can’t really do justice to the man’s arguments — I didn’t hear the whole thing, and besides, [...]

In Cedar City for the Shakespearean Festival last week I purchased a copy of the SUU literary magazine, “Kolob Canyon Review.” Thumbing through the issue (which contains work by SUU students, faculty and alumni), I couldn’t find any work that used Mormon themes or references, but the names of several of the contributors, together with [...]

The August issue of Book Business Magazine came this week. It included quite a few interesting tidbits that are of interest.

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Zoe Murdock owns, with her husband, H.O.T. Press, which for years published tech manuals. When she decided to write fiction–the semi-autobiographical novel Torn by God: A Family’s Struggle with Polygamy–she just went ahead and published it herself. (personal website, twitter)
Moriah Jovan started B10 Mediaworx to publish her novel The Proviso. The novel is the first [...]

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Tonight the Living Scriptures salesman showed up at our door. His car’s GPS had every member of our ward plugged into it and after visiting the Coes, it told him to drive to our house next. He was a nice guy, a BYU student, getting married at the end of the summer. I was able [...]

Quick: What’s the largest genre in fiction? Among Science Fiction, Romance, Historical Fiction, Espionage/Thriller, Mystery/Detective Fiction, etc., what sells the most books?
And, why is there so little of the largest genre in the LDS market?

Publisher’s Weekly reported yesterday that most new titles produced each year are now produced using print-on-demand or short-run methods, according to industry service provider R. R. Bowker. During 2008, the number of new titles printed using traditional methods fell by 3%, to 275,232, while the number of new titles printed using print-on-demand or short-run methods [...]