When my now 14-year-old daughter was an infant and toddler, we employed a nanny to care for her. Since we were fairly permissive employers, we allowed her to use the time when our daughter was sleeping as she saw fit. One day I came home to find her reading Sam Taylor’s Heaven Knows Why?
She later [...]

The LDS Booksellers Association’s annual convention starts today.
For those who don’t know about this convention, it is the principal trade show for LDS products. Most of the association’s 200 producers and distributors display their wares for the 200 member bookstores, who attend hoping to learn what new products are available. Its the LDS equivalent of [...]

Last week I got back from a three week trip to South Africa, Mozambique and (briefly) Swaziland. I bought books (of course), and tried to get a sense for these countries and cultures. As you might expect, crossing the border from South Africa into Mozambique we saw quite a stark economic contrast. Where South Africa [...]

After my recent look at different Bible translations, I crunched some additional numbers about the possibility of a market for LDS Books in Spanish, and I’m more convinced than ever that we are ready to see the market develop, once the content is available.
It may even be obvious that this market is likely to start [...]

I follow a number of self-publishing email lists, full of authors either trying to get their manuscript accepted by a publisher or trying to publish and sell the manuscript themselves. Despite the almost uniform lack of financial success among these authors, nearly every author is in the middle of writing a new manuscript.
Why?

Last week I read my Easter gift from my parents: Outwitting History: The Amazing Adventures of a Man Who Rescued a Million Yiddish Books by Aaron Lansky. It’s a remarkable, wonderful story (and the story is pretty much what’s in the subtitle of the book), but even more than that it’s a fascinating exploration of [...]

In my recent post on Motley Vision, I pointed out one of the pitfalls of author contracts — inadequate out-of-print clauses (see Caveat Auctor). In the follow up discussion, I realized that what we need is a comparison of the various boiler plate contracts used by Mormon publishers, especially given common complaints about some publishers.
Such [...]