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#NYT bestselling author
chrollohearttags · 1 month
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and when we start putting our works behind paywalls, then what?
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dreamingamongthestars · 10 months
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oh my God
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captainderyn · 8 months
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Why is it every Instagram author I see has a “six figure book deal with their debut novel immediate NYT best seller”? Is that more common than I think it is??
Because I think a little bit of my writing paralysis *is* that I stumble across all these authors making those huge successes and my perfectionism just go *instant meltdown*, “you’ll never do that”
Which is my thing to work on but STILL point still stands: where are all these debut folks getting these six figure traditionally published deals??
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evenstarfalls · 8 months
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A Sense of Wonder and Whimsy
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lucithornz · 11 months
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OH MY GOD IT FINALLY HAPPENED! I actually got to say RAFO to a reader. You have no idea how badly I've wanted to do that. Like as a writer that just felt amazing!!!!!
Me and Brandon Sanderson exactly the same.
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miserywizard · 1 year
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unfortunately got to thinking about nine liars again. what happened. the mystery was so good but the editing was so so bad.
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mandoreviews · 1 year
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📚 The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
I really liked this book, all the way up to the end. It was very well written, the story was interesting, and the characters were well developed. I honestly enjoyed it. Then I got to the end, and I felt like the whole book had been a waste of time. I hated the way it ended. Although, I guess, if a book elicits an emotional response then it’s done its job. I did like that it followed the family through several years; it was good to see that. I also just saw that it was made into a movie, and I did like the book enough to be interested in seeing the movie.
Rating: 6/10
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scottprattfiction · 1 year
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Get the New York Times Best Selling Books by Scott Pratt Fiction
Scott Pratt is an author who has sold more than ten million copies of his novels. The two percent of people who are left in the world who want to know more about his books can discover that these best selling books are on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. This will help you buy the new books and why this writer's work is so important for readers.
You can check out the Book Series of New York Times best selling books by Scott Pratt. So, Visit our website for more details.  
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acelessthan3 · 1 year
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I think there's got to be like a Robin Hood corollary to any pro-pirating stance in that if/when you can afford to, spend the money to buy from small/local/independent art.
Some big top 100 musician/major studio whatever doesn't need your money, but the $10 on Bandcamp for the local band you saw at the bar's new album or your friend's soaps on Etsy or that indie movie playing at the cinema when it comes out on DVD or literally almost any author's book that's not like already an NYT Bestseller or community theater producing new works by living artists. It really can make a difference to those people.
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torbooks · 7 months
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#1 NYT bestselling author V.E. Schwab returns to the dazzling worlds of Shades of Magic with a fantastical, perilous, and intrigue-tangled new series-starter: The Fragile Threads of Power,with commissioned artwork of Kell and Lila by lasq.draws.
WHAT’S IT ABOUT
Once, the four worlds sat nestled like pages in a book, connected with fantastical power to a single city: London. But the magic pulsed. It grew too fast, and the doors between worlds were sealed in a desperate gamble at protection.
The few magicians able to open these doors grew rarer as time passed, and now only three are known in recent memory. Kell Maresh of Red London, Delilah Bard of Grey London, and Holland Vosijk of White London have hardly been glimpsed for the last seven years. A new magician rises to claim the throne of White London: She is Kosika, who burns with religious fervor and will feed her city with blood, including her own.
And back in Red London, King Rhy Maresh is threatened by a rising rebellion, one that promises to correct the power by razing the throne entirely.
These two royals from very different empires face mirror struggles: Keep their crowns. Keep their heads. And amidst a tapestry of old friends and new enemies, a girl with unusual magic comes into possession of a device that could change the fate of all four worlds.
Her name is Tes, and she will bring the worlds together, or unravel it all.
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younes-ben-amara · 2 years
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كيف تعمل قوائم الكتب الأكثر مبيعًا وهل هي مجرد زُخرف تسويقي أو لها قيمة خارج التسويق؟
كيف تعمل قوائم الكتب الأكثر مبيعًا وهل هي مجرد زُخرف تسويقي أو لها قيمة خارج التسويق؟
مساء السعادة، اقترح عليّ الأستاذ خالد الصادق هذا الموضوع فشكَرَ الله له. https://twitter.com/khaledAlSadek1/status/1552696721414782976?s=20&t=ZTGmECtxthtNIn7Sg4D4zw تغريدة الأستاذ خالد الصادق لننقل سؤاله أو استفساره نصيًا هنا ونجيب عليه بعون الحيّ الذي لا يموت: اذا لم يسبق ان تكلمت عن هذا الموضوع لازم تكرمنا بتدوينة عن ذلك: كثير ناس تشوف انه عبارة “NYC bestseller” ليست الا عبارة تسويقية…
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thebibliosphere · 1 year
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I just saw a baffling tweet on the other blue hellsite (link), and I clicked through to read the rest of the tweet where the agent claims, among other things, that indie authors sell maybe a max of 200 books, if they're lucky.
This was baffling to me because I know indie authors who sell into the thousands, myself included.
Anyway, I went to go check on my sales numbers on Amazon --not including all the other distributors I use -- and Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites, a book that no mainstream publisher or agent wanted without drastically altering the story (they wanted to remove the disability and give it a love triangle lmao) outsold the NYT bestseller requirement by several thousand in the first opening week.
For context, to be considered for the NYT bestseller list, you need to sell roughly 5000 copies in a week.
Like, I know I'm Spiders George in this instance, thanks to Tumblr, but the fact that sales have remained consistent even though I do the absolute bare minimum marketing would imply there is something about it that people want to read.
But y'know. No mainstream publisher wants Hunger Pangs. So it must be unsellable, and I should really "look within" and "make the necessary changes."
Like worstie, you're talking about having the "clout" of mainstream publishing, when most of my tradpub friend sales come from gremlins like me reblogging their work at breakneck speed because none of you fuckers bother to do any marketing anymore.
There are many reasons traditional publishing houses don't pick up authors, and sometimes it's because tradpub are fucking idiots.
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books · 4 months
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Writer Spotlight: Jamie Beck
Jamie Beck is a photographer residing in Provence, France. Her Tumblr blog, From Me To You, became immensely successful shortly after launching in 2009. Soon after, Jamie, along with her partner Kevin Burg, pioneered the use of Cinemagraphs in creative storytelling for brands. Since then, she has produced marketing and advertising campaigns for companies like Google, Samsung, Netflix, Disney, Microsoft, Nike, Volvo, and MTV, and was included in Adweek Magazine’s “Creative 100” among the industry’s top Visual Artists. In 2022, she released her first book, An American in Provence, which became a NYT Bestseller and Amazon #1 book in multiple categories, and featured in publications such as Vogue, goop, Who What Wear, and Forbes. Flowers of Provence is Jamie’s second book.
Can you tell us about how The Flowers of Provence came to be?
I refer to Provence often as ‘The Garden of Eden’ for her harmonious seasons that bring an ever-changing floral bounty through the landscape. My greatest joy in life is telling her story of flowers through photography so that we may all enjoy them, their beauty, their symbolism, and their contribution to the harmony of this land just a bit longer. 
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(Photograph: Jamie Beck)
How do your photography and writing work together? Do you write as part of your practice?
I constantly write small notations, which usually occur when I am alone in nature with the intention of creating a photograph or in my studio working alone on a still life. I write as I think in my head, so I have made it a very strict practice that when a thought or idea comes up, I stop and quickly write the text in the notes app on my phone or in a pocket journal I keep with me most of the time. If I don’t stop and write it down at that moment, I find it is gone forever. It is also the same practice for shooting flowers, especially in a place as seasonal as Provence. If I see something, I must capture it right away because it could be gone tomorrow. 
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(Photograph: Jamie Beck)
You got your start in commercial photography. What’s something you learned in those fields that has served you well in your current creative direction?
I think my understanding of bridging art and commerce came from my commercial photography background. I can make beautiful photographs of flowers all day long, but how to make a living off your art is a completely different skill that I am fortunate enough to have learned by working with so many different creative brands and products in the past. 
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(Photograph: Jamie Beck)
Do you remember your first photograph?
Absolutely! I was 13 years old. My mother gave me her old Pentax 35mm film camera to play with. When I looked through the viewfinder, it was as if the imaginary world in my head could finally come to life! I gave my best friend a makeover, put her in an evening gown in the backyard of my parents’ house in Texas, and made my first photograph, which I thought was so glamorous! So Vogue!
You situate your photographic work with an introduction that charts the seasons in Provence through flowers. Are there any authors from the fields of nature writing and writing place that inspire you?
I absolutely adore Monty Don! His writing, his shoes, and his ease with nature and flowers—that’s a world in which I want to live. I also love Floret Flowers, especially on social media, as a way to learn the science behind flowers and how to grow them. 
How did you decide on the order of the images within The Flowers of Provence?
Something I didn’t anticipate with a book deal is that I would actually be the one doing the layouts! I assumed I would hand over a folder of images, and an art director would decide the order. At first, it was overwhelming to sort through it all because the work is so personal, and I’m so visual. But in the end, it had to be me. It had to be my story and flow to be truly authentic. I tried to move through the seasons and colors of the landscape in a harmonious way that felt a bit magical, just as discovering Provence has felt to me. 
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(Photograph: Jamie Beck)
How do you practice self-care when juggling work and life commitments alongside the creative process?
The creative process is typically a result that comes out of taking time for self-care. I get some of my best ideas for photographic projects or writing when I am in a bath or shower or go for a long (and restorative) walk in nature. Doing things for myself, such as how I dress or do my hair and makeup, is another form of creative expression that is satisfying. 
What’s a place or motif you’d like to photograph that you haven’t had a chance to yet?
I am really interested in discovering more formal gardens in France. I like the idea of garden portraiture, trying to really capture the essence and spirit of places where man and nature intertwine. 
Which artists do you return to for inspiration?
I’m absolutely obsessed with Édouard Manet—his color pallet and subject matter. 
What are three things you can’t live without as an artist?
My camera, the French light, and flowers, of course. 
What’s your favorite flower to photograph, and why?
I love roses. They remind me of my grandmother, who always grew roses and was my first teacher of nature. The perfume of roses and the vast variety of colors, names, and styles all make me totally crazy. I just love them. They simply bring me joy the same way seeing a rainbow in the sky does. 
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(Photograph: Jamie Beck)
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hannah--bug · 2 years
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A sample of Name is Bigger Than Title Syndrome loose in the wild. These specimens have been tagged and released for future observation and development on a cure
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thebrunoarchives · 1 month
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ABOUT ENCANTO: NIGHTMARES AND SUEÑOS
Return to Casita where we find seventeen-year-old Bruno from Disney’s hit animated film Encanto, where readers will finally learn what happened to make people never want to talk about him.
Fans will love this dark and mysterious young adult novel by Alex Segura, a NYT bestselling author who also wrote Poe Dameron: Free Fall and Araña and Spider-Man 2099: Dark Tomorrow.
Seventeen-year-old Bruno has never really fit in with his family—why can’t he be as outgoing as his sister Pepa, or as friendly as his sister Julieta? Does he like being the awkward loaner who never seems to find where he can fit in? But it’s hard to be popular when you have the power to tell the future and people don’t always like what you are telling them. So Bruno devises an act, and begins to model the behavior he feels the town wants to see in a hero.
But is being dishonest to himself and others the right path to walk down in order to make friends, or is Bruno just kidding himself as he hides from his own destiny that threatens to destroy all he holds dear?
[link]
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How a billionaire’s mediocre pump-and-dump “book” became a “bestseller”
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/15/your-new-first-name/#that-dagger-tho
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I was on a book tour the day my editor called me and told me, "From now on, your middle name is 'Cory.'"
"That's weird. Why?"
"Because from now on, your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author.'"
That was how I found out I'd hit the NYT list for the first time. It was a huge moment – just as it has been each subsequent time it's happened. First, because of how it warmed my little ego, but second, and more importantly, because of how it affected my book and all the books afterwards.
Once your book is a Times bestseller, every bookseller in America orders enough copies to fill a front-facing display on a new release shelf or a stack on a bestseller table. They order more copies of your backlist. Foreign rights buyers at Frankfurt crowd around your international agents to bid on your book. Movie studios come calling. It's a huge deal.
My books became Times bestsellers the old-fashioned way: people bought and read them and told their friends, who bought and read them. Booksellers who enjoyed them wrote "shelf-talkers" – short reviews – and displayed them alongside the book.
That "From now on your first name is 'New York Times Bestselling Author' gag is a tradition. When @wilwheaton's memoir Still Just A Geek hit the Times list, I texted the joke to him and he texted back to say @jscalzi had already sent him the same joke (and of course, Scalzi and I have the same editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden):
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/still-just-a-geek-wil-wheaton
But not everyone earns that first name the same way. Some people cheat.
Famously, the Church of Scientology was caught buying truckloads of L Ron Hubbard books (published by Scientology's own publishing arm) from booksellers, returning them to their warehouse, then shipping them back to the booksellers when they re-ordered the sold out titles. The tip-off came when booksellers opened cases of books and found that they already bore the store's own price-stickers:
https://www.latimes.com/local/la-scientology062890-story.html
The reason Scientology was willing to go to such great lengths wasn't merely that readers used "NYT Bestseller* to choose which books to buy. Far more important was the signal that this sent to the entire book trade, from reviewers to librarians to booksellers, who made important decisions about how many copies of the books to stock, whether to display them spine- or face out, and whether to return unsold stock or leave it on the shelf.
Publishers go to great lengths to send these messages to the trade: sending out fancy advance review copies in elaborate packaging, taking out ads in the trade magazines, featuring titles in their catalogs and sending their sales-force out to impress the publisher's enthusiasm on their accounts.
Even the advance can be a way to signal the trade: when a publisher announces that it just acquired a book for an eyebrow-raising sum, it's not trumpeting the size of its capital reserves – it's telling the trade that this book is a Big Deal that they should pay attention to.
(Of all the signals, this one may be the weakest, even if it's the most expensive for publishers to send. Take the $1.25m advance that Rupert Murdoch's Harpercollins paid to Sarah Palin for her unreadable memoir, Going Rogue. As with so many of the outsized sums Murdoch's press and papers pay to right wing politicians, the figure didn't represent a bet on the commercial prospects of the book – which tanked – but rather, a legal way to launder massive cash transfers from the far-right billionaire to a generation of politicians who now owe him some rather expensive favors.)
All of which brings me to the New York Times bestselling book Read Write Own by the billionaire VC New York Times Bestselling Author Chris Dixon. Dixon is a partner at A16Z, the venture capitalists who pumped billions into failed, scammy, cryptocurrency companies that tricked normies into converting their perfectly cromulent "fiat" money into shitcoins, allowing the investors to turn a massive profit and exit before the companies collapsed or imploded.
Read Write Own (subtitle: "Building the Next Era of the Internet") is a monumentally unconvincing hymn to the blockchain. As Molly White writes in her scathing review, the book is full of undisclosed conflicts of interest, with Dixon touting companies he has a direct personal stake in:
https://www.citationneeded.news/review-read-write-own-by-chris-dixon/
But this book's defects go beyond this kind of sleazy pump-and-dump behavior. It's also just bad. The arguments it makes for the blockchain as a way of escaping the problems of an enshittified, monopolized internet are bad arguments. White dissects each of these arguments very skillfully, and I urge you to read her review for a full list, but I'll reproduce one here to give you a taste:
After three chapters in which Dixon provides a (rather revisionistd) history of the web to date, explains the mechanics of blockchains, and goes over the types of things one might theoretically be able to do with a blockchain, we are left with "Part Four: Here and Now", then the final "Part Five: What's Next". The name of Part Four suggests that he will perhaps lay out a list of blockchain projects that are currently successfully solving real problems.
This may be why Part Four is precisely four and a half pages long. And rather than name any successful projects, Dixon instead spends his few pages excoriating the "casino" projects that he says have given crypto a bad rap,e prompting regulatory scrutiny that is making "ethical entrepreneurs … afraid to build products" in the United States.f
As White says, this is just not a good book. It doesn't contain anything to excite people who are already blockchain-poisoned crypto cultists – and it also lacks anything that will convince normies who never let Matt Damon or Spike Lee convince them to trade dollars for magic beans. It's one of those books that manages to be both paper and a paperweight.
And yet…it's a New York Times Bestseller. How did this come to pass? Here's a hint: remember how the Scientologists got L Ron Hubbard 20 consecutive #1 Bestsellers?
As Jordan Pearson writes for Motherboard, Read Write Own earned its place on the Times list because of a series of massive bulk orders from firms linked to A16Z and Dixon, which ordered between dozens and thousands of copies and gave them away to employees or just randos on Twitter:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7emkx/chris-dixon-a16z-read-write-own-nyt-bestseller
The Times recognizes this in a backhanded way, by marking Read Write Own on the list with a "dagger" (†) that indicates the shenanigans (the same dagger appeared alongside the listing for Donald Trump Jr's Triggered after the RNC spent a metric scientologyload of money – $100k – buying up cases of it):
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/21/books/donald-trump-jr-triggered-sales.html
There's a case for the Times not automatically ignoring bulk orders. Since 2020, I've run Kickstarters where I've pre-sold my books on behalf of my publisher, working with bookstores like Book Soup and wholesalers like Porchlight Books to backers when they go on sale. I signed and personalized 500+ books at Vroman's yesterday for backers who pre-ordered my next novel, The Bezzle:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/53531243480/
But there's a world of difference between pre-orders that hundreds or thousands of readers place that are aggregated into a single bulk order, and books that are bought by CEOs to give away to people who may not have any interest in them. For the book trade – librarians, reviewers, booksellers – the former indicates broad interest that justifies their attention. The latter just tells you that a handful of deep-pocketed manipulators want you to think there's broad interest.
I'm certain that Dixon – like me – feels a bit of pride at having "earned" a new first name. But Dixon – like me – gets something far more tangible than a bit of egoboo out of making the Times list. For me, a place on the Times list is a way to get booksellers and librarians excited about sharing my book with readers.
For Dixon, the stakes are much higher. Remember that cryptocurrency is a faith-based initiative whose mechanism is: "convince normies that shitcoins will be worth more tomorrow than they are today, and then trade them the shitcoins that cost you nothing to create for dollars that they worked hard to earn."
In other words, crypto is a bezzle, defined by John Kenneth Galbraith as "The magic interval when a confidence trickster knows he has the money he has appropriated but the victim does not yet understand that he has lost it."
So long as shitcoins haven't fallen to zero, the bag-holders who've traded their "fiat" for funny money can live in the bezzle, convinced that their "investments" will recover and turn a profit. More importantly, keeping the bezzle alive preserves the possibility of luring in more normies who can infuse the system with fresh dollars to use as convincers that keep the bag-holders to keep holding that bag, rather than bailing and precipitating the zeroing out of the whole scam.
The relatively small sums that Dixon and his affiliated plutocrats spent to flood your podcasts with ads for this pointless 300-page Ponzi ad are a bargain, as are the sums they spent buying up cases of the book to give away or just stash in a storeroom. If only a few hundred retirees are convinced to convert their savings to crypto, the resulting flush of cash will make the line go up, allowing whales like Dixon and A16Z to cash out, or make more leveraged bets, or both. Crypto is a system with very few good trades, but spending chump change to earn a spot on the Times list (dagger or no) is a no-brainer.
After all, the kinds of people who buy crypto are, famously, the kinds of people who think books are stupid ("I would never read a book" -S Bankman-Fried):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/11/29/sam-bankman-fried-reading-effective-altruism/
There's precious little likelihood that anyone will be convinced to go long on crypto thanks to the words in this book. But the Times list has enough prestige to lure more suckers into the casino: "I'm not going to read this thing, but if it's on the list, that means other people must have read it and think it's convincing."
We are living through a golden age of scams, and crypto, which has elevated caveat emptor to a moral virtue ("not your wallet, not your coins"), is a scammer's paradise. Stein's Law tells us that "anything that can't go on forever will eventually stop," but the purpose of a bezzle isn't to keep the scam going forever – just until the scammer can cash out and blow town. The longer the bezzle goes on for, the richer the scammer gets.
Not for nothing, my next novel – which comes out on Feb 20 – is called The Bezzle. It stars Marty Hench, my hard-driving, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant, who finds himself unwinding a whole menagerie of scams, from a hamburger-based Ponzi scheme to rampant music royalty theft to a vast prison-tech scam that uses prisoners as the ultimate captive audience:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865878/thebezzle
Patrick Nielsen Hayden – the same editor who gave me my new first name – once told me that "publishing is the act of connecting a text with an audience." Everything a publisher does – editing, printing, warehousing, distributing – can be separated from publishing. The thing a publisher does that makes them a publisher – not a printer or a warehouser or an editing shop – is connecting books and audiences.
Seen in this light, publishing is a subset of the hard problem of advertising, religion, politics and every other endeavor that consists in part of convincing people to try out a new idea:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/04/self-publishing/
This may be the golden age of scams, but it's the dark age of publishing. Consolidation in distribution has gutted the power of the sales force to convince booksellers to stock books that the publisher believes in. Consolidation in publishing – especially Amazon, which is both a publisher and the largest retailer in the country – has stacked the deck against books looking for readers and vice-versa (Goodreads, a service founded for that purpose, is now just another tentacle on the Amazon shoggoth). The rapid enshittification of social media has clobbered the one semi-reliable channel publicists and authors had to reach readers directly.
I wrote nine books during lockdown (I write as displacement activity for anxiety) which has given me a chance to see publishing in the way that few authors can: through a sequence of rapid engagements with the system as a whole, as I publish between one and three books per year for multiple, consecutive years. From that vantagepoint, I can tell you that it's grim and getting grimmer. The slots that books that connected with readers once occupied are now increasingly occupied by the equivalent of the botshit that fills the first eight screens of your Google search results: book-shaped objects that have gamed their way to the top of the list.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy
I don't know what to do about this, but I have one piece of advice: if you read a book you love, tell other people about it. Tell them face-to-face. In your groupchat. On social media. Even on Goodreads. Every book is a lottery ticket, but the bezzlers are buying their tickets by the case: every time you tell someone about a book you loved (and even better, why you loved it), you buy a writer another ticket.
Meanwhile, I've got to go get ready for my book tour. I'm coming to LA, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Calgary, Phoenix, Portland, Providence, Boston, New York City, Toronto, San Diego, Salt Lake City, Tucson, Chicago, Buffalo, as well as Torino and Tartu (details soon!).
If you want to get a taste of The Bezzle, here's an excerpt:
https://www.torforgeblog.com/2023/11/20/excerpt-reveal-the-bezzle-by-cory-doctorow/
And here's the audiobook, read by New York Times Bestselling Author Wil Wheaton:
https://archive.org/download/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_459_-_The_Bezzle_Read_By_Wil_Wheaton.mp3
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