Tuesday 17 April 2012

Hints and Memes at the London Book Fair

I’ve just read an interesting article in the PW Daily. The London Book Fair had their annual CEO panel and it included, among the traditional publishing CEO’s, Donald Katz, the CEO of Audible.com – an Amazon entity.
It was refreshing to hear the traditional memes about the publishing business being challenged at their source for once.  In particular, Katz called Bloomsbury’s Richard Charkin out on comments that Amazon didn’t take very good care of it’s writers, citing the generous royalty rates given to Kindle authors.
Also, in two interesting comments, Katz stated that “Publishers should never start another imprint,” (is Amazon now happy with their stable of imprints?) and also that territorial rights should go away.
Does this signal a change in the way Amazon will handle sales in the 30% zones?
Link to the article here.