Forbes

As we await next month’s inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States, the potential power of the personal brand has never been so startlingly obvious. The key vehicle for Brand Trump, the Midas-like persona that has propelled the property developer to the White House, was a 372-page document printed and…

Novelist Veronica Roth, just 26 years old, earned $17m (£10.5m) last year thanks to her dystopian young adult trilogy Divergent, making her one of the richest authors in the world, according to Forbes.

The list of the world's top-earning authors was released by Forbes on Monday. Topped by thriller writer James Patterson, it includes three names that have never appeared in the ranking before. Sixth-placed Roth, whose smash-hit stories are set in a world where people are defined and organised according to their dominant personality traits

Countless authors have taken advantage of a new and growing genre of literature aimed at primarily female readers between 18 and 25. Known as "new adult," the genre features mainly university or college-aged protagonists dealing with early twenties life, in particular romance and sexual relationships. The segment of the book-buying market is hard to quantify as the wider industry has been slow to embrace the genre and the bulk of sales are made online. But a recent report by author and publishing data website authorearnings.com found that self-published books make up

Three years after bookseller Borders filed for bankruptcy, is another bookstore staple getting closer to the chopping block? Barnes & Noble NE -0.91%, the largest bookseller in the U.S., isn't a goner just yet, but the development it revealed Thursday morning is not pretty: investor Liberty Media LMCA -1.24%, which once considered buying Barnes & Noble for $1 billion, is slashing its stake and privately selling a majority of its investment in the struggling book chain.

Tuesday, March 4th, 2014, New York, NY: Leading ebook technology company Vook today launched Author Control, a daily market intelligence dashboard that allows authors to track the sales and unit downloads of their books in Amazon, Amazon KDP, iBooks, Barnes & Noble, Nook Press, Kobo Writing Life, CreateSpace, Smashwords, Google, and Samsung, and display their results in a secure, easy-to-use online and mobile-accessible dashboard. Learn more about the new service at http://vook.com.

We now face a lack of constraints in publishing. Once upon a time, printing provided a natural constraint, as editors met to see what merited the space they had available. Now, with no obvious boundaries, we have new possibilities emerging in response — mega-journals, cascading titles, data supplements, and more papers in existing journals, many of these published online-only.

As publishing tools have become cheaper and more distributed, many have benefited from this ongoing democratization of distribution - whether it's Twitter users posting newsworthy updates from war zones, or would-be authors publishing their thoughts on Medium. That's the power of a platform that allows anyone to publish. It's when the line blurs between platform and publisher that things start to get tricky, not just for writers but for readers as well.

There is a comparison to be made (surprisingly, and even absurdly), between the growth of the publishing industry-aggregate commercial and indie-and the growth of Apple during its famous expansion from IPods to IPhones and IPads. Just like business analysts were surprised that Apple's (sometimes similar) products didn't cannibalize each other to a significant degree-and indeed, seemed to accelerate each others growth-the boom in best-selling indie titles has not hurt the mainstream publishing industry, but has potentially helped it.

Concrete data compiled by the book industry experts at Bowker will be released later this week, but are expected to demonstrate that not only is self-publishing continuing to grow in popularity, but also the the recent wave of self-publishing successes are actually fueling the traditional publishing industry as well.

A self-published book reaching the top of the charts is losing its power to surprise. Certainly it's less shocking than it might have been a few years ago to learn that Violet Duke's self-published romance novels, Falling for the Good Guy and Choosing the Right Man nabbed two spots on this week's iBookstore bestseller chart, alongside the likes of JK Rowling and Dan Brown. It's safer for an editor at a mainstream publishing house to buy a book that reads a lot like last year's bestseller