David Mitchell

Publishing is all too often, and all too easily, lambasted for all the things it does not do. But we should also acknowledge what has been happening. What publishers have been trying out and in what areas these initiatives have been working. 2014 has already been a sobering year for the business, with the loss of two redoutable indies (both scooped up by Hachette), and a continuing decline in sales of physical books (albeit at a slowing rate). But it has also been a year of innovation

Cloud Atlas author David Mitchell will publish his next work of fiction in 140-character instalments on Twitter.

The British novelist has written a short story called The Right Sort which readers can enjoy in bitesize chunks over the next seven days, twice a day.

There will be 20 tweets at a time and a total of 280 tweets for the story narrated by a teenage boy who discovers Valium. A cluster of tweets have already been tweeted via his Twitter handle, @david_mitchell.

In the week ending July 22nd, according to BookScan, 400 copies were sold of the trade paperback edition of "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell. The following week, it was 2,273 copies, and the week after that 3,972. This past week clocked in at 3,177 copies sold. Clearly, Mr. Mitchell, always a well-reviewed and –regarded author, has gotten a whole lot more popular lately.

Publishers of all sizes have to manage detailed and vital information about the rights they own, the rights they have sold, and the royalties they either owe or are owed. It can be a significant accounting undertaking. Especially with the burgeoning digital marketplace, book publishers are increasingly redistributing their content in any number of ways and thus, generating additional revenue––as well as the need to manage additional rights and royalties. Fortunately, there are a number of solutions on the market today, from services that help publishers license their content to those that help automate the tracking and payments process to save time and

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