App Development

Smashwords today unveiled our first major website redesign since our launch in 2008. We made hundreds of changes large and small.  We also made technical changes behind the scenes that will lay the groundwork for us to introduce many new tools and features for authors and readers alike in 2014. 

Among the highlights of the redesign:
The Smashwords home page - We doubled the number of books listed on the Smashwords home page from ten to 20, added 27 new book category filters to increase discoverability, added live stats

When the Best Books of 2013 are listed, the most important may not make the cut. That's because the most exciting literary innovation of the year is not a book at all, but a video game for iPad and iPhone. Device 6 is a metaphysical thriller in which the world is made almost entirely from words. Playing it is like reading a book-except, in this book, the words veer off in unexpected directions, rather than progressing in orderly fashion down the page.

Here is the weirdest thing about the modern Web: humans are only one constituency and maybe not the most profitable one. Consider the case of an anonymous publishing executive who spoke with the media trade magazine Digiday about purchasing bulk robot traffic to his former company's website. By robot, I mean software that is designed to simulate a human being browsing the Web. Bots, as they are known, are relatively easy to create, and now you can easily purchase their services to build a nice business, if you are willing to bend the rules of digital publishing.

At our Publishing Business Conference & Expo in September, one very popular session was called "The Futurist Panel." Convened and organized by the visionary Brett Sandusky, it included a number of forward-thinking and innovative publishing folks, encouraged publishers to think more like software designers and less like, well, publishers, and debated the future of publishing as a craft and the core strengths publishers need to develop to compete in the publishing landscape of tomorrow.

The overarching question all publishers must ask, the existential über-question trumping all others, is: Where will revenue and earnings come from in the future?

With 20 million members (a number some have noted is close to the population of Australia) and a reputation as a place where readers meet to trade information and share their excitement about books, the social networking site Goodreads has always appeared to be one of the more idyllic corners of the Internet. The site sold to Amazon for an estimated $190 million this spring, and Goodreads recommendations and data have been integrated into the new Kindle Paperwhite devices, introducing a whole new group of readers to the bookish community.

Inspired by the recent flux in authors sidestepping the traditional route, Feiwel and her team last month launched Swoon Reads, a crowdsourcing publishing platform for authors of young adult fiction.

In short, it's a network where aspiring authors like Hoover can submit their manuscripts and have them critiqued by both Macmillan's staff and users of the site. Once enough submissions are collected and reviewed, Macmillan will publish the top-rated stories.

Romance and literary fiction have helped drive the number of US books self-published in hard copy up to 234,931, an increase of 59% compared to 2011. Research by the book data company Bowker, which counts all the ISBN numbers issued to self-published works, suggests that electronic titles bring the total for US self-publishing up to 391,000. This figure - which does not include titles published without an ISBN and may include some electronic editions of books also published in hard copy

In 2012, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH) filed for bankruptcy protection. In July of this year, Cengage Learning did the same, hoping to eliminate $4 billion in debt. Earlier in the year, McGraw-Hill completed the sale of its entire education division. And though HMH has since emerged nearly debt free and is seeking an IPO, clearly these are signs that disruptive changes are underway in educational publishing.

Before joining Book Business last year, I was the director of graduate publishing programs at Rosemont College. In that job, it was my primary responsibility to develop courses, hire instructors and help shape the curriculum that would allow our students to gain the skills needed for a successful publishing career.