How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy

More on the unexpected perils of self-publishing:

…a delightful futuristic absurdity: a computer program, pretending to be human, hawking a book about computers pretending to be human, while other computer programs pretend to have used copies of it. A book that was never actually written, much less printed and read.

The weird thing about all this frenzied bot activity is that in the end, it doesn't seem to have affected the author's profit margin.

How Bots Seized Control of My Pricing Strategy

Also check out this absurdity: Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 book about flies

Self-Publishing Stats & Pitfalls

Here is something every potential self-publisher needs to understand.  

Ins and Outs of Publishing Your Book via the Web - NYTimes.com

While the potential for sales and readership is unlimited, the reality for most self-published authors is very modest: “most self-published books sell fewer than 100 or 150 copies, many authors and self-publishing company executives say” — and from what we hear from many who've tried it, even those numbers are optimistic. And that's because “The biggest thing you have against you in trying to sell your book is that people don’t know about it,” as David Carnoy, an executive editor of CNET.com, puts it.

But it doesn't have to be that way. And that is where the collective at Thoth Books comes in:

• First, with an editorial guarantee that not only the author and his/her closest friends think it's pretty good, but that some pretty serious, well-established editors have approved this book and decided that it is ready for publication. Only books that have passed our editorial process will be qualified to bear the Thoth Books imprint.
• Secondly, by using our website and other network presence to make the book better known.

From there, the author's sales and readership will depend on recommendations by readers and any reviews that appear — that is, the book will sell itself, once people know it exists (and that it has been selected and recommended by our editors).  How many buyers/readers? We can't say, but if it's a good book, we'll be sure to give it its best shot.

Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part One) - NYTimes.com

This is surely more than you thought you wanted to know about John Baskerville, but amazing and intriguing about the effects of his fonts. Why is a comparison of credulity in the face of fonts of interest to us at Thoth Books? Because, since today's authors can choose their typface, we had better understand the possible consequences of our choices.

Hear, All Ye People; Hearken, O Earth (Part One) - NYTimes.com

To market with or without a publisher?

Mike Shatzkin follows publishing trends more carefully, cautiously and knowledgeably than anybody else we know. Here's a snippet of a recent blog essay:

How effectively social network marketing can replace display in stores and reviews in newspapers is an open question that won’t really be answered for a long time. The social networks are growing and there are already more possible outlets to work (Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, YouTube, Pinterest, GoodReads, and the comments section of every relevant blog are just the starting point) than most authors would have time to handle effectively (even assuming they have the skills and interest).

Just because the author does a lot of marketing doesn't mean the publisher can't help - The Shatzkin Files

For any independent author, it's worth reading the whole discussion, and follow his links if you're really concerned with hearing all sides of the issue.

What we aim to do for marketing here at Thoth Books is to create one more social-network platform for our authors, in addition to the author's own postings in Facebook, Goodreads (which seems especially effective for authors) and other sites. Any book with the Thoth imprint will be displayed on our website and announced in this blog (with any links to the author's other works that he or she chooses). And we'll do what we can to get reviews. Will that make up for our absence from brick-and-mortar bookstores? Or will more of those stores begin to carry POD (publish-on-demand) books from small imprints? Even Mike Shatzkin doesn't know for sure. But all our efforts combined will certainly give the marketing a boost.

Introduction to Thoth Books

Source: Phil Coppens

Thoth is the ibis-headed god who introduced writing in ancient Egypt. With his blessing, we intend to bring to your attention new writing and old that we think merits your reading energy. Those works bearing the name and logo of Thoth Books will have been reviewed and selected especially by our team.

Thoth's innovation was to go beyond simple pictographs to create “hieroglyphics” that evoked spoken syllables and could be combined to form more complex or abstract words. Later scribes would further break down the syllables into the still simpler symbols of “alphabets,” to write on clay tablets, papyrus sheets, parchment scrolls, IBM Selectric typewriters, iPads, cell phones, and whatever comes next.

We hope that publications of Thoth Books will stimulate exchanges in your head with other things you've read or thought, as part of the unending conversation begun by our remotest ancestors and first annotated over 12,000 years ago by ibis-headed Thoth.