Mercy Pilkington

2253 posts

Mercy Pilkington is a Senior Editor for Good e-Reader. She is also the CEO and founder of a hybrid publishing and consulting company.

Authors, It’s Time to Grow Up

n every corner of the art world, there are salacious tales of petty arguments, long-held feuds, squabbles and fiascos. Whether it’s actors who vow never to work together again or singers with a spotlight-sized axe to grind, it not only doesn’t surprise the public anymore, it actually makes for good media fodder. Perhaps for too long, we’ve thought authors could be better than that. After all, these aren’t some industry-made, navel-baring pop star hurling Twitter insults at her competing clone. Authors are educated, worldly, and carry the weight of literary prestige with them…right? Not so much, as it turns out. Two headline-grabbing events have occurred in the publishing world within days of each other, and they clearly demonstrate that Authors Behaving Badly isn’t limited to any single genre or publishing avenue.

Mercy Pilkington
3 December 2018
2 comments
3 minute read

The Biggest Scam in Publishing?

The digital publishing revolution is so old that a great many reading consumers might not be able to envision a time when they couldn’t simply pop online to order a book, download a new title from their favorite author, or use an app or PDF for supplemental book material. eBooks and digital publishing have simply become a part of everyday life for many people. But there’s one branch of the publishing family tree that has still not caught up with the times: educational publishing. Nearly every facet of education has been left in the dust when it comes to access, price, and readily available updates to texts. When this digital publishing took off in a major way, educational publishers were supposedly going to insert e-textbooks into every classroom from preschool through grad school. What’s the holdup? There are a lot of factors stopping the widespread switch to files instead of paper, but that’s only one factor in educational publishing. The other is the way new concepts are discovered, researched, and published to begin with. Scientific research is carefully horded by academic publishers, keeping anyone without deep pockets from accessing the findings. What’s even more concerning is that many research projects are funded by the taxpayers before going straight to the publisher’s paywall.

Mercy Pilkington
27 November 2018
7 comments
2 minute read

Where Would We Be Without Amazon? Buying Books on Smashwords

There’s little doubt that Amazon has changed everything about publishing. It’s not just a matter of opening the doors for indie authors, producing a viable e-reader device and then creating a platform for content to fill it, or leveraging the power of enhanced searchability to give authors potential visibility. Amazon has even sparked change in traditional publishing, such as prompting some companies to rethink the ridiculous wait times for royalty payments and upping the percentage of royalty share that authors traditionally received. But Amazon has also led to the death of a number of companies who simply couldn’t keep up. Smaller presses, literary agents, and countless brick-and-mortar bookstores are gone, unable to stay afloat in a world where one-click book buying, free two-day shipping, and 70% author royalties are considered normal. But what do we do when Amazon is no longer there? It’s not that far-fetched a possibility, as author David Gaughran’s recent post about books disappearing from international consumers’ sales shelves highlighted. At any given time, every author who sells exclusively on Amazon via the KDP platform could wake up to find their livelihood and fan following are gone. Luckily, Amazon isn’t the only game in town, despite the pop culture belief that it is. B&N is still stubbornly hanging on, Kobo is reaching more international markets than some major-name retailers, and Smashwords just released the news that there are now half a million titles available on its platform. As a company, Smashwords and its founder have been an interesting site to watch. At the risk of insulting a business model that has existed in the wings for ten years now, it’s the Little Engine That Could of ebook self-publishing. Founder and CEO Mark Coker has sat for interviews with this site several times, but the quiet bookish demeanor is not to be dismissed. Coker has long been an outspoken critic of book sellers who are too big for their britches and shutting out all other competitors for this exact reason: what will happen to books when (not if) Amazon fails? Fortunately, just because a household name is well-known, that doesn’t mean it’s the only option after all. Readers and authors alike would do well to explore their options on other platforms and keep the books coming in.

Mercy Pilkington
26 November 2018
No comments
2 minute read

Amazon Claims to Resolve “Disappearing” eBooks Issue

A couple of weeks ago, prolific author, advocate, and self-pub expert David Gaughran published a blog piece on a disturbing phenomenon: international customers were having trouble buying titles that had been published via KDP. The post had over 100 comments in the first twenty-four hours, largely from authors who detailed their own problems with trying to sell their books on Amazon and its international markets. Comments over on Passive Voice were largely the same, with authors outlining their struggles with the bookselling platform in general, not just in terms of sales frustrations. According to Gaughran, “A situation blew up at Amazon over the weekend which has made most KDP ebooks unavailable to purchase for international readers who use the US Kindle Store — one which has also exposed a glaring security problem. This issue — which is either a bug or a badly bungled roll-out — is causing great confusion as its effects are only visible to those outside the USA, which might explain why Amazon has been so slow to address it, or even understand the problem, it seems.” But there’s more to the story. As Gaughran points out, the issue was a slow-moving one, affecting customers first in Australia a few weeks before this larger-scale incident. That hardly speaks to a server issue or a software bug, although stranger things have been known to happen. However, the gradual problems sound more like policy changes gone wrong or an attempt to unveil an alternative to buying books via the US-based Amazon platform.

Mercy Pilkington
26 November 2018
One comment
2 minute read

KDP Launches New Reports Dashboard in Beta

Self-published authors whose works are distributed via Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing platform may have noticed a couple of beauty-wise changes to their author dashboards. A new report dashboard, currently in beta, gives the muddled old dashboard a much-needed facelift.