Chris Webb

Life After Harry Potter

The Guardian’s Nicholas Clee wonders about the future of the publishing industry after our friend Harry hangs up his robes for good. Even Bloomsbury has Harry headaches. The huge profits that the novels generate lead the City – in many ways, a stupid organism – to expect the company to make high margins in the Potter-less [...]

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The Book Proposal: Know Your Competition

“There are no other books like this one.” “There is no competition for this title.” Yes there is. Never leave the Competition section for your book proposal blank, nor should you use statements like the ones above to try to enforce the unique nature of your book. The fact is with more than 190,000 books published each year [...]

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Amazon.com as a Social Network

Joshua Porter over at UIE Brain Sparks has a great post about Amazon.com as a social network.  His examination of the product page for iPod found no less than 16 social features including user reviews, tell a friend, share images and many others. But even though big sites adding many social features at a time draws [...]

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