Authors Electric

Alice is one of our newest members, and will be posting regularly on the 4th of each month - but a bit of a malfunction on October 4th resulted in her first post being up only for a couple of hours. So - as it's an interesting post, full of useful information, we're re-posting it here today. What makes a book or e-book sell? That’s a question that every publisher, agent and writer would Alice Jolly like to be able to answer. Of course, at present, due to the rise of e-books, the answer is changing daily. But still you would assume that the big publishing houses must have an extensive knowledge of who buys books and why. But they don’t. How can they? They might notice that the sales of a book or e-book rise after an article in the paper, a radio interview, or a flurry of tweets, but still they have no means of knowing anything much about the people who bought the book, or why exactly they bought it. Amazon, of course, claim to know which books we all lik...