A great deal has been written recently about the sock puppet scandal involving crime writers R J Ellory and Stephen Leather, and possibly others, who used fake online identities to promote their own work and, in Ellory’s case, hatchet jobs of books by other authors. Many have suspected that this sort of thing has been going on for some...

If you think about it, most of the runaway bestsellers of the past decade have been books that broke some, or all, of the perceived rules of publishing. Or at least the perceptions publishers, and to a certain extent booksellers, have as to what sells and what doesn’t. A series of children’s books set in a boarding school, a...

Publishers are continuing to experiment with e-book pricing, as sales and marketing teams balance pressure from low-priced, self-published content with concern over consumers' perception of e-book value. Independent publishers have been trialling a 99p e-book price on selected titles, with larger publishers also reporting a more flexible...

I do hope you are all looking forward to Christmas, because we are going to have two of them. Lucky us.

We all know about the first one. We spend most of the year building up to it. Publishers are used to presenting their festive line-ups to retailers during a few frantic weeks in spring or early summer, and then occupying the next...