Book News Roundup: Amazon finds a new way to screw over authors

  • The Seattle Weekly's Mark Baumgarten talks with David Brewster about his Seattle atheneum, Folio. I wrote about Folio last fall, and it's now open to the public. If you're wondering whether a paid library/coworking space is right for you, you should drop by and take a look. It's on Marion Street, between 3rd Ave and 4th Ave downtown.

  • VIDA updated their excellent list of presses run by women this week. Women still don't possess an equal share of high-profile positions in the pubishing industry; supporting these presses is a way to help correct that imbalance.

  • The people behind popular narrative horror/comedy podcast Welcome to Night Vale are branching out by launching a podcasting platform, reports the New York Times. They hope to experiment with longform serialized fiction podcasts, which sounds like a great idea.

  • Newspapers are dying. No, really.

  • Graphic novel sales in bookstores increased by 22 percent last year.

  • We've been hearing from a lot of self-published authors who are upset with Amazon lately. Author A.M. Madden has published an open letter to Amazon on her blog that lists the majority of these complaints: basically, Amazon keeps changing the rules on their self-published authors. These changes result in huge financial losses for the writers, who are locked into Amazon's ecosystem and are, therefore basically powerless. "My fans have increased, and I now have nine books published instead of just three, yet in 2015, I made less than half in royalties that I made in 2014," Madden writes. Go read the whole letter.