In the age of the online wordsmith, writing and publishing is no longer restricted to lofty armchair philosophers and pipe-smoking literary prudes. The option of self-publishing and online publishing, once seen as a failing writer’s last resort, has become the new trend in online distribution.E-book publishers have had to learn the new rules of the game fast, with rising global competitors, rising manuscript submissions and a rising age of new-age content creators. As increasingly new releases are finding their footing in the online sphere – with the success of e-book giants such as The Hunger Games and 50 Shades of Grey – e-book publishing has become a lucrative niche of its own. Digital Book World created an e-book publisher power ranking tool to track how well each publisher is doing at sales. Forbes then released the top three publishing powerhouses of 2013 -Hachette, Random House and Penguin.Hachette is this year’s publishing wunderkind – with the success of series like Beautiful Creatures, 27% of all books on the list so far this year have been titles fromthem.Random House and Penguin follow closely with 87 titles and 42 titles, respectively. Combined, Penguin Random House (who are in the middle of a merger) has published roughly 40% of all e-book best-sellers this year.
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