The week that was with Katie Allen

Prize for (Inadvertently?) amusing headline of the week must go to the Guardian for its take on this week's new self-publisher: "Jackie Collins experiments with self-publishing The Bitch". That may be some publishers' views on the author's move to digitally self-publish her rewrite of bonkbuster The Bitch in the US - although over here S&S has already published it, as well as her backlist, in digital. The author declared: "If it does well, I probably will continue to e-publish, because I have a book of short stories and my publisher says short stories don't sell." An author going on the opposite journey is Amazon star Kerry Wilkinson. His first novel in the Jessica Daniel detective series, Locked In, became Amazon's top-selling Kindle book over the last quarter of 2011 after Wilkinson published it through the site's Kindle Direct Publishing tool. Now Pan Mac has snapped up UK and Commonwealth rights in a six-book print and digital deal, and will repackage the first three books and e-books for December. The first Pan Mac exclusive title will be Think of the Children, lined up for February 2013. Meanwhile, new research from Nielsen BookScan has shown that e-book production has overtaken that of hardbacks for the first time. In 2011, publishers produced 149,800 new books and new editions in 2011, down from last year's 151,959. Nielsen said the decrease showed a "natural reduction in difficult market conditions and a stabilisation across production methods and a shift from print to digital". Yet  the number of new publishers receiving an ISBN prefix over the year continued to rise—a boom "led by self-published authors, print-on-demand and digital product". Katie Allen is The Bookseller's web editor.