Here is the third ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon a few months ago. I’m a little embarrassed that it took this long for me to sit down and type it all up. The first part can be found here, and the second here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel...

Publishing Perspectives has another founder-penned piece promoting a publishing business. This one, called PUBSLUSH Press, aims to crowdsource the gatekeeping process by allowing its users to choose the stories they feel are worthy of publication. The founder, Jesse Potash, was inspired by the story of how much the first Harry Potter novel was rejected (twelve times!) before it found a publisher willing to take a chance on it. Indeed, the publishing world is rife with stories of novels that overcame repeated rejections to become major hits. This suggests that there are still a lot of excellent works out there...

I’ve pointed out in other posts that Wikipedia has outlasted every attempt at developing a competing “better” community-sourced general-purpose encyclopedia. While that means Wikipedia has had excellent staying power, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s perfect or even necessarily very good the way it is. Case in point: a lengthy rant from Danny Sullivan, editor-in-chief of the Search Engine Land blog, which he posted on his personal blog Daggle. Sullivan learned that the Wikipeia page for Jessie Stricchiola, one of the pioneers in fighting click fraud, had been deleted for “non-notability”. Sullivan wanted to provide the editors with references and...

I somehow missed seeing this when it came out a week ago, but Smashwords founder Mark Coker announced that Smashwords is going to begin accepting more e-book formats in 2012. At the moment, the site uses an automated document converter called Meatgrinder that accepts DOC files and processes them into that multiple formats it sells. However, as with any automated conversion tool, the results can be inferior to what is possible for those who prefer to design these formats from scratch. Coker writes: To accommodate the books from these ebook design pros, we'll offer a...

Found via a post on the E-Book Mailing List today, a fantastic blog post by writer Sarah A. Hoyt, that links to an equally fantastic blog post by Kristine Kathryn Rusch (which is of related but not identical subject matter to the blog post by Rusch we covered back in March). Rusch’s post, made back in May, is intended to be an eye-opener, a clarion call to the publisher-bound writers that Michael Stackpole analogizes to Roman “house slaves”. Traditional book publishing, Rusch warns, is traveling down the same road that rock music has. She points to examples from music-industry...

I have had a little fun over the last month, perhaps about the same kind that comes from watching a train wreck, in watching the fracas surrounding TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington’s decision to start a venture capital fund, and his subsequent ouster from the tech blog he founded. There was some concern that being a venture capitalist could somehow lead to a conflict of interest in his reporting on the blog, and after some discussion AOL (in the person of Arianna Huffington) decided it would be best if Arrington was let go. Fellow TechCrunch writer Paul Carr followed shortly afterward....

Here is the second ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the final part in days to come. The first part can be found here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conanmovie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this segment, we discuss piracy, e-book pricing, editing, and the “Storyteller’s Bowl”...

I had thought that I wouldn’t find an e-book typo more hilarious than “the next Jew chapters” or “arroz con polio” from the Young Wizards series. But The Guardian Books blog has found what may very well be one of the greatest typos of all time, in Susan Andersen’s novel Baby, I’m Yours. The passage in question in the e-book was supposed to read, “He stiffened for a moment but then she felt his muscles loosen as he shifted on the ground.” [emphasis mine] However, the accidental change of a “f” to a “t” (presumably in the OCR process;...

At one time in my career as an editor my function was crystal clear: everyone understood and agreed on the role a copyeditor played in the publishing business. But as the years have passed and the traditional publishing industry has consolidated into six megacorporations whose decisions are made based on bean counting, what was once clearcut has become fogged. (For an overview of the various editorial roles, see Editor, Editor, Everywhere an Editor.) This was brought to mind the other day when I was contacted by a client to copyedit a new medical book. The client's inquiry included these points: has recommended...

I no sooner published On Words & eBooks: What Does It Take?, my last article lamenting authors ignoring the need for professional editing before offering their ebooks for sale to the reading public, when, lo and behold, along comes yet another glaring example of poor editing: Walker’s Revenge by Brad Chambers. Unlike some other ebooks, Chambers at least got the title right. Unfortunately, that is all he got right. Consider his description of the book — the text that is supposed to induce a reader to plunk down his or her $2.99, which will cause, if enough people plunk, Walker’s Revenge...

I mentioned earlier that Diane Duane in the process of rewriting her earlier Young Wizards novels to take into effect advances in technology that have occurred since they were first written. Duane has made a post to her blog going into more detail about the process, and the reasoning behind it. Naturally, when you're talking about a series as well-loved as Young Wizards, the idea of having it be revised and updated can give some fans a sinking sensation. There's a certain mentality of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," and I think anybody can understand that. But...

Jason Boog of GalleyCat has taken a look at an essay by agent Andrew Wylie coming out in the new issue of WSJ Magazine. Wylie, Boog reports, is concerned about the quality issue in publishing, noting that even with all the self-publishing options available, editors and other quality controllers are an essential part of the process. Here’s an excerpt: “The devaluation of quality editing and writing is sad and it’s inevitable. Each house has a large number of titles to publish, and with a difficult economy, fewer people to handle the publications. But publishers need to...