By now, the success of indie author Hugh Howey has been widely publicized, including here on TeleRead. Howey wrote Wool, a book split into five novellas set in a dystopian future. Read Joanna Cabot’s review of the Wool Omnibus here. Howey recently did a radio interview with Orla Barry of The Green Room on Newstalk, during which he discussed his deal with movie director Ridley Scott (Prometheus, Black Hawk Down), who bought the movie rights to the book. Howey also discusses the rise in popularity of Wool. Howey didn’t expect Wool to take off the way it did, gaining steam without much marketing on...

By Colleen T. Reese Since its advent, the e-book game has been, comparatively, a more generalized market than its printed brethren. It seems only natural. E-books are inherently a widely democratized form of information consumption—and thus can be marketed to a larger audience. So naturally, one of the seemingly greater struggles for readers and publishers is not one of potential audience size, but is simply one of product discoverability: How do you find new e-books? Per TeleRead’s last questionnaire on e-reading behaviors, a great number of TeleReaders responded that they use blogs and e-book community forums as a venue for discovering new e-books. At face value,...

The Atlantic reports on a new 20-page legal brief objecting to the terms of the Department of Justice settlement, filed by nine major independent publishers: Abrams Books, Chronicle Books, Grove/Atlantic Inc. Chicago Review Press, Inc, New Directions Publishing Corp., W.W. Norton & Company, Perseus Books Group, the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, and Workman Publishing. These publishers object to the settlement on similar grounds to everyone else who has objected—it will allow Amazon to prosper at the expense of publishers, and is thus contrary to the public interest. The publishers complain that the DoJ never talked to independent...

One problem a lot of people have with books is that they buy them and then never get around to reading them. This can be a problem for first-time authors, since if nobody bothers to read what they wrote, they might not get the word of mouth or repeat buyers they need to sell enough to keep writing. Argentinean indie publisher Eterna Cadencia thinks it might have a solution to this, however: it printed an anthology of new Latin American authors done up in disappearing ink: the text of the book vanishes two months after it is opened,...

Doctor Science, the blogger who wrote a couple of installments on the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon last month that I blogged about at the time, actually wrote a third piece, which I only just noticed when I went back to check references for the fanfic article I posted earlier. The first two parts talked about “the decline of the publishing industry,” indicating that (at least in some cases) fans were providing a lot better value when it came to editing fanfics than publishers were to editing submitted manuscripts. (Not surprising, in light of a study showing that...

While perusing the ConQuesT dealer room, I stopped to talk to Tyree Campbell, managing editor of small press publisher Sam’s Dot Publishing. He was kind enough to consent to a five-minute interview, in which he discussed how his small press operates: Me: How long has Sam’s Dot Publishing been in operation? Tyree Campbell: As Sam’s Dot it's been operating since 2002. My predecessor was on-line mostly; we're in print. My predecessor was mostly on-line since 1986. So we've been around for a while. Me: So you were formerly an on-line publisher? Tyree Campbell:...

This morning at ConQuesT, I attended a panel called “The Road to Publishing”. The panel consisted of Eric Reynolds, publisher and founder of Kansas City area small press Hadley Rille Books, authors Robert Collins, Shannon Butcher, Sherry Foley, and Sharon Lee, and author/editor Gardner Dozois. The panel focused on how authors should go from having written a book to getting it into print, and the discussion covered major publishers, small presses, and self-publishing. Here are some highlights from that panel. As an editor, Dozois said, on these sorts of panels he is frequently asked for a magic formula,...

Publishers Lunch reports that the three month standoff between Amazon and the Independent Publishers Group is over. Although IPG President Mark Suchomel declined to discuss the terms of the agreement Amazon and the IPG have reached, the fact that it took three months to reach it does suggest Amazon didn’t get everything its own way—but neither did the IPG. The Publishers Lunch piece suggests that the dispute came down to the larger chunk of co-op fees Amazon wanted that also made several Big Six publishers balk. IPG ceo Curt Matthews has written about the issues...

Self-publishing, usually through Amazon, seems to be the latest hot thing, displacing getting a book accepted through the Big Six publishers. But there’s an alternative between those two that people tend to overlook: publishing through a small press. Our own founder David Rothman had his own book The Solomon Scandals published through a small press, for example. Another author who published through a small press is Liana Brooks, who has an interview on indie fantasy author Lindsay Buroker’s blog discussing the book she chose to publish through a small e-book press instead of publish herself. The book, Even Villains...

In her latest “The Business Rusch” column, Kristine Kathryn Rusch calls attention to the fact that this year a reporting Pulitzer went to an online-only publication, the Huffington Post, for the first time ever. Most traditional news outlets have been concentrating on the fact that no fiction Pulitzer was awarded this year, because (Mrs. Rusch posits) the Huffington Post news scared them. Rusch points out that even if the Post is a non-traditional publication, the reporter who penned the story is a 66-year-old seasoned journalist who has worked for many traditional publications in his time—and uses the “traditional...

And speaking of Kickstarter crowd-funded fiction projects, Wired’s GeekDad has a post on a Kickstarter project by Evil Hat Productions, publisher of the Spirit of the Century pulp adventure RPG (which I’ve mentioned before a time or two), to fund a trilogy of novels in the game’s main setting. Started with a goal of $5,000, thus far the project has received almost $37,000 in pledges, making it the second-most-highly-funded fiction Kickstarter ever. As it received more funding, the Evil Hat folks added a series of “stretch goals”—premiums they would kick in if the project hit certain targets—and the donations blasted...

Salon Magazine has an extremely lengthy story looking at Amazon, and bringing up a couple of points I hadn’t heard about before. In main, the article looks at Amazon’s habit of making quiet but substantial grants to various small independent publishing organizations, totaling about $1 million per year. Is it done to support indie publishing, or silence Amazon’s most strident critics? The Salon piece is more even-handed than the last article I covered on this theme. But the really interesting part is actually buried in the second section of the article, which mentions something I hadn’t heard elsewhere: Salon claims that...