Does self-publishing represent a threat to traditional publishers, or perhaps an opportunity? A number of people in the publishing industry seem dismissive of self-publishing writers or their numbers. But Philip Jones of FutureBook thinks that this is a mistake. He notes that readers who buy cheap self-published books will be spending time reading them that they might otherwise have spent reading more expensive works from traditional publishers. What strikes me most about indie writers, however, is not what they write, but how they publish it. Konrath may be a 'downmarket' writer for some, but he is...

A couple of weeks ago I blogged a post by author Will Entrekin about why he felt Amazon’s Kindle Select program (in which authors give Amazon exclusivity over their work in return for getting paid for Kindle Prime subscriber e-library checkouts) was a very good deal. Now I see another post, by Christopher Wright on Eviscerati.org, about why self-publishing authors might want to stay far away. Wright compares Kindle Select to Michael Roberts’s MP3.com independent music distribution site, which allowed independent musicians (such as Wright) to upload mp3 tracks to catch the attention of the Internet audience. ...

We’ve mentioned the e-writing app Scrivener (available for Windows or OS X) a time or two, and some of our commenters have expressed fondness for it. Indeed, even my brother loves it and has been pestering me to try it; he seems to think that lack of Scrivener is all that’s keeping me from writing the next Great American Novel. I have to admit, with the things I’m seeing about it I’m definitely starting to get tempted to try it out. On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that...

In the last few years, Amazon’s Kindle publishing facilities have sparked a self-publishing revolution. Everyone from established authors with backlist titles to new wanna-bes who can’t get publisher attention has been able to send their words out over the Internet for others to buy. We tend to assign most of the credit for that to those very facilities, but on NovelPublicity.com, Novelist Terri Giuliano Long blogs that there’s another element that should share in the credit—book bloggers. Long feels that book bloggers plugging her book In Leah’s Wake are the main reason it was able to sell 80,000 copies...

Self-publishing author Will Entrekin has written a very interesting blog post about his participation in Amazon’s “Kindle Select” program, in which his books are made available exclusively on Amazon and are part of the Amazon Prime Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. In the first part, he talks about why he made the decision to go exclusive with Amazon. It boiled down to having greater comfort developing for Amazon’s platform, and liking the kind of control Amazon gave him over the presentation of his book that he didn’t feel he could get with Barnes & Noble. (And also, he never...

Self-published writer Adam Croft has a guest post on Joanna Penn’s writing blog, The Creative Penn, discussing how he has sold 130,000 copies of his e-books without any marketing budget or the services of a publisher. His advice is much the same sort that self-publishing author Michael Stackpole gives at his seminars, but it’s definitely good advice. Croft urges that writers should know their audience, and write the sort of thing that audience wants to read. He says that writers should not set unrealistic goals, but rather set goals that they know they can attain so that they can...

On TechCrunch, James Altucher writes that “every entrepreneur should self-publish a book”. He runs through the usual benefits of self-publishing—declining publisher advances, rapidity of going from manuscript to sale, better ability to market, higher royalty rate, and more control over how the book turns out—then gets to why entrepreneurs should do it. Altucher sees self-publishing as a way that entrepreneurs can publicize their business in a way that stands out better than a business card or website. And entrepreneurs who blog will already have a collection of material that, properly edited and curated, can easily be turned into a...

Remember that report about how rife with plagiarized and duplicate books Amazon’s self-published titles are? Its author, Adam Penenberg, has written a follow-up article for Fast Company in which he tracked down one of the plagiarists to find out more about how and why he had published the title. The plagiarist is a Kuwaiti national who used the pseudonym “Luke Ethan”. Luke explains that he had gotten a lead on an Internet marketing forum to a private black-hat forum (with a $500 entrance fee), where he paid $100 for what he was told was a collection of material with...

FutureBook’s Philip Jones had the chance to talk with self-publishing star Amanda Hocking, whose move to a $2 million traditional publishing deal with St. Martin’s Press caused some controversy in self-publishing circles last year. In the interview, she confirms that Amazon actually made a higher monetary bid to publish her books, but she was concerned that the company would not be able to convince other bookstores to carry the printed versions. Hocking discusses the reasons for her switch—mainly that she wanted to be able to devote more time to writing rather than to all the fiddly little things that...

Amazon has a bit of a public relations problem stemming from the prevalence of plagiarized self-published books and e-books on the site, Fast Company reports. Especially in the erotica section, Amazon is rife with republished works taken from the public domain or other authors—and no matter how fast they remove them, the perpetrators continue to perpetrate more. When PaidContent looked into the matter, an Amazon representative told them that they do use screening software and have “worked steadily to detect and remove” copyright violators, and have removed thousands of such works over time. The representative declined to provide any...

I received an email the other day from Mark Baumer, a writer who is launching a Kickstarter project for $50,000 to write 50 books in a year. On the project website, he writes: Mark Baumer has never published a book. He is going to write and publish fifty books in one year. Each book will be a unique object. There will only be about 100-500 printed copies of each book. He is asking a website for $50,000 to cover the costs of printing, editing, and layout for all the books. All the money raised on this...

Rumors have been flying about the Apple event announced for later this month. It seems pretty obvious that it’s about time for a new iPad to make the rounds, of course, but Good eReader thinks that Apple is going to announce a new self-publishing platform. “Sources close to the matter have told us that they intend on launching a new digital self-publishing platform to get peoples content into the iBookstore,” writes Michelle Kozlowski. She notes that it’s currently possible for independent authors to get on the iBookstore through Smashwords, but the Apple program will be designed to give authors...