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.

That was, without question, the most fun I’ve ever had online. MP3.com started providing tools for musicians, including the ability to upload mp3 tracks and convert them into a CD — so you could sell your CD alongside the tracks you were giving away from free. No one had ever thought of this before. It was nuts. And the best part of it was meeting other musicians.

MP3.com set up forums and the musicians would talk, trade recording tips, talk about what kind of marketing worked and what didn’t, advertise shows, and organize meet-ups in the real world. The best part was it was completely cross-genre — I was a punk/noise musician but I was making friends with country musicians, house musicians, funk musicians, metal, hip-hop, gangsta rap… you name it. And I got exposed to music I never would have considered listening to before hand. I still carry most of those MP3′s around in my collection.

However, after the site went public, MP3.com instituted a “Payback for Playback” program, which split a pool of money among the artists whose tracks were most played—a very similar idea to the Kindle Select lending library. This program served as an apple of discord, Wright writes, effectively ending the camaraderie and leading a number of artists to try to game the system. 

Wright sees history repeating itself with the Kindle Select program, and points out that Amazon already has problems with people trying to game the self-publishing system with plagiarized and duplicate content. He wonders how long it will be before the same thing happens with Kindle Select.

He also points out that giving Amazon exclusivity over works harms the publishing ecosystem as a whole. Even if Amazon is accounting for the lion’s share of income right now, keeping content off of its competitors handicaps the competitors’ ability to compete with Amazon.

In the end, whether authors go with Select or not is up to them, but it’s good to hear from all points of view on the issue. It remains to be seen whether Select is vulnerable to gaming or not. As Wright acknowledges in a postscript, the limitation to one book checkout per month for $80/yr Kindle Prime subscribers does restrict how badly the system can be abused, but he is not sure that necessarily removes the vulnerability.

On The Creative Penn, writer Joanna Penn blogs that she used Scrivener for her latest book, and that it was “a truly life-changing experience”. She lists a number of the benefits and useful features it has, such as the ability to drag and drop scenes into order, consolidate research notes into one handy place, and—what Penn calls a “game-changer”—seamlessly export e-books into Kindle and ePub files.

You can now create your own ebooks by compiling and exporting from Scrivener which is under $50, which once paid you can use over and over again. You obviously need to check your created files carefully but for plain text novels with little complications, this is a no-brainer.

Penn still recommends using professional formatters for books with complicated formatting or lots of images—but for ordinary prose novels, this takes a lot of the bother out of creating self-publishable works, and is also great for providing copies to beta readers.

That’s certainly less expensive than a professional publishing app, and if it doesn’t necessarily provide you with the same fineness of control over everything that those apps do, fiddling with fine detail may not matter to people who just want something that will look all right on a screen. (Of course, I don’t know how much fine detail control it allows, not having used it myself, but Penn seems happy enough with it.)

I think I’m really going to have to look into trying that thing out one of these days.

Long feels that book bloggers plugging her book In Leah’s Wake are the main reason it was able to sell 80,000 copies after an agent told her she would never sell even 500. She notes that book bloggers have picked up the slack from traditional reviewers, helping would-be readers sort out the wheat from the chaff. They provide reviews as in-depth as professional reviewers, but that “feel more personal” somehow.

And she says that bloggers help people “discover new voices”:

Unlike traditional media, most bloggers don’t stigmatize indie-published books. Except perhaps in free reads, no one pays bloggers for their reviews. Bloggers don’t answer to corporate publishers, nudging them to read books by their anointed authors, nor do they answer to a marketing team. Bloggers select books freely – their only goal is to share good reads with their readers and followers. Because they’re open-minded, willing to read books by an author they’ve never heard of, they discover new voices. This is what happened with In Leah’s Wake.

Long concludes that book bloggers introduce new authors to the world, and create a community of authors and readers through comments and guest posts.

I think Long may be overgeneralizing a little—I’m sure there are book bloggers who do everything she says and more, but I’m sure there are also some who are just as terrible as those are good. One point she didn’t raise is that, thanks to Google, these blog posts will often pop up when someone searches for the book in question to find out more about it. When I googled In Leah’s Wake, several such entries appeared on the first page amid the Amazon and Barnes & Noble store links.

The question of how any individual self-published work can stand out amid the tens or hundreds of thousands of others that come out every year has been discussed for a long time, but it might just be that bloggers are providing at least part of an answer. Of course, authors have to do their part, too, writing a book the bloggers will like and bringing it to their attention first.

Correction: I had mistakenly assigned credit for the post to Emlyn Chand; it turns out she is just the publicist who owns the blog, and Terri Giuliano Long was the author of the book and post in question.

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 ended up selling that many copies of works he had offered through B&N anyway.)

Then he gets into discussing the Lending Library.

This is an interesting wrinkle here in this story. See, Amazon dedicates a set amount of money (right now it’s $700,000. It was $500,000. It fluctuates a bit) for it’s Amazon Kindle Owners’ Lending Library, and so, when readers “borrow” one of my books, it’s not like giving it away. I get a little portion of that money.

The interesting thing: apparently, the size of the portion one receives is unrelated to the price of the book borrowed. At least, so far as I can see. I have several short stories and an essay available for sale for 99 cents, and for which I receive 35 cents or so of every sale (as opposed to the $1.70 I would receive from a $2.99 sale, or the $3.50 I receive from a $4.99 sale). But whether someone “borrows” a 99-cent short story or a $4.99 novel (or even, I would assume, novels costing $7.99 or, egregiously, $9.99 or $12.99 or higher yet), the royalty is (or was, anyway) $1.70.

Entrekin notes that, of course, the amount will fluctuate over time. But it’s still a decent chunk of money, and it has important implications for pricing: if you’re going to get the same royalties every time your book gets checked out, why price higher? And it’s also a pretty good argument to go exclusive with Amazon, he points out—if Amazon wants to give you money for letting someone read your book without even having to pay for it, why not let them?

I would point out that nobody knows how much longer Amazon will be content to pay authors that kind of money for library checkouts—but on the other hand, as long as you don’t let yourself get too dependent on it, perhaps it is a good idea to grab the money while you can.

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 put their efforts toward attaining them. He notes that writers have to do more than just write—they have to use whatever other skills they have in creating the book and getting the word out.

Use your other skills where you can, be it in graphic design or marketing. For me, marketing is not a problem as that’s my professional background. I promoted my books heavily using Twitter and Facebook, both of which are vital tools in the modern day. Free book giveaways are always a great way to attract new interest; one of my most successful avenues was to offer free copies of my book to a set number of new Twitter followers on a given day. Try this, and you’ll find that you get a surprising number of new Twitter followers very quickly.

He also advises asking your friends for help if they have useful skills, or even just as proofreaders. It’s also important to choose an outlet that will let you sell the most books (and, naturally, Amazon comes up here). Then you tell everyone about your book, because you are your own best (and often only) marketing tool.

Of course, self-publishing isn’t necessarily for everybody, and there’s no “magic formula” for success, but given how many of the successful ones have advice extremely similar to Croft’s, it seems like there might be something to these suggestions.

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 book.

Amazon is an extra platform for you to market your blog. Or vice versa. You won’t make a million dollars on your book (well, maybe you will – never say never) but just being able to say, “I’m a published author” extends your credibility as a writer/speaker/entrepreneur when you go out there now to sell your book, syndicate your blog elsewhere or to get speaking engagements, etc. And when you do a speaking engagement, you can now hand something out – your book! So Amazon and publishing become a powerful marketing platform for your overall writing/speaking/consulting career.

He goes on to discuss how to self-publish and then market what you’ve self-published. “Writing guest posts for blogs like TechCrunch helps and I’m very grateful.”

This may seem a bit mercenary to people who just like to read (or, for that matter, just like to write), but it takes all kinds to drive a market. And if people should find they want to read what some entrepreneur or other puts down on electrons, who am I to say they’re wrong?

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 permission to reformat and resell as e-books. One of those works was an incestuous short story, “I Remember Mother”, by David H. Springer, that someone had reformatted into “My Step Mom Loves Me”. (The change from mother to step mom came about because Amazon doesn’t permit works featuring actual incest to be sold on it store.)

Springer complained to Amazon, and got back a notice from Amazon saying that its plagiarizer had made about $560 from it, and if he felt he was entitled to compensation, he should take it up with that person. For his part, Luke says he was entirely unaware the material had been plagiarized. (Though given the dodgy nature of how he acquired it, not to mention that Amazon’s policies also disallow reformatted duplicate material even when it comes with legitimate permission, it’s hard to feel too sorry for him.)

Nevertheless, Warrior Forum continues to be awash in copyright infringement come-ons. "If you go to the warriorforum and ask around, there are hundreds of people offering to sell you books with publishing rights," Luke says. Check out this ad, posted in its special offers group, for "The Kindle Secret: Want to Create Kindle Books in 15 Minutes or less?" The person behind it hawks a guide for $17 that explains how he’s "dominating" one "hidden Kindle niche." He claims to be "outsourcing books" for "$20 a pop (can you get a whole Kindle book created for $20?) and selling them on the Kindle for $2.99 each," promising that his books "require no marketing and still sell like crazy," with each title earning between $40 and $300 a month. "I don’t write a thing," he brags. He just creates the covers, uploads the content then moves on to the next book. "This is completely scalable. Want to go big? Create 100 books for $2,000 and you’ll have major passive income set up for you in just a couple of weeks."

It is unclear whether Amazon is legally obligated to pay “I Remember Mother”’s original author anything, even though it received 40% of the revenues (about $380) from their sale. The Kindle Direct Publishing Agreement includes a provision stating that Amazon will pay victims of piracy “the Royalties due in connection with any sales of the Digital Book through the Program, and will remove the Digital Book from future sale through the Program, as your sole and exclusive remedy.” (Which makes it a bit odd that Amazon told Springer that if he wanted any money from “My Step Mom Loves Me”, he’d need to take it up with Luke Ethan.) But if Amazon were to be sued, it could undoubtedly tie up the litigant in court for years.

Penenberg notes that this is probably a major reason behind Amazon and other tech companies’ vocal opposition to SOPA and PIPA:

If made into law both could have armed copyright holders with weapons to do battle with websites that host infringing material. In theory, without the hassle of attaining a court order, a single complainant might have been able to force credit card companies to suspend Amazon’s financial transactions, Google and Bing to erase it from search results, and DNS providers to cloak the site so users couldn’t easily find it. One slip up and the impact on a site like Amazon could be devastating. 

Without those bills, Amazon is in the clear over plagiarized material as long as it makes a “good-faith effort” to remove it when it’s told about it. And it doesn’t have to pay plagiarized authors like Springer a cent.

It’s not terribly surprising to learn that there is a very active underbelly of the Internet devoted to selling digital snake oil like private label rights and plagiarized material for “instant” Kindle publication. It’s the tragedy of the commons—any time something could be abused for a quick profit, there will be those who will try to profit, directly or indirectly, from abusing it.

It would be nice if there were a way for plagiarized authors to get their own back from Amazon. It is doubtful Springer could ever recover anything from a citizen of Kuwait. But it would probably take a carefully-balanced law without the potential for abuse inherent in SOPA and PIPA, and it remains to be seen if the content industries are capable of or even interested in producing such a thing.

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 had to be done to get that writing into a salable condition. She also notes that the support and advice she has gotten from her editor at St. Martin’s Press has enabled her to take chances as a writer that she would have been hesitant about before.

But the transition will not come without compromises: in particular around how you establish a new price-point for the e-books previously marketed at self-publishing prices. Hocking says that her publisher is obliged to "consult" with her over the e-book pricing, but concedes that you cannot sell an e-book at a dollar when the print book costs ten. "I knew the e-book prices would have to be a little higher if I wanted the books to be in stores, which was kind of the goal, so I understand why they have to do it, and I understand why some readers don’t get it. They are on the lower end of e-book prices."

Hocking doesn’t say she will “never” go back to self-publishing, but she says that the print publisher would have to mess up pretty badly to drive her to that extreme.

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 details, however.

There’s no question that Amazon has been working on winnowing out duplicates, including both copyright violators and PLR (“Private Label Rights”) republished work—as shown by this example from August. But is it doing enough? Fast Company suggests some other things Amazon could try:

Why not require an author to submit a valid credit card before she can self-publish her works on the Kindle? If an author, who could still publish under a pen name, were found to have violated someone else’s copyright Amazon could charge that card $2,000 and ban her from selling again. Amazon could also run content through one of the many plagiarism detectors that are available–such as Turnitin or iThenticate–before an ebook is put on sale.

Of course, the credit card idea might be going too far to the opposite extreme—but as ineffective as Amazon’s efforts seem from time to time, it might benefit by doing something more.

It is questionable whether Amazon could effectively be taken to court over the issue, as legal experts state that Amazon is not legally required to act unless it knows about a specific infringement. Some of the issues PaidContent mentions are, interestingly enough, the same ones that apply to file-sharing site Megaupload which just got taken down by the Department of Justice and may well end up losing its safe harbor protection.

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 website will go towards printing books. If Mark Baumer doesn’t raise enough money then he will just go out in the street and yell at the unpublished versions of his books until someone gives him a dollar

If you’re wondering what Baumer’s writing is like, the above should give you an idea—very stream-of-consciousness and more than a little idiosyncratic. I checked out his blog and website and Googled a number of things he’s written, and they all seemed to be in that same style. The page that (apparently) lists the subject matter of the books he will be writing is another example.

Baumer seems like a very interesting person, I wish I could say I enjoyed his writing, especially since he said he enjoyed mine in the e-mail he sent me—but to be honest that sort of stream-of-consciousness stuff sets my teeth on edge. But I have no doubt that if stream-of-consciousness is your thing, you will enjoy his writing very much—he does it very well.

The project is certainly ambitious, and I wish him the best of luck with it. If nothing else, it shows that there are plenty of ways to go about self-publishing, and people shouldn’t feel limited to just what Amazon and Barnes & Noble have to offer.

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 incentives to publish exclusively with Apple.

However, Smashwords’s Mark Coker is highly dubious about this rumor. He told eBookNewser that Apple already has a self-publishing program, and a system of carefully-vetted aggregators such as Smashwords who serve it.

According to Coker, there isn’t another retailer with such a rigorous qualification process for authorized aggregators. He said, “Unlike others, Apple actively encourages authors and publishers to deliver books through their aggregators. Apple realizes that they’re going to earn a 30% commission whether they source the book from an aggregator or from their own platform, and books sourced from aggregators are more profitable for Apple because they can be sourced at lower cost (no need to invest millions of long term dollars to maintain and staff their own platform) and greater scalability than from one’s own platform.”

What Coker says makes a lot of sense. Apple is the company that invented the 30% agency pricing cut, after all, and why would they want to spend big on setting up an infrastructure under which they’d earn exactly the same 30% they would if they let someone else do all the work?

Also, it seems unlikely that any right-thinking authors would want to publish exclusively with Apple, when they could publish with Amazon and Barnes & Noble who between them make up something like 90% of the e-book market. Why would anyone limit himself to Apple, by comparison a totally third-rate player in the field?

Whatever happens, I’m sure Apple will have a lot of surprises to unveil at the January event, its first post-Jobs show. The company always does. And perhaps some of them will have to do with e-publishing. We’ll just have to wait and see what they actually are.

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 seminar.

In this segment, we cover Stackpole’s “house slaves” comparison, whether traditional publishing is in trouble, and the importance of quality and self-promotion in self-publishing.

Me: In your recent blog posts, you draw a comparison between the world of publishing and–I believe you used the term "house slaves"?

Michael: Well, with house slaves I’m referring very specifically to those authors who have done well traditional publishing and basically are denigrating all self-publishers and taking the traditional publishers’ word for it that they don’t need to worry about digital publishing, they don’t need to worry about any of those things because the traditional publisher will take care of them.

And I find it very funny because these are the same guys who very quickly will end up telling you that, "Hey, you know, my publisher screws me over all the time, they’re always late with payments, they never listen this, working with my editor is really really tough," but when it comes to, "Hey, dude, stop bitching, do it yourself," "Oh, no no, I don’t need to, because sales are up enough, and I can’t do this, and I can’t do that," And it’s like, you know, fish or cut bait.

Unfortunately for those individuals, for the house slaves who are invested in traditional publishing, the publishing business is changing so fast, just unbelievably fast, that they’re going to be screwed. The last blog post that I did talking about the fact that publishers are shortening the window between hardback and paperback publication. That means that if you cannot deliver faster–the days of taking a year to do a novel, or five or six years to do a novel, are gone. If you can’t deliver on a steady basis, you’re toast.

Me: You know, Maxwell Grant, the author of the Shadow novels, he did two novels a month for like twenty, forty years–

Michael: Yeah, Walter Gibson, and Lester Dent who wrote most of the Doc Savage novels as Kenneth Robeson, he also did one or more novels a month, about 60,000 words. Which actually is not that hard to do.

And I really think, looking back at the pulps, I always used to think when I was growing up as a writer, I would love to have lived back in the days of the pulps because you could do tons of stuff then, there were that many markets. Now I am of the firm conviction that I think the authors who were writing in the days of the pulps would wish that they were writing now in the days of digital, because they would be so much better off.

Me: Do you think traditional publishing is in trouble now?

Michael: There’s no question about it. No question about it that it’s in trouble. It has lost the majority of its shelf space. I mean, that’s just gone. Barnes & Noble is beginning to market books more like magazines than they are like books. It’s forcing traditional publishers to change their model. They’re pricing their digital product too high because their overhead is too high. And they’re not making changes in that regard quickly enough.

Me: Borders basically just vanished.

Michael: Borders vanished, so there goes 10% of their market, probably 20% of their shelf space, but you look at Barnes & Noble, Barnes & Noble now they’ve got cafes, they’ve got their Nook boutique that’s eating up shelf space. They’ve got their flavor of the month, whatever their hit of the month is, shelf space. I had a novel come out last November, and it was out there for two, maybe three months, and then vanished. A year ago, two years ago, that never would have happened.

Me: And publishing is still stuck on that model where they take back and destroy a significant fraction of the books that they print.

Michael: Absolutely.

Me: And it’s amazing that nobody’s tried to do anything about that yet in this economy.

Michael: It’s because that’s just been the way it’s been done for so long, and because in some ways it’s being a slave to your drug dealer, you know, or to your customer. Bookstores won’t let them change and bookstores are their primary market.

Me: You know, the agency pricing thing that they implemented that basically Apple forced them to implement…

Michael: Right

Me: It’s kind of funny really because they were so afraid that Amazon might cut their revenues by insisting that they sell for cheaper that they went ahead and cut their own revenues from half of hardcover price to, what is it, 70% of e-book price.

Michael: But they wanted the ability to–their fear was that digital sales would cannibalize paper sales before they had a chance to shift their economy over.

Me: And that consumers would get used to thinking e-books were "supposed to be" cheap.

Michael: Right.

Me: Little too late for that.

Michael: They wanted the ability to control the price so that people would not be buying the cheaper e-books preferentially. They try all sorts of things. They’ve tried windowing, delaying the release of digital books.

It’s funny that we’re here at GenCon because the gaming industry for years and years had PDFs available. They don’t do any windowing. Or they release the electronic versions earlier and you can go down and talk to anybody, they’ll tell you that e-book sales do not cannibalize print sales. And people do buy souvenir copies of things.

Publishing, modern publishing, traditional publishing has never done a good job of market research. They don’t understand their market, they don’t understand what their readers want, what their demographic is, how their readers buy, and this has been a big problem for them. So they’re now reaping the fact that they haven’t paid attention to what’s going on.

Me: Is there anything that I haven’t covered that you think is important to mention about self-publishing these days?

Michael: I think the real trick is going to be this: that if you’re an author and you’re going to self-publish, make sure that that book is as good as possible. Get editors, get other people to look it over. Form writer co-ops to help each other get books up to publishable quality, because the worst thing you can do is put a product out there that is sub-standard, that isn’t good enough.

Even if you’re self-publishing digitally, it is always true: our books have to be better than the last guy’s book. And this cuts in two ways: One, the writing has got to be there, and two, you’ve got to make sure that your book design, the way the book goes together, looks really good, looks better than what traditional publishers are doing.

Me: Is there an answer to the "self-publishing slushpile" problem, wherein now that everybody’s self-publishing, any decent works will get buried under Sturgeon’s share?

Michael: That’s totally fallacious. There’s no sense to that. If you promote your work, if you make sure that one you have a website, two you give away samples, three you have contests, four you go out and you meet people, you build community, you do all the little things that you have to do to promote your work, you’ll draw attention to it and if it is of quality other people will go ahead and let you know and let their friends know.

When I brought out In Hero Years I’m Dead, I turned around and shot copies out to lots of writers I know, I shot copies out to blog writers I know, I shot copies out to podcasters I know, and I talked about doing interviews and what can we do to publicize this. I had to sit down and promote promote promote.

So now you’ve got to wear two hats. You have to be writing the material and that is job one, always be writing the material. But you also have to promote, and if you promote, that’s how you rise out of that sea. There are going to be tons of people that put books out there for 99 cents or three dollars or five dollars or ten dollars expecting the money just to roll in. They’re not going to roll up their sleeves, they’re not going to do any work.

When you look at Joe Konrath or you look at Amanda Hocking or you look at other people who are doing this successfully, they sit down and do the full job. They make it the best package and the best quality item to sell possible, then they let people know that it’s out there. And that’s the only thing that you can do.

That promotion side will make sure that it rises above that great morass, and as long as your book is good, you will find an audience. Science fiction and fantasy is one of the most forgivable genres ever. Because even if the book is horrible, if we like a character’s name or we like one line out of the thing, we’ll recommend it to other people. We are such soft touches! Well, once we do that, then that’s the word of mouth that will sell more stories. So make it really good and then let people know it’s out there. And that’s how you win at this game.

Me: Excellent. Well, thank you very much for your time.

Michael: You are more than welcome.

Me: I really appreciate the chance to talk with you.

Godin calls Prichard’s views “economically ridiculous,” basing his argument on Chris Anderson’s “long tail” theory. Godin suggests that the broad consumer choice the long tail makes possible will drive down production costs and production values. He notes that for what Michael Jackson’s album Thriller cost to produce, “today’s artists can make and market more than 5,000 songs. You just can’t justify spending millions of dollars to produce a record in the long tail world.”

The same thing that happened to music is going to be true of books. The typical e-book costs about $10 in out of pocket expenses to write (more if you count coffee and not just pencils). But if we add in $50,000 for app coding, $10,000 for a director and another $500,000 for the sort of bespoke work that was featured in Al Gore’s recent “book” , you can see the problem. The publisher will never have a chance to make this money back.

So, far from multimedia and other super-duper costly gee-gaws, Godin sees the future of book production being as bare-bones as possible so that publishers (and self-publishers) are able to make their money back by selling fewer copies—because there will be so many more things in the marketplace for readers to spend that money on.

(He suggests the same thing will happen to movies once everybody’s using Netflix, though I have a little difficulty seeing that happening. There’s a significant difference in the way money is represented on the movie screen to how it shows up on the e-reader screen. People want spectacle in their movies, and spectacle still costs money to put on screen.)

I can see some of this happening in how cheap self-published e-books are, but I’m not sure how much sense Godin’s argument makes in the long (tail) run. We certainly haven’t seen professional publishers rush to lower their prices yet. Will it happen eventually, perhaps as publishers see more and more of their business going to the self-publishing market? It will be interesting to find out.

Journalist Marc Herman’s Kindle Single on the aftermath of the Libyan revolution sold enough copies at $1.99 each to begin to recoup costs for the trip to Libya in the first place. He suggests that this might be a possible model for investigative journalists to go freelance as newspapers’ decline reduces funding for their kind of work.

Ingram notes that Amazon isn’t the only short-book/long-article market, either. A number of other publishing ventures are offering help to journalists who want to publish their own longer works.

As I’ve pointed out a number of times before, the term “book” has become so fluid that it can now mean almost anything a writer wants it to. What that does to traditional publishing is a question mark (it’s probably not good) but what it does for writers is almost unquestionably good.

Of course, Singles are far from the only new opportunity Amazon has produced; much better-known is the enabling effect it has had on self-publishing. It just goes to show that it’s an ill wind that blows no good.

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 that have yet to find a publisher willing to take a chance on them.

PUBSLUSH asks writers to submit “the best 10 pages and a summary” of their book, then users can choose to “support” (pre-order) the books they think are best (they will only be charged if and when the book is published). Once a book reaches 2,000 supporters (pre-orders), it will be edited and published, just as it would be if it were approved by a traditional publisher. (PUBSLUSH will offer all the editorial, design, marketing, etc. services of such a publisher.)

Also, for every book PUBSLUSH publishes, it will donate a book to a child in need, in the interest of fighting global illiteracy.

PUBSLUSH seems like an interesting idea, though I’m not sure that ten pages are really enough to judge a book. I think it would be interesting to see a publishing operation built around a similar goal that would instead search for well-written and popular original fiction on the Internet, and seek to get permission to publish it. (For example, I happen to think that most of the Paradise stories would make an excellent print anthology.)

I also wonder whether it’s going to be able to get the critical mass necessary to support its publishing operations. As varied as people’s tastes tend to be, for 2,000 people to be willing to support any given book I would expect it to have to have considerably more users than that altogether.

But for all of that, I think PUBSLUSH is an excellent idea, and is just the kind of experiment we really should be seeing more of. If it catches on, it could form a sort of middle ground between the anarchy of self-publishing and the too-restrictive gates of traditional publishers.