Publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin’s latest column is a look at the motives behind Amazon’s competitive behavior, and how it might end legacy publishing. Perhaps the most interesting thing here is that Shatzkin spends the first half of the post giving the devil his due, explaining why Amazon has been looking so good to so many people with manuscripts they want to get out there. If you’ve got the manuscript in hand and you have a choice between [spending months to go from manuscript to published book and earning lower royalties] and having books to show your...

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...

I saw a note on BoingBoing that Rick Munarriz’s 9-page essay “Why the Kindle Will Fail” is now available to Amazon Prime subscribers to read for free as part of Amazon’s Kindle Owners’ Lending Library program. This seems pretty funny at first glance: ha ha, everybody laugh at the silly prognosticator. Except when you look a little closer into it, it’s really not all that ironic at all. I’m not a Prime subscriber, and I’m not about to shell out $2.99 to buy the e-book. (In fact, that he’s charging $2.99 for a 9-page essay that’s too short even...

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...

Earlier today I mentioned the Evil Hat Productions RPG tie-in book Kickstarter project, which has scored enough pledges to bring it in at second place in the Fiction category, right behind a book of made-up Finnish folklore from Regretsy, and ahead of a project to publish an edition of Huckleberry Finn with the “N-word” changed to “robot” (which is probably poking fun at the edition I talked about here). When I mentioned it to a friend, he pointed out the Kickstarter project that Rich Burlew, webcartoonist behind The Order of The Stick, ran that concluded in February. I...

A post on BoingBoing links to a Kickstarter project put together by young-adult novelist Kate Milford, author of a novel The Boneshaker (not to be confused with the steampunk novel Boneshaker by Cherie Priest) to crowdfund a novella tying this novel together with its upcoming sequel, The Broken Lands. Milford has set a goal of $6,500, and with 50 days to go she’s more than 1/3 of the way there. Her plan for the novella is to make it available in three editions: an Espresso Book Machine paperback, a Google Play e-book, and a special-edition pay-what-you-want e-book illustrated by...

Ever had the experience of trying to find an out-of-print book and discovering it was only available at premium prices? The experience drives some people to pirate the book they want, since they can’t get it at what they consider a reasonable price. But when author Frank Giovinazzi discovered one of his favorite books was in that situation, he went in the opposite direction. Giovinazzi found the self-help book How I Found Freedom in an Unfree World by two-time Libertarian Presidential candidate Harry Browne was selling at prices of $30 to $100 on eBay and Amazon. Self-help books usually...

If I were to pick one word describing the publishing industry’s attitude toward Amazon over the last couple of years, that word would be “panic”. We see it in the Authors Guild’s angry tirades about Amazon having too much power, in Barnes & Noble’s and other booksellers’ decision to boycott Amazon-published books, and most of all in the imposition of agency pricing by which publishers attempted to padlock a bell onto that obnoxious Amazon cat. But on Publishing Perspectives, Lisa Buchan, CEO of on-line book rights trading community Sparkabook, says that these fears may be overblown. ...

The quality issue is often brought up as one of the biggest drawbacks to the rise of independent/self-publishing. “There’s so much slush, how do you find the fraction of percent of books that are actually worth reading?” However, in her latest blog post, Kristine Kathryn Rusch points out that this may be the wrong question. Rusch points out that a lot of commercially-published books aren’t so hot either, but in terms of finding books you want to read, it’s really beside the point. Hundreds of thousands of books are published by traditional publishers every year, and even if we...

On her blog, Cabin Goddess, Kriss Morton writes an irreverent explanation of why ISBNs are important for self-publishing writers to have on their books. She notes that Smashwords will provide ISBNs for free as part of its Premium Catalog program, but that lists Smashwords as the publisher rather than you. If you head on over there, you can read what they tell you. Personally I think it is worded to intimidate you into believing that their way is the only way. I think it is a great alternative, but for the last year areas have opened...

On Mashable, Lance Ulanoff posts about the trend toward self-publishing through Amazon and other e-book shops. Amazon, he writes, has a huge potential audience, and both known and unknown writers are finding audiences for their books there. And Apple just unveiled iBooks Author, which makes creating e-books easier than ever. Of course, there are concerns over quality, especially given that many e-books may not have been professionally edited. Whether you use Amazon or Apple, these platforms tear down the traditional publisher barrier and put control firmly in the hands of you and me. I wonder how...

Until recently, the main formatting tools that self-publishing writers could use to create e-books were expensive desktop-publishing applications that cost a lot of money to buy and a lot of time to learn. (I’m not counting Calibre here because Calibre is a conversion app—you still have to do the actual writing and formatting in something else.) However, the $50 writing and note-keeping app Scrivener has changed that. Scrivener can export e-books in PDF, Kindle, EPUB, and Word (required for Smashwords) formats, among others. On his blog “Writing is Hard Work,” independent author and English teacher Roger Colby...