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...

When I started my “Cheap Reads” series, I expected I would be posting a number of entries. I never expected it to be limited to just two for all this time! Fortunately, I’ve found another inexpensive novel that is highly worthy of mention. In recent weeks I became aware of a small-press-published novel that looked very interesting by one of my Facebook friends, Sara M. Harvey. It is called Seven Times a Woman, and is a tempestuous romance set in ancient Japan involving a kitsune woman named Rei-Rei, the god Inari, and a dragon Rei-Rei has to...

Mike Shatzkin has another fascinating essay in which he goes into detail about how e-books are priced by various actors in the e-book publishing industry. He explains that the break between agency pricing and non-agency pricing creates two separate standards—the “digital retail price” (of which agency vendors take 30% and are not allowed to change), and the “suggested retail price” (which is usually close to the cost of the lowest print version, and agency vendors pay half of to the publisher but can then choose to mark down for their own sales). The non-agency publishers who sell to Apple are obliged...

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...

At FutureBook, “namenick” has a post explaining why he sees Kobo as being much better-suited than Amazon or Apple for international expansion. In short, Kobo has much better international content availability. Where Amazon has been opening separate stores for various different countries and languages (most recently a French store), Kobo makes all content for all languages available from the same store. One example which shows why Kobo is ahead of iBookstore or Kindle Store – Smashwords. Books from Smashwords are theoretically available at Kindle Store, Kobo and iBookstore. The deal with Amazon doesn’t seem...

From the Smashwords blog: We updated the Smashwords Style Guide today to include improved instructions for building linked Tables of Contents, controlling your NCX, building intra-book links for footnotes and endnotes, and troubleshooting. The new instructions are included in an expanded Step 20. Download the latest Style Guide here. [...] Separately today, we reached an exciting milestone. Today, the 100,000th copy of the Smashwords Style Guide was downloaded at Smashwords.com. Thousands of additional copies have been downloaded through our retail distribution network and Amazon. ...

The Alexander G Public Relations blog has a fairly lengthy interview with self-publishing writer Jason McIntyre, whose works have been downloaded over 33,000 times so far. McIntyre has worked as an editor, writer, communications professional, graphic designer, commercial artist, webmaster, and more, and still works at these jobs in addition to his writing. Like so many other self-publishing writers, McIntyre went into self-publishing over disillusionment with the traditional publishing process after traditional publishers said they liked his books but admitted they could not figure out how to market them. When the iPad came out, McIntyre realized that he...

Ebooknewser has an interview with Mark Coker of Smashwords in which he talks about some of the distribution deals Smashwords has in place, and his predictions for the future. He discusses agency pricing, and whether printing costs should come out of e-book pricing. The interview has a pretty good basic explanation of what agency pricing is for someone who has been living under a rock for the last year or so and doesn’t understand it, and it includes an interesting point that Coker, sadly, doesn’t elaborate on in the rest of the review. Of...

Welcome to my annual Smashwords year in review where I report our progress and plans for the new year. 2010 was a breakout year for us. It was also a breakout year for our indie ebook authors and publishers. Exactly two years ago we were publishing 140 books from 90 authors. We thought that was fantastic for our first year in business. Last year at this time we hit 6,000 books from 2,600 authors and publishers. We were thrilled. Today we're listing 28,800 books from over 12,000 authors and publishers. We released 3,200 new ebooks in...

It's annual prognostication time when folks like me stick out their necks and try to predict the future. I invite you to join in the fun. Brush up your crystal ball and share your publishing predictions for 2011 in the comments field below. Earlier today, Jeff Rivera over at MediaBistro interviewed me for my ten book publishing predictions for 2011. I'll list five below, and then I encourage you to click over to Mediabistro for the full ten in his interview, Publishing Predictions for 2011 from Smashwords. If 2010 was the year ebooks went mainstream in the U.S., 2011 will be the year indie...

At first glance, Brian S. Pratt of Boswell, Oklahoma doesn't fit the stereotypical profile of a best-selling author. Yet he, and others Smashwords authors like him, represent the future of publishing. Pratt began publishing with Smashwords in early 2009. His first quarterly royalty payment was $7.82. While most authors would find that number discouraging, Pratt was encouraged. It was a start. In the quarters since, Pratt's earnings have grown, and in recent quarters he's become a veritable breakout success. Last quarter, he earned over $18,000 from sales across...

I’ve been distracted for the last few days. A story idea got into my head for one of the Internet fiction series I contribute to occasionally, and it’s been hard to concentrate on anything else until I could get it out of my head. Unfortunately, I’m still not happy with the end results. It’s one of the most frustrating things in the world, as a writer, when the idea that seemed so awesome in your head comes out on the page like, well, a steaming pile of words. Perhaps in a few days I’ll have a better perspective and can...