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...

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...

A year ago, marketing guru Seth Godin announced he would never publish a book “traditionally” again, and launched the Domino Project, an Amazon e- and print publishing imprint through which he intended to “make ideas easier to spread” and experiment with thinking outside the box in the way e-books are formatted and sold. (For example, his first book had no text on the cover, since you’d be seeing that on the Amazon page when you ordered it.) He continued to experiment with innovative ways of promoting the books. For example, one Domino Project book came with a code...

The Writer’s Guide to E-Publishing has a piece by an indie publisher, looking at Amazon’s 99-cent e-book pricing, and explaining to writers who price their e-books that way how far from universally available that pricing actually is. It starts by reminding readers that the Kindle Fire is only available in the US (as with every Nook B&N sells), and outside of North America even the old black and white Kindle is only available in Britain, France, and Germany. In many parts of the world that don’t have hardware Kindles yet, the Kindle app is still available—but that 99 cent...

Simon & Schuster has entered a deal to start publishing books by self-publishing star author John Locke. There’s not so much that’s new about that in and of itself—after all, just a few months ago several publishers bid on works by self-publishing star Amanda Hocking. But something that is new, the Bookseller points out, is the terms of the publishing agreement: Simon & Schuster is just taking the print books and creating a new imprint to do it, and Locke will continue self-publishing his own e-books. Not only does this mean S&S is splitting print and digital rights—something publishers...

Today Push Pop Press, the e-publishing firm who produced an interactive version of an Al Gore climatology book, announced today that it has been acquired by Facebook. Facebook has no interest in publishing interactive e-books, and Push Pop has announced it will no longer be publishing anything. Instead, Facebook will be incorporating Push Pop’s technology into its own platform. As Tim Carmody put it on Wired: So instead of an independent born-digital press, publishing next-generation multimedia novels (or magazines or textbooks or children's books or cookbooks), Facebook will probably get marginally better iOS apps. ...

Futurebook has an article looking at a recent discussion in Soho held as part of a “Future of Publishing” conference series. As the piece points out, it seems like you can’t turn around without running into another conference or other event trying to determine how to deal with the “future of publishing”, but this series differs in that it tends to offer some hands-on exercises aimed at finding practical solutions. A few interesting things that came out of this discussion include the contention that, even though e-book readers and tablets have taken off in the last few years, the...

In May, I mentioned a writer’s thoughts on what the rise of the e-book would mean for book covers. Today I found an article considering what badly-designed covers mean for particular e-books. We reported in March on agent Sonia Land’s deal to publish Catherine Cookson’s backlist digitally through Amazon, bypassing Cookson’s print publishers altogether. On Futurebook a few days ago, Simon Appleby posted a column poking fun at the e-books’ frankly hideous covers. Essentially, all the book covers look more or less like the one posted at left; the only differences are the title and the background...

Carrying on the electronic self-publishing theme of my posts tonight, Michael Stackpole (whose self-publishing efforts we’ve covered before) has a blog post talking about the reasons some authors fear self-e-publishing. He discusses the perceived illegitimacy of self-published books (a holdover from the pre-Internet days when self-publishing meant “vanity press”), pointing out that the traditional publishers don’t exactly have clean hands in that regard anymore either. Traditional publishing surrendered it’s claim to being gatekeepers every time they let a crap novel get printed. Am I to believe that Snooki is ever going to be short-listed for...

I suppose it was inevitable. As self-e-publishing has drawn more and more attention, with relatively major-name authors deciding to forego pro-publishing and go it alone, and over 1/4 of the Amazon Top 100 list being made up of such books, now signs of an anti-pro-publishing “backlash” have popped up. Blogger switch11 at iReaderReview points out the “mistake” one popular self-publishing author made when he decided to sign up with Macmillan. There’s no other way to put it – Signing a book deal was a huge mistake. John Rector could have been a Top 100 Kindle...

Salon Magazine’s Laura Miller has an article looking at the recent moves by Barry Eisler away from and Amanda Hocking toward traditional publishing, and how the current author-marketed nature of the publishing industry means that even traditionally-published authors have to be their own publicist to a greater or lesser extent. This is, of course, a problem that has been apparent at least ever since the Internet expanded beyond the ivory towers of government and academia, and publishers started standing back and letting authors do more of their own marketing while they did less. It didn’t spring fully-formed from the...

In response to John Scalzi’s e-publishing bingo card, Flickr user Shmuel 510 put together a “Traditional Publishing Bingo Card” containing the arguments he’s tired of hearing in favor of traditional publishing. Like Scalzi’s card, it’s still missing some (in particular, the “smell of books” question again goes unmentioned) but also like that card, it’s particularly dead on in what it does have. It was rather hard picking just four squares to excerpt for this posting. (Found via BoingBoing.)...