I had a fascinating conversation today with an aspiring self-publisher. I accompanied my kindergarten classes on a field trip to a conservation area, and during the lunch break I was chatting with our tour guide, who happens to be an aspiring author. He took the guide job because he loves working with kids, and the flexible hours gave him time to work on his creative projects. Turns out he's writing a book. He told me enough about what he's done already to demonstrate that he's actually done his research, which was refreshing. He knows the marketplace, knows what niche his book...

Self-Publishing Has Become a Cult (Salon) What’s funny is, the adherents would have you believe that once you self-publish, the scales will fall from your eyes and you’ll recognize self-publishing as the One True Path. Traditional publishing will reveal itself to be a lost circle of Dante Alighieri’s Hell, full of damaged souls who want to enrich themselves off your work while destroying every shred of your creativity. I call shenanigans. --- Digital Magazine Usage Growing Via Tablet Users (Good e-Reader) Digital Magazine usage is growing with people who have adopted tablets into their lifestyle. Recently a survey polled 1,293 people on how they have...

British writer and digital guru Tom Chatfield has been attracting quite a bit of attention recently with his piece "I type, therefore I am" in Aeon Magazine, which takes a more unabashedly positive view of the growth of modem digital literacy than some other recent pronouncements. His essay ranges widely into areas very far removed from e-books, but I want to pick up on some of the most relevant insights as they apply to e-publishing and digital print.   Overall, Chatfield explains, whatever the crisis of traditional print books and newspapers, we are living in perhaps humanity’s most literate age ever. “Darkness and silence...

This post comes out of a tendency I’ve noticed in myself, as well as in very many self-published authors across the Kindle Boards, on Facebook, on Twitter and elsewhere. It’s a tendency that does reflect the early maturity of the self-publishing sector, as well as the lonesome cowboy mentality of many self-published authors. Because that Wild West of limitless opportunity that many lit out for is now (so the self-publishing community tattle has it, at any rate) overrun not only by robber barons but also by snake oil sellers peddling not-enormously-useful advice and services. When digital disruption first began to impact the publishing...

British horror writer and lawyer A.N. Donaldson released his richly crafted and very unsettling novel Prospero’s Mirror, which chronicles the last days of the celebrated ghost story writer M.R. James, in April this year, in print and e-book editions from Endeavour Press. I talked to him about the difficulties of getting its peculiar strengths accepted by a publisher, and how the print and digital releases complement each other. TeleRead: Has e-publishing helped you produce a distinctive work that might otherwise never have been picked up by a print publisher? A.N. Donaldson: E-publishing has certainly proved a life-saver for my book Prospero's Mirror....

Well-regarded Tor and self-published author Tobias Buckell just posted a wide-ranging analysis of the hype and letdown attached to much current self-publishing that has been getting considerable airtime on Facebook and elsewhere: “Survivorship bias: why 90% of the advice about writing is bullshit right now.” He followed up with me by answering some questions at length. What follows is a lightly edited version of our conversation. TeleRead: Just how bad do you think the shovels-to-the-goldrush overgrowth of services and Smashwords-like platforms has become for the self-publishing community? How badly does this exacerbate the bias? Tobias Buckell: Even though I could rag on Smashwords...

One of the best ways to learn as a writer is to study the work of other writers. And one of the best ways to learn as an entrepreneur is to study other entrepreneurs. So who should you learn from if you are an author who wants to not just write, but sell? Here are three authors whose blogs should be must-reads for you. These authors blog in an engaging, realistic way about not just the craft of writing, but the business side of it too. In no particular order... 1. J.A. Konrath (http://jakonrath.blogspot.ca/) Konrath's blog, affably titled 'A Newbie's Guide to Publishing,'...

Earlier I wrote about the possibility that the new channels of e-book marketing might soon be saturated by the efforts of a new generation of publicists, agents and book promoters—once these had mastered social media and other techniques for getting their message in front of readers—to the detriment of indies or individual self-publishers. Now it seems this is happening before my eyes. To the right is a screenshot of my Hootsuite Twitter feed for the hashtag #pubtip, which as many self-publishers know, is a well-regarded search term for advice and tips for authors, originally started by literary agent Rachelle Gardner in...

This is as much a thought piece and a kickoff for discussion as a fully fleshed-out article, but it goes like this: Is the end of the golden age of self-publishing already in sight? Part of the reasoning behind this comes from the dawn of the dot-com era just over a decade ago, when Internet companies were racing to build their public profile prior to going public. I used to do a lot of this stuff in Hong Kong, back in the day when page views rather than "friends" or retweets were the key metric; and with the prospect of high-rolling...

Self-publishing is not for everyone. It’s not for the impatient. It’s not for those dreaming of great successes. Self-publishing is one of the hardest gigs to get into—that has been proven by hundreds (if not thousands) of authors who have self-published books. That’s not to say you cannot have great success, or even quick success, if you self-publish. It just won’t happen for most. Ted Heller recently wrote an article for Salon complaining about his own self-publishing experience. Heller had three previous books published the traditional way. When his latest book West of Babylon, didn’t get a bite, he decided to go the self-publishing...

This book had me diving into my current e-book projects within the first few minutes of opening the review copy, looking at how to improve the preview, feedback hooks, tagging, category choice, etc. And by the end, I had a whole checklist of sites to visit, tweaks to make, programs to sign up for. That's how useful it is. Irish author and self-publishing proselyte David Gaughran has turned himself into quite an advocate for the e-publishing revolution. Advocate is putting it mildly; I wouldn't like to be the publisher or vanity press on the receiving end of a diatribe like this....

A couple of weeks ago I read about Draft2Digital, an e-book distributor still in beta mode. They got my attention with their claim to be able to turn a Word doc into a functional EPUB or Mobi (Kindle) file. Naturally I had to check them out, so I asked for a beta code, and I've been playing around with their conversions ever since, to see if they're any good. The results so far have been fair. I threw them a Word doc of my nonfiction book, which had previously given Barnes & Noble fits. Amazon had handled it well, but the...