Matthew Ingram at GigaOm takes a look at a Seth Godin interview (which is actually interesting in its own right for all the stuff Godin said that Ingram didn’t cover) to cherry-pick a comment from Godin that authors should be willing to give their books away for free as e-books and focus on building a fan base rather than trying to make money right away. Godin said: Who said you have a right to cash money from writing? Poets don’t get paid (often), but there’s no poetry shortage. The future is going to be filled...

Venture capitalist Bill Gurley’s personal blog, Above the Crowd, has a post pointing out why Dropbox is a “major disruption” (that is, a disruptive innovation—”an innovation that helps create a new market and value network, and eventually goes on to disrupt an existing market and value network (over a few years or decades), displacing an earlier technology” per Wikipedia) in the industry. Prompted by a new feature Dropbox added, to allow Android devices to synch photos automatically, Gurley points out that it’s easy to underestimate the importance of what Dropbox has done. He explains that Dropbox was the first...

Author Cat Valente has a guest post over on Charles Stross’s blog. She’s been writing a series of posts on writing and publishing, and this one looks at the current “us vs. them” mentality when it comes to self- or traditional publishing. Valente points out that there’s no self-publishing magic wand that will make your books an instant success—but that while all the self-publishing boosters pay lip service to the idea that it’s going to take a lot of hard work to make it in self-publishing, there’s always this subtext that there really is some sort of magical...

Should we learn to stop worrying and love the Amazon? That’s the position espoused by writer/publisher Bob Mayer in a post to his blog “Write It Forward”. Mayer co-founded independent publishing house Who Dares Wins Publishing in January 2011, and “went from selling a few hundred eBooks that month to earning seven figures.” He doesn’t see a threat in Amazon, but instead sees opportunity. Mayer has some books in the Kindle Select program, but he is also providing exclusives to Barnes & Noble and doing business with Kobo and others as well. I’m not...

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...

Fair’s fair. If we get upset over something Apple’s done, we should also mention when they fix it. So, remember the kerfuffle over Apple apparently claiming rights in the user agreement over commercial sale of any e-book created in iBooks Author? Well, Ars Technica reports that Apple has just released a patch to the app, and iBooks Author v1.01 includes a clarification in the EULA: it specifically covers only e-books generated in the interactive .ibooks format. (Emphasis mine.) If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated...

My aging laptop, a trusty and wonderful device–on which I’ve composed five novels, countless articles, poems and pieces—is nearing the end of its existence. I extended its life expectancy substantially by replacing various components as they wore out, namely the hard drive and battery pack, but still the Time Has Come to replace the device altogether. Recently, while standing in line at a coffee-shop, I observed an individual place a roll-out rubberized keyboard on a small bistro table and then plug it into his smartphone. He put the android device on a small stand and began typing away like mad. This...

Over the last few days, I’ve done something I’ve always meant to get around to but hadn’t yet: worked my way through the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes stories via their posting on Google Books. (Except for the last story collection, of course, which is not yet in the public domain in the US.) After that, I happened onto an interesting Conan Doyle work called Through the Magic Door, in which the author looks at his own bookshelf and discusses each of the works that are dear to his own heart. The first few paragraphs of the book especially...

On FutureBook, Steve Richards (managing director of social media agency Yomego) has a brief piece looking at the rising popularity of online worlds (such as Pottermore and Scholastic’s Horrible Histories World) as ways to market books to kids. He offers a number of suggestions for how the runners of those virtual worlds can make them more attractive and user-friendly to their target audience. Online environments don’t signal the death of reading – far from it. They can actively promote books to children, and pique their interest in new characters and stories. But just as a child...

Baen Books and the National Space Society are hosting a writing contest in memory of the late Jim Baen. Entries must be prose and less than 8,000 words, showing “the near future (no more than about 50-60 years out) of manned space exploration.” There is no fee to enter, but only one entry is allowed per person. Entries are to be submitted in RTF format via e-mail. WHAT WE DO WANT TO SEE: Moon bases, Mars colonies, orbital habitats, space elevators, asteroid mining, artificial intelligence, nano-technology, realistic spacecraft, heroics, sacrifice, adventure....

  To sell or not to sell? That, is the million-dollar question for writers. There exists within most novelists a book they’d love to write; a book that they hope–beyond all hope–that someday they’ll be famous enough to be able to write (but know secretly in their hearts that it would likely never make it past an editor’s desk.) “It wouldn’t sell…” is a horrible utterance that often accompanies such attempts at passing one’s beloved manuscript on to folks that can get it in print. “Can’t you write something about vampires in traumatic throes...

Economist David Harrington has an article looking at anti-plagiarism service Turnitin, discussing how effective it is, how easy it is to fool, and how it can actually help students conceal evidence of their plagiarism. One of the points Harrington makes is that Turnitin can’t scan the whole web. Using the example of a book that read like it was in large part cribbed from New York Times articles, he found that Turnitin wasn’t able to index the Times articles because the site’s archives are behind a paywall. And another point is that the service offers a tool...