Monthly Archives: May 2010

20 Successful Self-Publishers

JA Konrath (this site can’t seem to get enough of him recently) has an interesting and encouraging post listing 20 self-publishers who are as successful on the Kindle as writers from mainstream publishers.  These are:

Primal Wound by Ruth Francisco, ranked #688

Thin Blood by Vicki Tyley, ranked #14

Deed to Death by D.B. Henson, ranked #42

Toe Popper by Jonny Tangerine, ranked #1464

Kill & Cure by Steven Davison, ranked #72

The Shot to Die For by M.H. Sargent, ranked #231

The Elect by James Gilbert, ranked #756

Punctured by Rex Kusler, ranked #988

Final Price by J. Gregory

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2011-10-08T18:33:23+02:00May 28th, 2010|Categories: Features|

Selling Direct to the iPad

The Apple iPad has now gone the Kindle dtp route and now users can upload a book directly to the iBooks store without having to use a third-party distributor, like Smashwords (which I still advocate because of all of the other places it distributes to).

Via MacLife:

Apple sent us an e-mail today with details on how someone could sign up to sell their own books in the iBookstore. Their books would have to adhere to these criteria: each one would need to have a 13-digit ISBN, be in ePub format, validate against epubcheck 1.0.5, and contain

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2011-10-08T18:33:41+02:00May 27th, 2010|Categories: News|

Garrison Keillor on Self-Publishing

Today’s must-read.  Garrison Keillor signals the death of publishing and the birth of…something else:

And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a Web site. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris (sic – in the NY Times no less) and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood

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2011-10-08T18:33:56+02:00May 27th, 2010|Categories: Features|

Getting a Free eBook with a Physical Book

Cross-posted at my blog as well.

I saw a post on the Kindle forums asking “Will Amazon offer free to Kindle users, the hardcovers they have purchased?” and the obvious answer is no, since it’s not Amazon’s decision. Books you buy are not just the words of a story, no matter how ideal that would be. You’re purchasing a product, and a lease to use (read) that product in a certain environment. It’s not the words themselves that are being purchased. That’s how traditional publishers are treating digital books.

But I’m not part of a traditional publisher. And neither are […]

2011-10-08T18:34:12+02:00May 27th, 2010|Categories: Features, Member Blog|

Price of Innocence: An Interview With Vicki Hopkins

An interview with Vicki Hopkins, author of The Price of Innocence.  See how you can fill out this interview here.

1. How did you come to self-publish? Did you try to get published traditionally?

My first self-publishing experience was in May of 2009, when I published a popular blog – Lessons From the Phantom of the Opera.  My readers begged for it in book form, so I thought the self-publishing route was my best choice for the type of non-fiction reference.

The Price of Innocence, my first novel, is also self-published.  Before release, I did not submit […]

2020-02-21T04:00:08+02:00May 27th, 2010|Categories: Interviews|

On Piracy and Freebooks

This post about my novel potentially being pirated made me look into book piracy and freebooks and just how this will affect the future of self-publishing and publishing on the whole.  Check out this endlessly fascinating interview with a bittorrent book pirate. He justifies it this way:

1) With digital copies, what is “stolen” is not as clear as with physical copies. With physical copies, you can assign a cost to the physical product, and each unit costs x dollars to create. Therefore, if the product is stolen, it is easy to say that an object was stolen that

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2011-10-08T18:34:49+02:00May 27th, 2010|Categories: Features|

CD-ROM Copyright Infringement

So a CD-ROM version of my novel showed up on Amazon a day after I placed the book on Feedbooks and Manybooks.  It’s listed as published by “The Again Shop” so be on the lookout.  A Google search just came up with other examples of this. The novel is protected by a Creative Commons No Derivatives license, which reads:

You are free:

  • to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work

Under the following conditions:

  • Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests
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2011-10-08T18:35:15+02:00May 27th, 2010|Categories: Resources|

Feedbooks: A Primer

Amid all of the discussion about the multiple ‘walled gardens’ being set up to push DRM-ed ebooks to devices, a Paris-based team have been steadily building a system to push books anywhere and shipping more books than Apple in the process.

Of course, the books are free so the comparison is dodgy, but let’s put the figures out there: in the first 28 days of iBooks, Apple distributed 1.5 million ebooks while Feedbooks distributed out 2.6 million ebooks to iPads, iPhones, PCs and Android devices.

They describe themselves as “a cloud service for digital publishing/distribution” and if you are interested […]

2011-10-08T18:35:31+02:00May 26th, 2010|Categories: Lead Story, Resources|
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