As the DIY approach gains more and more writers and readers, traditional publishers must reinvent themselves, writes Alison Baverstock at The Guardian. After a boom year in self-publishing the headlines are getting a little predictable. Most feature a doughty author who quickly builds demand for her work and is rewarded with a large contract from [...]

Author Iain Banks has announced on his website that he has just months to live after being diagnosed with bladder cancer. The 59-year-old announced the book he is currently working on, entitled The Quarry, is likely to be his last after cancer spread to his liver, pancreas and lymph nodes. In a personal statement on [...]

Mark Coker, founder and CEO of Smashwords, is courting libraries. In a March 23 post on the Smashwords blog, Coker describes his campaign to convince libraries to offer self-publishing programs to their patrons, with, of course, the help of Smashwords. According to the blog post: Libraries are uniquely qualified to orchestrate community resources and talent [...]

    This puts Amazon in an even stronger position to control which books get read and which ones languish. We’ll have to wait and see if Amazon starts deleting bookstore links, thus reducing options for both readers and authors. In any case, the 500 pound gorilla that is Amazon just got considerably bigger.  Amazon.com [...]

MediaShift’s Anna Lewis talks proofreading in this article originally from Completely Novel. If you are self-publishing, then proofreading your manuscript is a really challenging task — and you’ll kick yourself if you find a mistake after you’ve told everyone about the book. No matter how many times you’ve read through your work, it’s amazing how [...]

Howls of outrage are bound to accompany next month’s unveiling of Granta’s list of top 20 young writers. Here a former Granta editor and veteran of the 2003 judging panel reveals how the list takes shape Ten years is a long time in the literary game: it can easily take someone until then to finish [...]

Could this be the end of the Nook? Via the New York Times: Even for a company with a lot of bad news lately, the bulletin from Barnes & Noble this month had an ominous feel. Barnes & Noble, the nation’s largest book chain, warned that when it reports fiscal 2013 third-quarter results on Thursday, [...]

This is pretty bad news for self-publishers, given that many self-publishers are digital-only: Sixty-one percent of book purchases by frequent book buyers take place online, but only seven percent of those buyers said they discovered that book online, while physical book stores account for 39 percent of units sold and 20 percent of discovery share: [...]

Recently it was reported that the Douglas County Library system bought 10,000 Smashwords titles to add to its collection of ebooks. An interesting piece from Library Journal shows just how hard this was to work out, especially considering many Smashwords titles are NC-17+. “It was a lot more complicated for us than we expected,” said [...]

An interesting announcement by Lulu, posted on their blog. Effective January 15, 2013, Lulu will no longer offer Adobe’s Digital Editions DRM as an option when publishing or revising eBook content in EPUB and PDF formats. DRM works best when administered by those who control how content is purchased and viewed. Companies like Amazon, Apple [...]