David Gaughran has a comprehensive post about Kobo’s recent buyout by a Japanese firm. In the U.S., Kobo doesn’t get a lot of love – sales are slim on Kobo compared to other outlets, and the Kobo reader doesn’t really stack up to the Nook or the Kindle.  Plus, there was the recent discount fiasco, [...]

This is pretty huge news. The biggest mark against Smashwords is their meatgrinder – it’s necessary to submit a bare bones files or else the meatgrinder will convert it with myriad formatting problems, and the file won’t be eligible for distribution. That has been the main way that Smashwords can distribute the same file to [...]

A cautionary tale this week about a writer whose book was set to free for the Kindle by mistake. Amazon saw a free preview on Barnes and Noble as being a complete book – and so given Amazon’s policy to never have a higher priced book than any other outlet, they matched the price of [...]

The Kindle Lending Library went live today and there’s some consternation about what all this means. First off, this is only for Amazon Prime customers, who pay $79 a year, or around $6.50 a month. These titles cannot be accessed on Kindle for iPad, Kindle for desktop – only on Kindle hardware. At first, Amazon [...]

From the Wall Street Journal article: Secret of Self-Publishing: Success Self-publishing these days is increasingly a tale of two cities. There are established authors, like Nyree Belleville, who says she’s earned half a million dollars in the past 18 months selling direct rather than through a publisher.. Then there are new authors, like Eve Yohalem. [...]

Mark Coker writes at Smashwords: Last month I provided a brief update about the ScrollMotion relationship (September 19 Site Updates update below) where I linked to an interview I did at The Savvy Book Marketer. In that interview, I commented about the delays ScrollMotion faced in distributing Smashwords ebooks as apps. Despite the fact they [...]

I can’t claim to entirely know the market for comics, but this story seems pretty significant. An illustrator for Mad Magazine decided to self-publish his collection of caricatures via his own imprint, Deadline Demon Publishing. Given his connection to big time publishing, he likely could have gotten a deal, but he weighed his options and saw [...]

This story is pretty amazing.  A “publishing consultant” in Atlanta, GA ripped people off by taking their money and offering nothing in return.  At the risk of blaming the victim, I am not 100% sympathetic.  When you’re shelling out $10,000 to someone with 30 prior fraud complaints, perhaps you didn’t do your homework.  Many of [...]

As a sequel to SPR is Charging for Reviews, here ‘s the lowdown for reviewers, as I’m not sure how many people yet know about this yet.  Reviewers are paid $40 per review, and the site is getting a steady stream of people looking for reviews so far. But as the idea is to find [...]

Believe me, I struggled with this idea for a long time. In a world where self-publishers get ripped off by shady print on demand outfits, there’s a lot of sensitivity to charging self-publishers any money. The main purpose of charging for reviews is not to make me money as editor of this site, but to [...]