Maybe it’s great – but I’ll never know. Sounds great, in theory: Now anyone can create stunning iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books, and more for iPad. All you need is an idea and a Mac. Start with one of the Apple-designed templates that feature a wide variety of page layouts. Add your own [...]

Has self-publishing lost its way? The reason that I got interested in self-publishing was because of the traditional publishing industry’s obsession with marketing over the quality of books. It seems like the vibe around self-publishing these days is echoing trad publishing’s marketing obsession. I understand wanting to sell books. I’m desperate to sell books as [...]

2011 was an essential year for self-publishing and it’s good to have all major events collected in one place. I prepared a timeline, which works very well with a detailed report on top self-published Kindle ebooks of 2011 and will be a part of the infographic about self-publishing I’m going to post at Ebook Friendly [...]

Andrew Sullivan posted an email from a reader – who we’ve reviewed and  interviewed in the past – about his leap from self-publishing to AmazonEncore (which I didn’t know had happened, so congrats Tim!).  He writes: After finishing a first draft of the manuscript, I jumped through all the typical hoops: got an agent, wrote [...]

I’m very happy about Konrath’s success.  It’s encouraging to everybody.  If I make 1/10 of what he’s making, I’ll be ecstatic.  But there’s sometimes a problem with writers like Konrath or Cory Doctorow touting their success when they’re each in a very unique position.  Doctorow advocates giving away books for free permanently because it’s worked [...]

Yesterday, I was looking at my Kindle sales, which reliably sell the the same amount every day (which is not a huge amount, I’m no Konrath) and I was wondering why I couldn’t break through with more sales.  Am I getting the exact same traffic to my Amazon page every day?  How much of that [...]

Meghan Daum has a very interesting post in The Believer about what it’s like to be a columnist for the L.A. Times and the amount of invective that’s thrown her way: These days, being attacked isn’t just the result of saying something badly, it’s the result of saying anything at all. I can testify to [...]

Having reviewed as much non-fiction as I have, you are bound to come across those who have “borrowed” other people’s work and not given them credit for it. It doesn’t happen often in traditionally-published works, but it does happen. As a green reviewer early on, I missed one that was a direct rip-off of another [...]

I’m writing this to save my own life.  If my opening line doesn’t seize you by the wallet and pry the credit card from your increasingly skeptical hand, I could die.  Or worse, not sell you my book. According to accepted wisdom (syndicated through the usual links, Likes and sponsored emails) your career will literally [...]

I recently discovered that my book was victim to an act of sabotage through bad reviews and wrote a blog post for the Huffington Post. Here it is: How much can you trust book reviews on the web? Turns out, very little. My journey in self-publishing started at the end of this past October. I had [...]