Recently in this space, I came down pretty hard with the advice that you should make sure your writing is as smooth and error free as possible before you publish it. Now that I’ve made that point, I want to add the corollary: Don’t obsess. Well, maybe obsess a little, but not too much. The [...]

When I set out to write “The Bull and The Ban” I realized that there was going to be an issue. Although my book is the account of my journey through Spain and Catalonia to discover the controversy behind bullfighting and I am English, there were going to be Spanish speakers interested in the book [...]

So you just created your first book and you’re done with the editing. You have someone lined up to help you with the formatting and to help you upload the ebook to the online retailers. You’re an indie author and you’re going to self-publish. The ebook will be available for anyone in the world to [...]

I want to tell you about something that happened to me a couple of months ago. After spending most of 2012 working on the edits of my second novel and putting off multiple opportunities to visit family in the process, the prospect of killing two birds with one stone—visiting family and promoting the book—seemed like [...]

A good post and discussion at Rachelle Gardner’s blog: 5 Surprises About Self-Publishing. This leaps out: 4. I overestimated my ability to sell books. I have lists of bookstores at which I’ve done appearances, book clubs who have hosted me, readers who have loved my work and bloggers who have reviewed my books. I didn’t [...]

In the past few years I’ve been reading and editing a lot of self-published books. Two things I’ve noticed: 1) How good many of them are. 2) How poorly edited most of them are. The ones I’ve read have more often than not been MUCH better than most people probably expect self-published books to be. [...]

Jane Friedman has a provocative post about self-publishing  that has the potential to rekindle age-old genre wars: whether or not genre is “serious” fiction. But that’s not really what she’s getting at. Her point is that there’s a different process for how much genre fiction is consumed, and this is how the self-publishing industry is [...]

One of my jobs is to help other writers write well. But often, in order to do that, I first have to teach them to write badly. Few things are more frightening than an empty sheet of paper (an empty refrigerator and an empty bank account are two that spring to mind, but let’s stick [...]

It seems to me that self-published writers are looked down on – that they’re just using up space in the market; that if their work was good enough to get a proper publishing deal it would have done; that they’re putting out any kind of rubbish just because technology allows them to. All of this [...]

Present Returning to my last article on SPR, one year later, I’m struck by a comment left by a reader named Ron Fritsch.  The article was about my self publishing experiment, the Bookdrive, and Ron seemed to really like my idea. He liked the potential of a multimedia reading experience provided by a USB Book. [...]