Fred Crawley of The New Statesman chews over the rise of self – published content on Kindle from an original angle – is the concept of  “own-brand” consumerism affecting self-published books? Are standards slipping to give way to instant gratification? Should proofreading standards be higher? Discuss… In the digital video shops we increasingly use as [...]

Spoofs are a serious business in literature, particularly when murder is involved. Pulling off a send-up of hard-boiled detective and spy novels is like singing badly on purpose –  it ain’t as easy as it looks. This volume of fifteen short stories, the third in a related series by Australian writer Gerry Burke, provides the [...]

Jim Carrey is preparing to join the ranks of self-published authors with what he described as a “metaphysical” children’s book about a wave. The actor told HitFix that the book would be called How Roland Rolls. And although a major Hollywood name like Carrey would find it easy to land a mainstream publisher, he said: [...]

The UK photo book software developer, Taopix, has announced its new collaboration with Silicon Valley’s on-line self-publishing engine, FastPencil. This will offer an opportunity to picture book self-published authors to have a real choice about illustrations in their books instead of the difficult price sacrifices needed on the mainstream suppliers, such as Amazon’s Createspace. Self-publishing [...]

Glancing at the cover of this book we know right off the bat something is up with that well. There are too many historical writings about fountains of youth to count, not to mention the legendary island of Avalon and utopian villages such as Shangri-La. In The Puddingstone Well, the second novel from William Westhoven, [...]

A former mobile disc jockey, voiceover artist and Crazy Eddie store manager, William Westhoven was a full-time journalist from 1989 to 2011, when he fell victim to newspaper industry-wide layoffs. Since then, he has switched to fiction, writing and self-publishing novels. One-Hit Willie, a historical novel that covers 50 years of music in America, was [...]

The Life and Times of Car Johnson by Rebekah Webb is a comedic biography of a fictional character. One could almost say my reading experience of this book was a trip. The book is presented in first-person, as though the character is dictating. During the first few chapters, I thought I was reading a transcript [...]

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf’s treatise on women and fiction, Mrs. Woolf lamented that, historically, women had to have both money and a room of their own in order to write – two resources that had been universally difficult, if not impossible, for women to attain back then. However, these days women [...]

One of the most important things you can do in this ebook world is to provide your reader with your current contact information. I monitor over 50 authors and ebook experts blogs on a regular basis and finding their contact links is quite a challenge. Surprisingly, I find the same problem in the current ebooks [...]

One of the first things an indie author should realize is that the printed version of their book does not have the same content as the ebook version and the differences start right in the front of the book. It starts with the Copyright Page. The first area that jumps out is the copyright page [...]