For over a year now, I’ve been publishing my ebooks through Smashwords, an online company that specializes in allowing indie authors to format and upload their digital books to be sold on different platforms, including the Amazon Kindle, the Barnes and Noble Nook, and the Sony Reader. Although I’ve experience a few drawbacks during my [...]

This week, Mark Coker posted a new entry to the Smashwords blog detailing the rise of self-publishing and discussing the broken model upon which big publishing is built. From the article: If authors – the beating heart powering Big Publishing – lose faith in Big Publishing, then big publishing as we know it will die. [...]

So, why do free eBooks exist? Why would any person go to the trouble of typing so many words on a page, then spend money to create a cover for that electronic book, only to give it away to people with no expectation of a monetary reward?

It’s because we need reviews.

Hello. I’m Ravis. I write a lot of stuff that could nominally be called horror–because I love horror and other genre fiction–and some stuff that falls under whatever the currently trendy term might be for contemporary lit that’s based in the real world, yet contains elements of the fantastical. I recently self-published  an e-novella called [...]

In the past, I’ve posted here and there about the tools I use for my web design, marketing and audio projects and figured I’d bring them all together in one reference for others wanting to check them out. This is by no means a full list of all that is out there, just a list [...]

It’s not easy to make the transition from a misanthropic and socially anxious writer to a self-promoting suckup, and the biggest reason I published this first book on my own was because I’ve been losing my mind trying to get agents to even agree to peek at the manuscript for my novel, which is a [...]

I started a blog to review books published at Smashwords.com. There is a real need to help Smashwords authors get the word out on what they offer and how to reach them. The site is: http://smashwordsreviewed.blogspot.com. Any Smashwords author can contact me at neilcrab@hotmail.com and we’ll make arrangements. The first review is Mike Jastrzebski’s The [...]

For the last century, publishers controlled the means of book production and book distribution. If authors wanted to reach readers, they had no choice but to kneel before the publishing oligopolists who had the power to determine who got published, and what readers read. The system worked fantastically well for the publishers, [. . .] but less well for the authors they published, and even less well for the vast majority of authors who could never gain access to the cliquey club of the published.

The most downloaded books today, Jan. 8, at Smashwords.com are by (self-published) Backword Books authors. Women’s fiction #1 – Homefront by Kristen J. Tsetsi #2 – Waiting for Spring by R.J. Keller (reviewed by me here) Literary fiction #1 – Homefront by Kristen J. Tsetsi #4 – American Book of the Dead by Henry Baum [...]