Features

A guest post on David Gaughran’s site covers the new world of bundled box sets. A good idea on the surface, and very profitable, but also problematic. She addresses this in the post:

With the attention, of course, also comes the inevitable criticism: that 2012 was the year of the freebie, 2013 the year of the 99¢ book, and now 2014 is the year of the 99¢ box. All cheap marketing ploys that will devalue the written word and destroy an industry.

Pretty much. Next paragraph:

Our business ledger, of course, says otherwise. Despite having built our assisted-self-publishing micropress

Are self-publishers dumb? Don’t answer that.

Recently, the debate has arisen again about genre vs. literary self-publishing (as if there’s some kind of war between the two) with Chris Meadows gloating on Teleread:

Maybe because, I dunno, nobody wants to read them? I read to get away from the real world. I don’t want to read more stories about the real world.

Anyway, I come to wonder: after all these years of sneering at genre’s low-brow nature, is literary fiction about to die off because its writers couldn’t make the same transition to self-publishing that genre’s writers could? That

With the increasing emphasis on e-books and the ease of digital publishing, you may think the saying “don’t judge a book by its cover” doesn’t really apply anymore. After all, a book cover displayed on the screen of a tablet doesn’t hold the same weight as it does on the front of a hardback book.

However, data suggests we shouldn’t forget that old saying just yet. A recent study by Voxburner surveyed people ages 16 to 24 on their reading preferences. The findings were surprising — 62 percent preferred print books over e-books. Think about that statistic for a minute […]

Mick Rooney has a great post up at the Independent Publishing Magazine: Is self-publishing creating a hierarchical community for its authors?

So what’s bugging me about self-publishing now? Aren’t we experiencing a self-publishing boom with little to complain about?

There is an increasing hierarchy developing in the self-publishing community and it shows no sign of disappearing anytime soon. It’s the hierarchy of the true savvy self-publishers and those authors who choose an assisted self-publishing service. I’ve even witnessed the line in the sand drawn between authors who have their own publishing imprint name and block of ISBNs registered with Bowker/Nielsen,