Features | Self-Publishing Review

Why I Nuked My Writing Career Before it Even Started

On Friday, September 9th I uploaded my eBook to Amazon.com, iBooks, and Barnes & Noble for $2.99

A week later, I uploaded it to The Pirate Bay for free.

I know what you’re probably thinking. “Well, that was stupid.” That’s exactly what my girlfriend, a few of my friends, and the voice in my head all said.

It took me two stiff drinks to work up the courage to prep the file. I wrote up a half page letter to the reader. This has been uploaded by the author. It took ten years and countless hours to create this […]

Andrew Van Wey2020-02-21T06:44:57+02:00September 21st, 2011|Categories: Features|Tags: Copyright|

Ebook Cover Design: Context Creates Possibilities

This post is a part of Ebook specific cover design series.

There are three approaches to covers:
– ebook cover is a copy of a print edition,
– one cover is designed for both print and digital edition,
– a cover is designed for ebook only.

I’d like to focus on the last one as it creates much more possibilities than you would originally think of. And all this can happen if you just switch the perspective.

A different approach, free from constrains typical for print production – and taking into consideration circumstances typical for digital environment – can bring […]

Piotr Kowalczyk2020-02-21T03:41:32+02:00September 13th, 2011|Categories: Features|Tags: Book Cover Design|

Kindle Quality Control

I received this email this morning from Amazon:

Dear Publisher,

During a quality assurance review of your title, we have found the following issue(s):

Typo/formatting issues exist that may have been caused by an Optical Character Recognition (OCR) problem. Following are few examples:

*Loc 1969; “kiss on the check” should be “kiss on the cheek”
*Loc 578; “I bum one” should be “I bum one”

At Location – 1924; the word “more” is missing between “even” and “doomed”.

Please look for the same kind of errors throughout and make the necessary corrections to the title before republishing it.

If you

[…]

Henry Baum2011-09-09T13:21:58+02:00September 9th, 2011|Categories: Features|

eBook Authors: Errors and the Dreaded Stigma of Self-Publishing

Self-publishing and ebooks have carried a stigma from day one by naysayers and the traditional publishing world. They forecast the book publishing pipe filled with poor and unreadable digital content because of the self-publishing ebook author.

There has been an increase in errors and poor formatting introduced by the new digital books compared to their pbook counterparts to be sure. So what has gone wrong? And why are these mistakes happening?

Are the self-publishing newbie authors, with their lack of experience, to blame? Does the new digital creation process introduce a new level of errors? Should traditional publishers share in […]

James Moushon2020-02-21T03:47:11+02:00September 6th, 2011|Categories: Features|Tags: Author Branding, Book Editing|

Traditional Publishing: Pros & Cons

There’s also so much information out there about all the different forms of publishing that most new authors are overwhelmed when it comes to deciding which way for their books.

My goal with this series of posts is not to persuade or convert any author in favor of one form of publishing over another. That is a personal decision for every author, and I don’t fault anyone for what choice they make. I was blessed in that I was given the opportunity to publish in every manner. As a result, I now independently publish my books because that works best […]

Lauren Carr2011-09-01T13:18:45+02:00September 1st, 2011|Categories: Features|

Beating them off with a Schtick

I’ve written a book with a schtick.

If I tell you that when I first drafted my collection of Christmas-themed horror shorts they were as a gift for my wife, who loves the holidays like no doe-eyed child ever did, and that I genuinely wanted to explore the notion of ‘giving’ creatively, while reveling in a mythology that is all too rarely untouched by serious genre writers, precisely because the associated tinsel-trimmed gimmickry makes them seem corny or hackneyed: you still won’t care. If I tell you these things they will only ring as excuses: as the book enters the […]

Damien Kelly2011-09-01T12:27:24+02:00September 1st, 2011|Categories: Features, Member Blog|Tags: Book Promotion|

So! You Want To Be A Writer?

This blog is inspired by Alan Rinzler, Zoe Winters, David Kazzie, JA Konrath, and Dean Wesley Smith. Because everything I ever learned about being a writer – a person who makes money writing – I learned from these individuals. So, if in the next five minutes you read something that you don’t believe, they are the ones to blame.

Do you know how to write? I’m not kidding. One day I was reading the autobiography of a bus stop mate. He had self-published the saga of his journey from gang member to solid citizen. The thesis of his book was […]

Emily Hill2011-08-22T12:32:16+02:00August 22nd, 2011|Categories: Features, Member Blog|Tags: JA Konrath, Zoe Winters|

A Spotify for Books

I’ve been using Spotify pretty religiously recently, and it’s amazing. So amazing that it sort of seems like it should be illegal. What is Spotify? If you’ve ever used iTunes, it’s like that, but with access to everyone else’s iTunes library at once – including your own. Yep, it’s like having access to all of the world’s music for free. Yes, it doesn’t have everything, but it has plenty. Unless you’re the type of person who needs to physically own an album, you can have access to it immediately, whenever you want. I used to be that person – […]