There’s nothing written in stone that requires a self-published author to format a book for seven–or any–publishing platforms. Of the fifty titles my publishing company currently offers, around thirty are my own books, the rest are by friends or friends of friends, all of whom feel better off writing books rather than doing all the [...]

The biggest roadblock to James’s proposal is the huge gap between the capabilities of the various ebook readers. The utter lack of an industry standard–and the fact that no one appears to be working toward even the mere concept of an industry standard–leaves the ebook publisher with a choice between standardizing ebooks on a least-common-denominator [...]

Henry, what would you do with information about where ebooks sell? You can’t send a rep to that area to gin up more business, because you don’t distribute or sell ebooks there. (Amazon, etc. do, and they don’t bother with geography beyond whole countries and regions’) And you can’t afford to. You might benefit from [...]

Henry, see how this truth (which I see as the first truth of marketing) factors into your quest for data:

Every buying decision is mutually exclusive of every other buying decision.

There’s a specific bias against writers at work here. The internet has democratized discourse, but the gates have been opened for wannabes with a grudge who tend to coarsen discourse. Those of us who really can write, who are confident in what we do, who can earn a living at it, are both admired for [...]

If anyone is suffering under the delusion that Amazon, for one, will get an abuser off your back, here is some give and take from the past few days. First, my note to Amazon, which explains itself: I am the publisher of the book . Apparently the author’s political views are not tolerated by several [...]

Here’s a one-star Goodreads review about my book on just the military aspects of the 1967 Six Day War. “Never Read it. Don’t Plan on reading it. This book has to be fiction because none of this is true. Nuff said.” This doesn’t upset me in the least. It’s the only one-star review on a [...]

They were the best of lines, they were the worst of lines, it was the ague of isdom.

Well, hold on a second. I have to believe Tracy would have been grateful, maybe ecstatic if the free book had garnered a good review, so it’s fair if a free book garners a bad one. You pay your money and you take your chance. I do agree that a bad review and a review [...]

That is an insanely short-sighted and greed-driven outlook. I’m making about 75 percent of my monthly ebook income from Amazon, but that does not blind me to the fact that a commercial war is either simmering or has already turned hot. There are immense market forces at work here, and immense companies are involved. Google [...]

The antidote to an Amazon monopoly and monopoly behavior is OUR support of other ebook venues, such as B&N and even Scribd. We must see to it that our titles are available anywhere ebooks are sold. As long as =readers= have choices, we’ll have choices. At least from the perspective of an onorous exclusivity demand, [...]

Ah, Jon, a cynic after my own heart. And with good reason. Cynics are not born that way, they are made. All this chicanery and jockeying is happening during an astoundng growth phase, while the ceiling is still blue and seems unlimited. Try to imagine what it will look like when the ereader market is [...]

I still can’t tell you how it translates into sales on Amazon, B&N, etc., but I am getting a ton of reads for each of my books on Scribd. Virtually no sales there, either, but I think there’s simply resistance to reading a book on a computer screen rather than a more comfortable reader or [...]

I think Amazon is well aware that the traditional publishers are feeding their flops to Select. And that’s why Amazon is making this splendid offer available to stinky indies: to save the fricking program with volume.

There’s a marked propensity on SPR to view large entities like publishers and Amazon as the enemy. They just do what they do to make a buck, and they use us to help them do that. But we use them too. If traditional publishing was still a viable model unhampered by technology that allows us [...]

As usual, Amazon is hedging its bets on the backs of others as it leaps into another brave new world. There’s no real way to market test the lending library, so why not ask authors and publishers to foot the bill (by abandoning competing revenue sources) in order to fund a trial-by-rollout. It’s a a [...]

Hemingway famously observed that every writer needs a built-in, shock-proof shit detector. Shanks’s horseshit allusion to stocking a farm team confirms Hemingway’s warning. What professional team with a farm system requires its tyros to pay to play?

Actually, Ron, I never felt lonely. I felt independent, able to fend for myself in a world filled with people whose judgement I questioned and acumen I could not respect.

I started out as self-publisher in 1985, in order to move a book caught in a publisher bankruptcy back into print. I had had several books published by mainstream publishers by then, and I was writing books full time. At the same time I self-published myself, I published a book I had just co-authored, a [...]