Henry Baum | Self-Publishing Review

About Henry Baum

Author of three self-published novels and one traditionally published (Soft Skull Press, Canongate, and Hachette Littératures). Recipient of Best Fiction at the DIY Book Festival, the Gold IPPY Award for Visionary Fiction, and the Hollywood Book Festival Grand Prize. He lives with his wife Cate Baum in Spain. He's the founder of SPR.

Excerpt: The American Book of the Dead

Here’s what I hope to be a new feature on SPR: book excerpts. If you’re interested, follow these instructions to post an excerpt. The novel can be purchased here.

This is the introduction to the novel. People either love this book, or they’re mystified – which is to be expected, as I was going for some level of mystification. Some have criticized that I should get to the action sooner. Some haven’t. The point for me is to get inside the narrator’s head and to set up the scope of the story.

Eugene Myers is working on a novel

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Henry Baum2013-06-18T16:54:51+02:00June 15th, 2013|Categories: Book Excerpt, Lead Story|

Hugh Howey’s Advice for Writers

A nice piece in Wired about the changes in publishing, which starts with Hugh Howey’s story:

While working in a bookstore in Boone, North Carolina, back in 2011, a 36-year-old college dropout named Hugh Howey started writing a series of sci-fi novellas called Wool. His stories were set in a postapocalyptic world where all human survivors live in an underground silo, a microsociety where resources are so scarce that one person has to die before another can be born. Howey had already published a book with a small press, but he wanted to retain creative control, and

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Henry Baum2014-02-12T13:31:16+02:00March 20th, 2013|Categories: Features|Tags: Hugh Howey|

One Racket to Rule Them All

A pretty brutal assessment of Author Solutions at Let’s Get Digital:

You see, Author Solutions’ modus operandi is pretty despicable, and they’ve been badgering, swindling and confusing writers out of money—and lots of it—for years.

The deceit starts with the web of brands they’ve established. With so many imprints, Author Solutions has tricked authors into thinking they have dozens of choices. In reality, however, the parent company is just slapping up half a dozen different logos, renaming packages, and selling the same grossly overpriced services to all of their customers no matter which brand ends up on the cover.

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Henry Baum2013-02-19T09:23:07+02:00February 19th, 2013|Categories: Features|

Print Still Matters

This is pretty bad news for self-publishers, given that many self-publishers are digital-only:

Sixty-one percent of book purchases by frequent book buyers take place online, but only seven percent of those buyers said they discovered that book online, while physical book stores account for 39 percent of units sold and 20 percent of discovery share: the stats come by way of new research from Peter Hildick-Smith, the founder and CEO of the Codex Group, which tracks frequent readers’ book-buying behavior. At the Digital Book World conference in New York on Thursday, he said that discovery and availability are

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Henry Baum2013-01-17T19:30:17+02:00January 17th, 2013|Categories: News|

Self-Publishing: Hard Work

A good post and discussion at Rachelle Gardner’s blog: 5 Surprises About Self-Publishing. This leaps out:

4. I overestimated my ability to sell books. I have lists of bookstores at which I’ve done appearances, book clubs who have hosted me, readers who have loved my work and bloggers who have reviewed my books. I didn’t think I had to build a platform. I thought that with a few flicks of the mouse, I’d quickly sell thousands of books and build a buzz that would carry me to even greater sales. It didn’t happen, so now I’m out doing what

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Henry Baum2013-01-11T14:05:24+02:00January 11th, 2013|Categories: Features|

Details on the Smashwords Sale to Libraries

Recently it was reported that the Douglas County Library system bought 10,000 Smashwords titles to add to its collection of ebooks. An interesting piece from Library Journal shows just how hard this was to work out, especially considering many Smashwords titles are NC-17+.

“It was a lot more complicated for us than we expected,” said Smashwords founder Mark Coker, “We’re giving libraries the option to slice and dice by multiple categories and multiple filters. And, along the way we discovered some cool ways to surface titles more accurately, that we think better reflect the interests of readers.”

The list began

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Henry Baum2013-01-09T18:57:28+02:00January 9th, 2013|Categories: News|

Self-Publishing: For Genre Writers Only

Jane Friedman has a provocative post about self-publishing that has the potential to rekindle age-old genre wars: whether or not genre is “serious” fiction. But that’s not really what she’s getting at. Her point is that there’s a different process for how much genre fiction is consumed, and this is how the self-publishing industry is evolving. She writes:

This model relies on a readership that consumes books like candy, or readers mostly interested in finding a next read as quickly and cheaply as possible. (We’re starting to see the impact of this cheap-read behavior: agents asking publishers to reduce

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Henry Baum2013-01-09T15:35:28+02:00January 9th, 2013|Categories: Features|

Lulu Nixes DRM for eBooks

An interesting announcement by Lulu, posted on their blog.

Effective January 15, 2013, Lulu will no longer offer Adobe’s Digital Editions DRM as an option when publishing or revising eBook content in EPUB and PDF formats. DRM works best when administered by those who control how content is purchased and viewed. Companies like Amazon, Apple and Barnes & Noble integrate a reader’s experience from purchasing to downloading and finally to reading. These companies do a fantastic job in this area, and eBooks published through Lulu and distributed through these retail sites will continue to have the same rights management

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Henry Baum2013-01-09T14:04:35+02:00January 9th, 2013|Categories: News|