Henry Baum

Since January 25, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award is open to submissions until February 7.

To register and enter you will need to submit:

• The full/complete version of your manuscript (the “Manuscript”), which must be between 50,000 and 150,000 words;
• Up to the first 5,000 words, but no less than 3,000 words, of text of that manuscript, excluding any table of contents, foreword, and acknowledgments (the “Excerpt”);
• A pitch statement (cover letter/summary) of up to 300 word (the “Pitch”);
• Other registration information as asked for on the entry page (such as name, contact information, book title), and
• An author photo

New feature at Self-Publishing Review: a Link Directory.    Users can add a directory listing for a book, service, website, or other.  The listing will be given a unique page that will show up in your profile. Example for my book: The American Book of the Dead.

To use the directory:

1. Go to My Account at the top.

2.  Select Directory – Create a Link.

or

1. Go to your profile.

2. Find “Directory” in the sidebar list.

3. A new menu will come up at the bottom of the profile called “My Links.”

4. Select “Create […]

So the iPad is finally here and brings big implications for the future of publishing. Here’s a video of the iBooks app at work:

The iBooks app will use the ePub format, which is good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s not a proprietary format, like the Kindle – i.e. Kindle books can only be read on a Kindle. Actually, Kindle has expanded to having books available on the iPhone, but generally it’s a single format ereader. One wonders if Kindle books can be read on the iPad, as they can on the iPhone, what use […]

Via MediaBistro comes news that Wattpad is teaming up with Lulu to offer print on demand services for Wattpad stories:

Wattpad, the Toronto-based eBook-publishing social network, which recently completed a round of funding, today announced a partnership with Lulu, the self-publishing and printing company, to create a branded Wattpad store on Lulu.com. Click here to check out what they’re officially calling “The Wattpad Marketplace on Lulu.com.”

To this writer, Wattpad leaves a lot to be desired. Stories are formatted like blog entries – with breaks between paragraphs and no indents – and there are no italics. Worse, though, is […]

Used to be you had to dig to find posts like this, or least find a caveat, “Self-publishing sucks, but here’s a writer who’s doing it.”  Basically, more traditionally-published writers are coming out of the woodwork and looking into this medium.

In the L.A. Times, there’s a nice piece by Steve Almond (on Amazon) who put out his most recent collection via the Espresso Book Machine.

I pitched this project to a number of editors over the ensuing months. Aspiring writers and fans of micro-fiction would go nuts. Members of the iPhone generation would embrace it as a

As a reaction to the brouhaha over Author Solutions’ partnership with Harlequin, Author Solutions CEO, Kevin Weiss, put together this video to address the literary guilds that took issue with the partnership: the Romance Writers of America (RWA), Mystery Writers of America (MWA), and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

From the press release,

In response to ASI’s announcements of partnerships with traditional publishers, the three writer’s guilds led a campaign to discredit the publishers involved in creating these groundbreaking opportunities, even going so far as to de-list one as a qualified publisher. Weiss believes the