Henry Baum

Cory Doctorow’s the pioneer of giving your work away for free and he’s had major success.  He writes:

I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money.

When my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, was published by Tor Books in January 2003, I also put the entire electronic text of the novel on the Internet under a Creative Commons License that encouraged my readers to copy it far and wide. Within a day, there were 30,000 downloads from my

I want to add something to the discussion which states that self-publishing is a business decision. April Hamilton ends her post Not Your Father’s Self-Publishing with:

And given that self-published authors have access to the same distribution channels, quality production methods, marketing and promotion methods, and audiences as their mainstream-published peers, it should be very clear by now that the choice of whether or not to self-publish is, to quote Guy LeCharles Gonzalez, a business decision. Period.

I would make the argument – as others have in the comments – that traditional distribution is superior to self-published distribution. Even if […]

I want to add a final word to this debate, even if I’m getting sick of it, as the debate about self-publishing vs. vanity publishing seems to be one that won’t die. I’ve got into plenty of discussions about it on Twitter, with people very vehement about separating self-publishing and vanity publishing through a pay service like AuthorHouse or iUniverse. Me, I see no difference. They’re both a method to self-release your work.

But people list these things as being decisive about calling something vanity publishing:

• You don’t control your rights
• You don’t control book cover design
• You don’t control