Member Blog

I’ve been away from Self-Publishing Review for several months, but now that I’ve fulfilled some of the obligations that kept me away, it’s good to be back. The biggest task was judging one of the Spur categories. Two other judges and I read about 30 Western novels, most of which were self-published.

Between a few of the self-published and the traditionally published novels, there was not much difference in quality. That argues against the prejudice that might linger against self-published novels as a category, despite Joseph Wideman’s well-publicized decision that Henry Baum discusses on the front page. The other two […]

MediaBistro.com analyzed what many of us call “meaningless chatter” on Twitter and found, among all the celebrity nonsense, there are plenty of us out there too:

Using highly unscientific methods (a simple TweepSearch to find all the people who included the word “poet,” “novelist,” or “writer” in their Twitter profile), GalleyCat has compiled a year-end census of the literary Twittersphere.

According to simple TweepSearch queries, there are 1,790 novelists, 9,139 poets, 19,490 journalists, 28,529 authors, and a staggering 99,082 writers on Twitter. The publishing world latched on to the microblogging site in 2009, as Twitter writers scored book deals, serialized

I love cutting through the muck of life.  Please get me from A to B in the most efficient manner possible.  I don’t want a long song and dance.  Don’t want to be distracted on the way.  And when I get to where I am going I really, really want to know that I am actually there. We all have the same issue and it should serve as a strong reminder of why building the best possible landing page for those who search is an essential part of book marketing.

This point was hammered home to me again the other […]

It takes a different kind of person to make their own dreams come alive.  Not everyone is prepared to put in the long hours and hard work it takes to bring a novel to the store shelves in non-traditional ways.  I’m one of those crazy, annal retentive, ego centric fools who just has to do things his own way.  I’m not content to let others tell me how my books are going to look or even if they get published.  That’s just not in my character.

As a youth, I saw the movie Star Wars.  Not the Jar-Jar Binks […]

This is all over the web, but the best analysis I’ve seen is over at arstechnica. Starting in June, Amazon will offer a new royalty program for Kindle e-books: 70% of the retail price goes to the publisher, instead of the 35% in the current standard contract. From the article:

Amazon dropped a bomb on the publishing world Wednesday morning by announcing a new royalty program that will allow authors to earn 70 percent royalties from each e-book sold, but with a catch or two. The move will pay participating authors more per book than they typically earn from

Fragmentation of the book business has made it nearly impossible for writers to find publishers, unless, of course, they already have publishers who are willing to take chances on their new books. Publishers need to make money, and times are hard. As a result, conventional publication by major publishers has become nearly impossible for great numbers of aspiring writers who have no history of huge sales, or, quite possibly, no history of any sales at all. In an earlier post, The Dream of an Instant Book, I explored the promise of The Espresso Book Machine, a device that promises […]