Lead Story | Self-Publishing Review

A New Indie Distribution Model

An interesting development out of Boulder, Colorado that is both a good and bad sign. Self-published writers can now pay for being stocked on the shelves or more:

The store charges its consignment authors according to a tiered fee structure: $25 simply to stock a book (five copies at a time, replenished as needed by the author for no additional fee); $75 to feature a book for at least two weeks in the “Recommended” section; and $125 to, in addition to everything else, mention the book in the store’s email newsletter, feature it on the Local Favorites page of

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Henry Baum2011-10-08T18:17:10+02:00May 18th, 2010|Categories: Lead Story, Resources|

SPR is For Sale and/or Needs a Co-Editor

I can’t do this alone anymore. Big site, needs a lot of content. With self-publishing growing as it is, this site could become a major magazine…if it had a staff able to take on the amazing number of books being released. And I’m talking about good books, not just a way to review as many books as possible. As time goes on, the quality of self-published books is going to get better and better, meaning there has to be a staff on hand to review the growing number of books. But alas, I’m in no place to actually pay anyone […]

Henry Baum2010-05-26T09:45:18+02:00May 14th, 2010|Categories: Lead Story, News|

Get it Together, Lulu

Lulu’s been exhibiting quite a few problems lately. Here are two posts on Lulu’s mishandling of ebooks and their clients. The first is reprinted from Mike Cane’s iPad Test blog, titled Lulu And The iBookstore: Say NO!

Get Your eBook in the Apple iBookstore

Don’t do it.

Here’s why.

Lulu says:

ISBNs. Apple requires ISBNs on eBooks. Lulu can assign one for free.

And who will own that ISBN? If you’re getting it for free, I doubt that’s going to be you. See why ISBN ownership matters.

Lulu says:

Validation. Apple has a strict file validation process. All files

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Henry Baum2011-10-08T18:27:50+02:00May 10th, 2010|Categories: Lead Story, Publisher Reviews|

Adventures in Self-Publishing

(click for complete version)

I’ve been self-publishing novels for a little more than ten years. I’ve had some successes–for example, I’ve won the Writer’s Digest National Self-Published Book competition and I’ve sold more than 6,000 copies of my books. But I’m not a self-publishing rock star and I still dream of doing much better.

Here’s an essay on some things I’ve learned in ten years of doing this. Other versions of this essay appear elsewhere on the net, most recently on my site wetmachine.com, from whence you can download versions of my books for free if you feel like […]

John Sundman2011-10-08T19:38:08+02:00March 24th, 2010|Categories: Features, Lead Story, Resources|

When a CC License Becomes a PITA, or worse, a Pain in Your Bottom Line…

Last week I entered into an unfortunate discussion regarding Creative Commons licensing, free content, and intellectual property theft to the tune of Copyright Hijacking. See the discussion over on Tele-read with author Piotr Kowolcyzk titled: I have a Ghost Publisher at Amazon … Please Help!:

I’ve self-published my two books Password Incorrect and Failure Confirmed through Kindle Digital Text Platform in mid-January, a couple of days after Amazon opened a system to authors from outside USA.

Last Friday I’ve noticed that there is another edition of Password Incorrect, published on Feb 15 – by somebody else. The link to

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Cheryl Anne Gardner2011-10-08T18:38:09+02:00March 2nd, 2010|Categories: Lead Story, Resources|

Self-Publishing is Humanity’s Progress (and also the Apocalypse)

How’s that for a bombastic title? Not that self-publishing needs any more defending because it’s here to stay and detractors are gathering cobwebs, but not a lot has been written here about publishing as it relates to the music industry, or about the long-term future of publishing. One of the mysteries about self-publishing is that a playwright can put on his own play out of pocket, or a band can self-release a book, and this is not considered…pathetic. The difference between this and self-publishing, as far as I can see it, is that book writing and reading is far more […]

Henry Baum2011-10-08T18:39:53+02:00February 19th, 2010|Categories: Features, Lead Story|

Authors in the eBook Age

Ever since Macmillan Publishing took on Amazon a few weeks ago in regards to a new contract, the cost of eBooks have been bandied about. Some readers seem to think that publishers are greedy and have money raining down on them by pricing their books over $10. In one Amazon discussion group, a reader asked, “What’s the price of a few electrons?” He reduced the cost of a book to the energy it takes for a Kindle or other reader to receive it.

Still, without the cost of printing and hauling the books around by truck, surely the cost has […]

Christopher Meeks2011-10-08T20:19:25+02:00February 17th, 2010|Categories: Features, Lead Story|

Deconstructing Bembo: Typographic Beauty and Bloody Murder

Book designers are typographers by necessity, if not by nature. Content may be king, but content is almost always text. Text must be displayed for a reader, either on the pages of a book, or on a screen.

To display text, you need to use a type font. The font could be chosen by a designer, or it might be a default set up by the engineers who create digital reading devices.

When it comes to fonts, designers have strong feelings. While you’re sitting at a restaurant trying to decide what to order, the book designer at the next table […]

Joel Friedlander2016-02-23T03:58:14+02:00December 30th, 2009|Categories: Lead Story|