Lead Story | Self-Publishing Review

Adventures in Self-Publishing

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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|

Welcome to Self-Publishing Review 2.0

The new site is finally live. Spent the last couple of weeks living on the WPMU and Buddypress forums to get this set up. Users now have the ability to:

Join groups
Participate in forums
Add friends

Additionally, the coolest part of this new set-up for me is that anyone who registers has the ability to add blog posts to the site. If you look at the header, the site is separated into Blog and Magazine. The Blog page consists of all the posts on the site, but all blog posts won’t automatically go to the front page, otherwise people […]

Henry Baum2011-10-08T18:45:58+02:00December 22nd, 2009|Categories: Lead Story, News|

Zombocalypse Now: A Review & Interview with Matt Youngmark

Zombocalypse Now is like the old Choose Your Own Adventure books. And when I say “like,” I mean exactly like. It consists of two-page chapters and at end of each chapter it says: if you’d like to do X, go to page X, if you’d like to do Y, go to page Y. Chance happens that I’d been rereading my old CYOA books with my daughter (they age well), so I have a sense of how these things read. With the old CYOA books they can be hit or miss. The main problem is that the choices either aren’t all […]

Henry Baum2011-10-08T18:46:45+02:00December 15th, 2009|Categories: Book Reviews, Interviews, Lead Story|

Not Your Father’s Self-Publishing

Things in self-publishing have changed a lot just in the past couple of years. Awareness of, and respect for, self-publishing has grown to the point that it’s virtually gone mainstream. Yet based on some posts and comments I’ve seen around the web in the wake of the Harlequin Horizons/DellArte Press rumpus, it’s clear to me there’s still an awful lot of misinformation being spread around the web about self-publishing in comparison to mainstream publishing.

The Harsh Realities of Being A Mainstream-Published Novelist

The novelist’s traditional path to authorship is common enough knowledge. First, you spend months or years writing and […]

April L. Hamilton2014-01-08T20:53:14+02:00December 7th, 2009|Categories: Lead Story|