Lead Story | Self-Publishing Review

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|

The American Book Release

In an interview I recently did with the Creative Penn, Joanna Penn asked how I used the Self-Publishing Review to market myself. Beyond the footer which contains links to my books at the bottom of each post, I haven’t done a lot of plugging my own books in the posts. But it’s my site – I started it and do most of the writing – so here we go. My novel, The American Book of the Dead, is now out.

The reason I started this site in December 2008 was because I knew I’d be releasing a […]

Henry Baum2009-12-28T20:59:16+02:00November 27th, 2009|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|

West of Mars: An Interview with Susan Helene Gottfried

Susan Helene Gottfried runs the website West of Mars, where she will tell you she does very little talking about her writing. Instead, she writes. She engages readers addicted to her Demo Tapes, described on her website as “collections of short fiction that introduce you to Trevor, Mitchell, and the rest of the fictional band, ShapeShifter — as well as the world in which they inhabit.” But West of Mars, winner of twenty blog awards, isn’t all about Susan and her own writing. She also promotes other writers who want to reach readers. In the following interview, Susan discusses […]

Kristen Tsetsi2011-10-08T20:22:06+02:00October 30th, 2009|Categories: Interviews, Lead Story|

An Interview with Anne R. Dick – Philip K. Dick's 3rd Wife

Earlier in the year, Self-Publishing Review had an interview with Tessa Dick, last wife of Philip K. Dick, who has self-published a memoir about PKD called Remembering Firebright. Strangely enough, Philip K. Dick’s third wife, Anne Dick, has also self-published a memoir about her former husband, Search for Philip K. Dick. Why should someone close to one of the most beloved and well-known science fiction writers of all time be driven to self-publish? Anne Dick’s book is superlative, it’s one of the best biographies of PKD available – read SPR’s review. From an interview on io9[…]

Henry Baum2011-10-08T20:23:29+02:00October 14th, 2009|Categories: Interviews, Lead Story|

Dorkisma: An Interview with Maria Bustillos

An interview by Erin Stropes with Maria Bustillos, author of Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork: “Pure gold. Don’t just grab it for the [David Foster Wallace] chapter (good as it is) but for the celebration of everything that is dork.” Nick Maniatis, The Howling Fantods.

Self-Publishing Review: Hello, Maria, and welcome to the Self-Publishing Review hot seat. Your book, Dorkismo: The Macho of the Dork, is a collection of nonfiction essays celebrating the joys of dorkdom in everything from anime and “Star Wars” to Alexis de Toqueville and Jane Eyre. It’s written in a light, […]

Erin Stropes2011-10-08T18:51:38+02:00October 7th, 2009|Categories: Lead Story|

Reviewing the Reviewers Part II

This is a continuation of Reviewing the Reviewers: A Dialogue about Book Reviewing with Steven Reynolds and Carol Buchanan, which led to a very lively discussion.

Self-Publishing Review: When a self-published novel is awful, do you think the reviewer has any responsibility to spare the writer’s feelings?

Steven Reynolds: A writer will always be somewhat hurt by a negative review. You have to assume they’re reasonably happy with the book they published, otherwise why would they bother? So to have some stranger publicly detail its apparent failings is going to hurt.

When confronted with a book that doesn’t […]

Henry Baum2011-10-08T18:52:29+02:00September 30th, 2009|Categories: Interviews, Lead Story|