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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 […]

The idea for this dialogue came after the controversy regarding the review of John Lacombe’s Winter Games.  If you haven’t seen that thread, check it out, it’s a long one – it has a lot of interesting commentary about how writers and/or their fans should respond to reviews, including examples of how not to respond to a review.  Carol Buchanan, who reviewed the book, didn’t like the novel.  Steven Reynolds, who reviews for SPR, liked the book in a review for the now-defunct Podler.  Carol and Steven got together to talk about the controversy and book reviewing in general. […]

A guest post by Judith D. Schwartz, a writer based in Southern Vermont and author, most recently, of The Therapist’s New Clothes, a memoir — and cautionary tale — about training as a psychotherapist. Her blog on using the Espresso Book Machine is: http://litadventuresinpod.blogspot.com.

As someone with a book manuscript making the rounds, I followed the growing acceptance of self-published work with great interest. It was reassuring to know that there were alternatives to letting the thing wither on my hard-drive. On the other hand, did I really want to do that? I mean, if I were a […]

When I read the blog entry about the launch of Book Oven, I saw this as a significant development in the changing landscape of publishing.  As I tweeted then, “Sometimes I feel like I’m fooling myself that POD’s losing stigma, but things really are changing.”  It was so refreshing to see a well-designed and maintained site talk about print on demand and other tools for publishers with no cynicism or apology.  As the site says,

There has been a revolution bubbling in the book world, and digital has arrived: ebooks, print-on-demand, and online sales mean you don’t need

Ransom Stephens has written one of the best assessments of the future of publishing that you’re likely to read (found via Pod People).  Called Booking the Future, it needs to be read – more than once.  Here we talk about the ideas put forth in the article and the success of his digitally-published novel, The God Patent, which basically proves the thesis of his essay: the future of publishing is going to look very different than it does today.  It will have many elements of self-publishing writ large.  As he says, “Though the role of publishing has […]