News

A new social community for self-published eBook authors was announced yesterday:

From Project Gutenberg, the first producer of free eBooks, now comes the free Author’s Community Cloud Library, a social network Self Publishing Portal.  This portal allows authors to share their works with our readers as well as allows readers to provide comments, reviews and feedback to the authors.  Every eBooks has its own detail page with ratings and Wall for displaying reader comment.

There is no charge for using this service and registration is not required for reading or downloading the publications or comments.  However, registration is required to

Regarding today’s big publishing story (every day it seems like there’s another one) in which Apple and Big 6 publishers are potentially getting slapped with a Department of Justice lawsuit, Mark Coker comments on Tech Crunch:

Prices might actually rise if Agency was abandoned. Under agency, publishers earn 70% of the list price as their cut, and the retailer gets 30%. Under wholesale, the publisher sells the book to the retailer for $X, usually at 50% of the list price, and the retailer usually marks up from there. Let’s take example of a book where the publisher wants

Big news on the Smashwords front:

There are two components of the agreement. The first is distribution into the Blio online store and e-reading app. The second part of the agreement gains Smashwords authors and publishers distribution into the library market through Baker & Taylor’s Axis360 service.

If you’re not familiar with Blio, it’s an online store (Blio.com) and also a popular e-reading application that has been pre-loaded on over millions of computers and devices. It powers the e-reading experience for laptops, desktops and tablets produced by Dell Computer, HP, Toshiba and T-Mobile, among others. Blio is

The site may look the same, but it’s not.  Step right up for a long and boring tale.  Around 3 months ago, registrations stopped working for no reason.  I tried everything to fix it – deleting plugins, adding plugins, messing with code.  Bluehost told me someone might have even hacked the site, so I hired a security firm.  No one had.  Finally, I found someone who knew what he was doing and he gave the site a full upgrade.

The site runs Buddypress, which is great and allows for everything you see on the site – members, groups[…]

If you went to your KDP account this morning to (obsessively) check your stats, you might have seen this:

After a bit of confusion whether or not self-publishers would be part of the Kindle Lending library, they now can be.  However, this isn’t a perfect deal for self-publishers for this reason:

When you choose KDP Select for a book, you’re committing to make the digital format of that book available exclusively through KDP. During the period of exclusivity, you cannot distribute your book digitally anywhere else, including on your website, blogs, etc. However, you can continue to distribute your book