News

Since January 25, the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award is open to submissions until February 7.

To register and enter you will need to submit:

• The full/complete version of your manuscript (the “Manuscript”), which must be between 50,000 and 150,000 words;
• Up to the first 5,000 words, but no less than 3,000 words, of text of that manuscript, excluding any table of contents, foreword, and acknowledgments (the “Excerpt”);
• A pitch statement (cover letter/summary) of up to 300 word (the “Pitch”);
• Other registration information as asked for on the entry page (such as name, contact information, book title), and
• An author photo

New feature at Self-Publishing Review: a Link Directory.    Users can add a directory listing for a book, service, website, or other.  The listing will be given a unique page that will show up in your profile. Example for my book: The American Book of the Dead.

To use the directory:

1. Go to My Account at the top.

2.  Select Directory – Create a Link.

or

1. Go to your profile.

2. Find “Directory” in the sidebar list.

3. A new menu will come up at the bottom of the profile called “My Links.”

4. Select “Create […]

So the iPad is finally here and brings big implications for the future of publishing. Here’s a video of the iBooks app at work:

The iBooks app will use the ePub format, which is good news and bad news. The good news is that it’s not a proprietary format, like the Kindle – i.e. Kindle books can only be read on a Kindle. Actually, Kindle has expanded to having books available on the iPhone, but generally it’s a single format ereader. One wonders if Kindle books can be read on the iPad, as they can on the iPhone, what use […]

Via MediaBistro comes news that Wattpad is teaming up with Lulu to offer print on demand services for Wattpad stories:

Wattpad, the Toronto-based eBook-publishing social network, which recently completed a round of funding, today announced a partnership with Lulu, the self-publishing and printing company, to create a branded Wattpad store on Lulu.com. Click here to check out what they’re officially calling “The Wattpad Marketplace on Lulu.com.”

To this writer, Wattpad leaves a lot to be desired. Stories are formatted like blog entries – with breaks between paragraphs and no indents – and there are no italics. Worse, though, is […]

Used to be you had to dig to find posts like this, or least find a caveat, “Self-publishing sucks, but here’s a writer who’s doing it.”  Basically, more traditionally-published writers are coming out of the woodwork and looking into this medium.

In the L.A. Times, there’s a nice piece by Steve Almond (on Amazon) who put out his most recent collection via the Espresso Book Machine.

I pitched this project to a number of editors over the ensuing months. Aspiring writers and fans of micro-fiction would go nuts. Members of the iPhone generation would embrace it as a

As a reaction to the brouhaha over Author Solutions’ partnership with Harlequin, Author Solutions CEO, Kevin Weiss, put together this video to address the literary guilds that took issue with the partnership: the Romance Writers of America (RWA), Mystery Writers of America (MWA), and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

From the press release,

In response to ASI’s announcements of partnerships with traditional publishers, the three writer’s guilds led a campaign to discredit the publishers involved in creating these groundbreaking opportunities, even going so far as to de-list one as a qualified publisher. Weiss believes the

Two major developments this week in self-publishing. Lulu.com is going public and looking for a $50 million public offering – interestingly on the Canadian market.

Why Canada? The local equity market has been on bit of a boom, and in 2009, saw 28 new issues worth C$1.8 billion, compared with the C$682 million raised from 57 new issues in 2008, the story says. Less stringent scrutiny on the Canadian exchange is also probably the reason why that seems more feasible than U.S. markets.

Remains to be seen if CSX would be receptive to a still-nascent market player like this. Also,

What an incredibly exciting time for the ebook market. Often, you could be led to think that there’s a hefty amount of delusion in the advocacy of self-publishing, given the difficulty of adequately distributing books. But this year’s Consumer Electronics Show shows that ebooks are here to stay, which will increase the potential for distribution for all writers. At some point not far off, it’s going to be a given that most everyone has some type of ereader technology.

The tablet seems most promising because it satisfies different functions. So those who are ebook-averse can get a tablet that acts […]