News

In a similar move to the recent partnership between Thomas Nelson and Author Solutions, Harlequin has started a romance self-publishing wing of its own, which is coming under some of the same scrutiny and criticism as the Thomas Nelson partnership, but perhaps with even greater reason.  Whereas the Thomas Nelson partnership created an entirely new entity – WestBow Press – the Harlequin partnership will be called Harlequin Horizons, raising the specter of fooling writers into believing their publication is closer to traditionally published than it really is.

Though this site applauds developments in self-publishing and sees the value in […]

Another week, another major announcement from Smashwords.  From the Smashwords blog:

If you haven’t heard of Shortcovers, they’re a hot startup created by Indigo Books, Canada’s largest book retailer. They offer a family of free e-reading apps supporting all major smart phone platforms, including the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre and Google Android. They also support several eInk devices.

The mobile channel, Shortcovers’ strength, is extremely important to the future success of all authors and publishers. Already, more ebooks are read on cell phones than on dedicated e-reading devices. Over the next few years, billions of ebook-ready smart phones

There have been two new developments in the last two weeks showing just how much digital publishing is changing.  When this site was started a year ago, there was still some holdover from the previous assessments of self-publishing – that is was a fringe type of publishing meant for people with limited talent.  This stigma is quickly diminishing, due in part because of the very high-profile people who are looking to self-publishing as a legitimate model.

Recently, Book View Cafe released a press release about their straight-to-digital publishing collective:

Traditional publishing, new media, ebooks, and now “vooks”… the publishing world

Reprinted from Mick Rooney’s blog.

Thomas Nelson was originally founded as a Scottish bookseller in Edinburgh in 1798. The company began selling second-hand religious books but quickly developed the Thomas Nelson publishing imprint. Throughout the nineteenth century it continued to publish both religious and non-religious books until close to the turn of the century when non-religious books accounted for 94% of published material. The American division of Thomas Nelson began in 1854 in New York and by the 1870s was one of the city’s most important firms.In 2000, the UK wing of Thomas Nelson was acquired by Wolters Kluwer […]

Currently there’s a promo for listing at the Publetariat Vault (discussed here on SPR).

Normally this service is $10 per 30 days, but if you sign up between now and October 25th, you’ll receive 4 free listing periods, 120 days total listing time, to try out the service. Just go to http://vault.publetariat.com and create an account, entering the promo code Oct120 in the registration sign-up form. Follow the directions provided on the site to create your listing(s). When you publish a listing you will be asked to provide your PayPal payment information, but no charges will be made to your

I’m normally somewhat reticent to post too much about Backword Books here because I don’t want SPR to become too much of a site for my own self-promotion – Backword Books is a self-publishing collective I belong to.  But I think this contest could be interesting: write a blog post about self-publishing to win 7 books by 7 Backword authors.  Here’s the full outline of the contest.  Hope you’ll take part in it – could be an interesting way to foment opinion about self-publishing:

Grand Prize: A package of seven books by Backword authors: Homefront by Kristen Tsetsi, Spam &