News

Currently, there’s an interview up with Shelley Lieber on the Smashwords blog, which acts as a better manifesto about the value of self-publishing than has yet to be put on this site.  Some nuggets include:

The industry has probably changed more in the past two years than it has in the previous 50 to 75 years. Of all the creative industries, publishing is the most conservative and slowest to change. As technology advanced and became more readily available and affordable, individual artists in every creative field began to take on more responsibility for all areas of their craft. Authors

These two things recently showed up in my inbox.

NextBigWriter.com: “Running its annual Strongest Start Novel Competition where writers submit the first three chapters of their novel for consideration. This is not a typical contest in that the novel does not have to be complete for it to be submitted. One of the goals of the competition is to provide writers with the feedback they need to perfect their opening. Writers can also edit their entry after they have submitted it based on the feedback they receive.

1st Place Winner Receives $500 and a $2,400 Publishing Package from BookSurge.[…]

Even if you don’t have a book review site, this is a great resource if you’re a science fiction or fantasy author…

From Grasping for the Wind:

My list of fantasy and sf book reviewers is woefully out of date. I need your help to fix that. But rather than go through the hassle of having you send me recommendations or sticking them in comments, what you can do is take the following list and stick it on your website, then add yourself to the list, preferably in alphabetical order. That way, I will be able to track it […]

It’s a major sign of the times and evidence that publishing is coming out its slumber. Though these experiments may not work in the long run – i.e. they don’t help increase book sales – it is at least evidence that publishers recognize the important of offering books for free to generate buzz and interest.

This week there have been two major cases of major publishers offering books for free. First, Suvudu.com is a site run by Random House which will release ebook versions of science fiction titles free to the public. The press release reads:

NEW YORK, NY –

Ebooks and self-publishing are not necessarily the same thing – as the most widely-read ebooks are those that are put out by mainstream publishers – but in some sense they are regarded in the same way. People scoff at ebooks in the same manner as they scoff at self-publishing – that they’re both inferior forms of publishing. For some reason, there is often an either/or proposition when it comes to ebooks: you either like ebooks or you like printed books.

With both self-publishing and ebooks there are arguments for and against both. There is a lot to be said for […]

“Japanese got Jesus robots telling teenage fortunes.
For all we know and all we care they might as well be martians.”
Elvis Costello, “Tokyo Storm Warning”

That may be a little harsh (though it’s on my favorite Elvis Costello record), but CNN reports on the cellphone novel phenomenon that has swept Japan, a phenomenon that might not translate to the U.S.  The story reports:

As the name suggests, cell phone novels are written entirely on handsets and posted on sites like Maho no i-rando (Magic Island), the first and largest mobile novel portal in Japan. The site has a

I haven’t yet written about the Tools of Change Conference (because I wasn’t there), but there is a lot of great information being posted online by people who did attend.  The basic mood you see online is that self-publishing is gaining increasing legitimacy.  Obviously, the conference is devoted to publishing innovation, but the way that people talk of self-publishing these days is that it is integral to the future of publishing.

For instance, the Publishing Trends blog has a great piece on how some of the participants view self-publishing:

All the participants argued for greater interplay between author, reader, and

I wrote an article over Christmas about book retailers in Ireland performing marginally better in 2008 than on previous profits for 2007. Early figures suggest that the UK book retail trade recorded similar results, but that they still were marginally down last year. While better sales than expected might have raised the bar of expectation—it seems early 2009 may see that optimism short-lived. There is much discussion amongst UK retailers about the strategy of committing themselves to larger discounts for the buying public.

Unit for unit, there are more books going out the door of retailers, but the profit figures […]