Features

A pretty brutal assessment of Author Solutions at Let’s Get Digital:

You see, Author Solutions’ modus operandi is pretty despicable, and they’ve been badgering, swindling and confusing writers out of money—and lots of it—for years.

The deceit starts with the web of brands they’ve established. With so many imprints, Author Solutions has tricked authors into thinking they have dozens of choices. In reality, however, the parent company is just slapping up half a dozen different logos, renaming packages, and selling the same grossly overpriced services to all of their customers no matter which brand ends up on the cover.

When I set out to write “The Bull and The Ban” I realized that there was going to be an issue. Although my book is the account of my journey through Spain and Catalonia to discover the controversy behind bullfighting and I am English, there were going to be Spanish speakers interested in the book as well, which is the book of interviews I filmed for the documentary I made, coming out this month.

It seemed logical and with over 300 fans on my social network looking forward to the release I also decided to look into the […]

A good post and discussion at Rachelle Gardner’s blog: 5 Surprises About Self-Publishing. This leaps out:

4. I overestimated my ability to sell books. I have lists of bookstores at which I’ve done appearances, book clubs who have hosted me, readers who have loved my work and bloggers who have reviewed my books. I didn’t think I had to build a platform. I thought that with a few flicks of the mouse, I’d quickly sell thousands of books and build a buzz that would carry me to even greater sales. It didn’t happen, so now I’m out doing what

In the past few years I’ve been reading and editing a lot of self-published books. Two things I’ve noticed:

1) How good many of them are.

2) How poorly edited most of them are.

The ones I’ve read have more often than not been MUCH better than most people probably expect self-published books to be. The writers have some great ideas, and many really know how to tell a story. But alas, most self-published books are desperately in need of the loving attention of a good editor.

Mistakes I often see:

* Recurring grammatical problems. It seems that very few […]