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Here are four things I keep hearing about self-publishing. Unfortunately I don’t believe any of them are true.

1. Self-publishing is a way of opening the doors to the weird and the wonderful that otherwise wouldn’t be published.

Everyone knows that the easiest thing about self-publishing today is the publishing bit. The hard part is the selling. But here’s the rub: Self-publishing favours the familiar. It favours non-fiction over fiction, genre fiction over the literary.

Genre is giving people what they expect, literary novels are about giving people what they don’t expect. (I’m not making value judgements here, I enjoy […]

It’s not very cool to argue in favour of DRM (digital rights management – basically systems that attempt to stop you copying digital files). The hip libertarian view is that it is an infringement of human rights, a restriction on the spread of art and ideas, an imposition by corporate culture on the freedom of the individual and the criminalisation of innocent youth.  A curious shift in logic marks out what is sometimes called the “freetard” position; because it hard to control (and impossible to eliminate) file sharing, trying to control it is some regressive and oppressive act that contravenes […]

That headline shouldn’t be such a big deal, but if you knew my dad, it would be – and the fact that he self-published is a serious sign of the times.  Though he’s been totally supportive of my own self-publishing ventures, the idea was anathema to him for his own books until this point.  He was just too much of an old-schooler.  And this shows the revolution that Amanda Hocking has unleashed.  Not showing to the world that you can make a million dollars self-publishing, because most people realize that’s an aberration, but definitely making it seem like an everyday […]