Features

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 […]

On Facebook, Writer Beware linked to this thought-provoking, and pretty depressing, article about ereaders.

The New York Times recently calculated that the environmental impact of a single e-reader—factoring in the use of minerals, water, and fossil fuels along the manufacturing process—is roughly the same as fifty books. At first that sounds encouraging; after all, even the smallest personal library contains fifty volumes. But the real problems come in lifespan. At present, the average e-reader is used less than two years before it is replaced. That means that the nearly ten million e-readers expected to be in use by next

Dan Holloway wrote a very interesting piece questioning the ‘success’ of indie authors. I have a lot of respect and affection for Dan’s work, but he left me scratching my head at one point. For a start, I’m not really sure what ‘indie’ writer means. Nor am I convinced by his distinction between ‘mainstream’ and ‘edgy’.

The concepts of ‘underground’ or ‘counter culture’ or even ‘alternative’ don’t really apply today – there are just various levels of distribution. To quote from Mark Fisher – ‘alternative and ‘independent’ don’t designate something outside mainstream culture; rather they are styles, in fact […]