Features

When this site started up in December 2008, self-publishing was still something you didn’t really talk about in polite company.  It was really big news in January 2009 when the New York Times published a piece called Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab.  There were detractors to the rosy picture of that article, but it seemed like a breakthrough.

Now, in 2010, self-publishing is everywhere, rightfully so.  It’s not always flattering – but even when it’s being criticized, it’s seen as inevitable, and that inevitability isn’t seen as a bad thing.  Recently, there was an epic post in […]

A while back, I had a debate with fellow Indie author, self-publishing zealot and Year Zero Writer, Jenn Topper, on the issue of distribution. Ever since, it’s been something that’s gnawed away at me.

This piece came partly out of Marc Horne’s fantastic article about Feedbooks; partly it’s a crystallization of many of the articles I wrote at the end of last year; and partly it’s come out of the increasing comments I’ve had about putting my work on Amazon.

What I want to say in this article may only apply word for word to “indie or die” […]

Most observers and even some authors believe the major publishing industry has been slow to respond to the electronic-book era. True, the industry is struggling with pricing while trying to protect hardcover sales and has not been especially welcoming of digital books, especially those that compete with their higher-priced versions. But they have not been putting their heads in the sand, either.

Publishing contracts of this century almost universally grant publishers the electronic rights to the content, and those clauses may have seemed innocuous even two years ago, when e-book sales were negligible. The clauses that were afterthoughts returned the […]

I’m probably not the first to write about the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award, because there were several self-published books entered in it.

Including mine, God’s Thunderbolt: The Vigilanates of Montana.

I entered it, although it has already won the 2009 Spur from Western Writers of America, as an experiment. In the first ABNA contest, it didn’t make the first cut. I dropped the “prologue” on the advice of an experienced, published author, and made some more editing changes, none of which materially altered the writing or the story.

This year, with the contest open to self-published books, I thought, […]

Nathan Bransford has a good post about the future of agenting/publishing in the digital world. As someone under 40 (I’m guessing) the bulk of his career as an agent is going to be in the age of ebooks, so he’s more progressive about how the agent process is going to be restructured. About digital publishing, he has this very good point:

No one sits around thinking, “You know what the problem with the Internet is? Too many web pages.” Would you even notice if suddenly there were a million more sites on the Internet? How would you even know?

By Scott Nicholson
http://www.hauntedcomputer.com

My friend and artist/writer Lee Davis had read the first part of The Red Church (my first published novel) and emailed me with his initial thoughts:

“Your understanding of humanity is crucial, ranging from complexities of the young boys’ mind to the conflict of a deteriorating marriage and then on to the law that is trying to maintain the peace and keep the town from falling in on itself. I immediately felt empathy to Donnie’s young and troubled thoughts at life in general as he goes inside his mind and looks at the nature of his