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JA Konrath (this site can’t seem to get enough of him recently) has an interesting and encouraging post listing 20 self-publishers who are as successful on the Kindle as writers from mainstream publishers.  These are:

Primal Wound by Ruth Francisco, ranked #688

Thin Blood by Vicki Tyley, ranked #14

Deed to Death by D.B. Henson, ranked #42

Toe Popper by Jonny Tangerine, ranked #1464

Kill & Cure by Steven Davison, ranked #72

The Shot to Die For by M.H. Sargent, ranked #231

The Elect by James Gilbert, ranked #756

Punctured by Rex Kusler, ranked #988

Final Price by J. Gregory

Today’s must-read.  Garrison Keillor signals the death of publishing and the birth of…something else:

And if you want to write, you just write and publish yourself. No need to ask permission, just open a Web site. And if you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris (sic – in the NY Times no less) and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood

This post about my novel potentially being pirated made me look into book piracy and freebooks and just how this will affect the future of self-publishing and publishing on the whole.  Check out this endlessly fascinating interview with a bittorrent book pirate. He justifies it this way:

1) With digital copies, what is “stolen” is not as clear as with physical copies. With physical copies, you can assign a cost to the physical product, and each unit costs x dollars to create. Therefore, if the product is stolen, it is easy to say that an object was stolen that

As someone who’s been critical of JA Konrath, who basically sees the only good self-publishers are the ones who make a living at it, it’s somewhat strange to come to his defense for this Publisher’s Weekly piece about his recent deal with Amazon Encore (covered here on SPR).  Nevermind the number crunching in the post, which is debunked in Konrath’s post, Publisher’s Weekly Epic Fail, what really irks me is this paragraph:

Ira Silverberg, at Sterling Lord, was more blunt about how uneventful Konrath’s move was. “Certain authors will feel they’re doing well in schemes like this,” he said.

Over the past few weeks I have refined my opinions on the paid-publishing model offered by mainstream publishers in light of its newest entity, Balboa Press from Hay House Publishing. So far, three of the paid-publishing imprints we have looked at in the past year had one common denominator—Author Solutions (ASI). I do not believe any of the three ASI-powered paid-publishing imprints will prove successes—and certainly not generate the kind of revenue that AuthorHouse, Xlibris, Trafford or iUniverse generate for ASI.

There are two other publishers we have looked at operating paid-publishing models—AmazonEncore and Troubador Publishing. A third one, Cold […]

Over on Pimp my novel: Prithee Convince Me, The blog poster wants self-published authors to “convince him” that self-publishing is a viable alternative to trad publishing. Now this is not the first time this blogger has declared open season on the self-publishing industry and self-published authors, but I can’t really understand why, since the blogger’s bio states that he works for a traditional publisher. He’s got his nice little job in the “real” publishing world, so why does he care so much about what we are doing?

This topic has generated some interesting discussion, and I decided to chime […]

There’s a fascinating post by author Daniel Pinchbeck at Reality Sandwich about new independent media. He’s currently my favorite writer in any medium – non-fiction or fiction – for his willingness to take on far-out ideas with some well-reasoned sobriety. He manages to be both eloquent and concise. All in all, his writing is a huge influence on my own novel. The piece basically condenses my own worldview and why I think self-publishing is so dynamic and important.

In the piece, he talks about releasing an independent film in this new climate:

In the new model that is still