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One thing that is lost in the self-publishing/traditional publishing debate is just how hard it is to sell any kind of book.  It’s as if pointing out that it’s difficult to sell self-published books, it implies it’s easy to sell traditionally-published books.  It’s not – it’s hard to sell everything.  One of the criticisms of self-publishing is people saying, “But self-publishers need to market all the time! When is there time to write???”  Unless you’re Dan Brown, or some other high-profile writer, most writers have to spend a whole lot of time marketing.

This could be an argument against self-publishing: […]

One of the major things revealed by the Harlequin self-publishing debacle is how much of a stigma about self-publishing still lingers. Some would say that it’s not self-publishing that’s the problem, but vanity publishing – the subsidy houses that charge too much for too little. But in much of the dialog about the controversy, self-publishing was talked about as a single entity: as if a writer is ever shelling out any amount of money to publish, this is an illegitimate road. Nora Roberts chimed in with “When a big brand publisher uses its name and its resources to sell this […]

Recently, Harlequin announced a number of related initiatives (a self-publishing imprint, editorial and marketing services, and an e-pub branch), and the criticism they received for it was at some points withering. Accusations ranged from cashing in on their slush pile to exploiting naïve authors to flooding the market with titles to diluting their brand value.

It reminds me of the old exchange:

Q: “How can you tell a true pioneer?”

A: “They have arrows sticking out their back and their front.”

At the same time, the field I work in (scientific publishing) is experimenting with a phenomenon called “author-pays […]

It’s been a while since I wrote a post about the faults of the traditional publishing system.  For anyone looking to criticize self-publishing for being an inadequate system only has to look at traditional publishing as a rival.  I’m not going to single out the particular agent who participated in the #askagent discussion on Twitter because it speaks of a larger problem.  Within the Twitter thread there are many choice quotes that had me pulling my hair out:

Asked whether the agent would be interested in web fiction, the answer was –

If your blog got thousands of hit per

On the heels of the post, Ebooks are a Disaster, here’s something a little more positive.  The annoyance with the number of formats aside, I find this commercial for the Kindle fairly amazing.  Looking past the saccharine sweetness of the commercial it’s a very interesting development:

What you have there is not just a commercial for the Kindle, but for books itself – for the act of reading. And that’s not something you usually find on mainstream TV.  It doesn’t appear that commercials for actual books are going to take off any time soon – certainly not on mainstream […]

A confession: ebooks are totally mystifying to me.  I may run this site and the future success of self-publishing rests on how much ebooks saturate the market, but I’m not a tech-head whatsoever. I don’t buy the latest gadgets or even follow the news that religiously – because a new gadget comes every third minute, and who can afford to shell out another $300 for the latest thing? I have a Sony ereader, but it’s not my first choice when it comes to reading. This may put me in a better position to talk about how incredibly and unnecessarily difficult […]

Check out these videos. I’ve never wanted to read someone’s book so much after visiting an author’s website than after watching this mini-movie. Seriously funny – some NSFW language. Watch the whole thing – each one is only a couple of minutes long.

Check out the origin of these at the author’s site, and the book:

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This is not self-publishing related…or maybe it is.  Because it’s a case of the government meddling in the affairs of new media and getting it entirely wrong.  Yesterday, the FTC revealed guidelines about how bloggers need to reveal how they’re paid for content. On the surface this makes sense because a product review blogger should reveal if he’s being paid by the manufacturer to write a review.  The problem with the FTC guidelines is this applies to all types of reviewers, including book bloggers, not just unscrupulous make-money-online types.

From the Edrants interview with the FTC’s Richard Cleland:

In