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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

Two very interesting posts came out last week signifying major shifts in publishing and how self-publishing may be regarded.  This article is a must read: Adding to the Bottom Line With Self-Published Titles.  Thie gist of the article is this: self-published titles are not the money-drain they used to be and now can be seen as a way for bookstore to…wait for it…turn a profit:

At the 20,000-square-foot Boulder Bookstore in Boulder Colorado, Arsen Kashkashian said self-published books are “definitely a growth market for us.” After getting “inundated” with local authors looking to sell their self-published books, the bookstore

We did another little book tour in August. It was time. The economy was creating a stagnant sales profile, and we know that doing a few book signings primes the pump. We made our arrangements with four Hastings Entertainment stores, two of which we were at last year. (This makes a total of sixteen book signings with Hastings Entertainment stores.)

Why the repeat appearances? Because we were on the same route to and from our house in Texas that we were last year. One of the book managers asked us to return because she had five signed copies we’d left […]

On Pimp my Novel, there was a very terrible post called Self-Publishing: Great Idea… or Worst Idea Ever? I have reached a point where I no longer feel the need to defend self-publishing any longer. And recently I’ve had some pretty long dialogues on the subject – I figure that’s my last word on the subject. The detractors are just so wrong, it’s not even worth arguing. Eric, who says he works in “the sales department of a major trade book publisher,” wrote age-old criticisms such as,

99%+ of the time, however, these books are either written by the functionally

There’s an interesting discussion at Frank Daniels’ review of No Mad by Sam Moffie. The review is scathingly critical and some of Moffie’s fans have come to his defense. I added the – perhaps unwise – comment that you could only like Sam Moffie’s book if you didn’t really care about “good” writing. Frank was called an “elitist” for not liking what “average” people will like.

A commenter said:

I read the book and loved it! A book the average person can enjoy. This review is just one of many examples of why those from the self titled publishing

Hugh McGuire of Book Oven – interviewed here on SPR – has a provocative post titled, Cloud-publishing; or, “Self-publishing” Is Meaningless. He says,

The key here is: cloud-publishing (and Book Oven) will provide the tools to allow groups of people to easily coalesce around the production, distribution and sale of a particular book or books. How those groups organize themselves will look different from book to book. But Book Oven’s tools will mean that book makers can focus on the important thing, the content, and not worry about the technical hurdles of making, printing & distributing books…

So