Features

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

One of the issues brought up in the comments of this post is about overconfidence in writers – especially self-published writers.  Part of what fuels the amount of poorly-conceived self-published books is a sense of overconfidence and misunderstanding the role of an editor.  Because “editor” has become synonymous with “gatekeeper,” it’s possible some writers do not think the editorial process is necessary and think the freedom of being your own publisher means you have the freedom to avoid the editorial process.

They’re wrong.  For one thing, if you are trying to get a book deal via the traditional route, it’s […]

It is no secret to serious writers that much of what we used to consider the vibrant literary world we lived in has collapsed into an unhealthy morass. In his new book, Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West, Anthony Grafton, a Princeton professor with a distinguished history as a scholar of the Renaissance, turns his attention to recent history and does not like what he finds. The world of print that informed and helped to create western society from Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450 into the late twentieth century is now […]

One thing that puzzles me about the criticism that any type of self-publishing is a kind of vanity publishing is the fact that vanity is actually rewarded in so many corners of our culture. Here’s a small taste of the insanity that passes for mainstream American culture:

Perhaps I am shooting fish in a barrel by pointing out the vapidity that is the heart of celebrity culture, but that you see there? That’s vanity. A writer trying to get the word out by publishing his book that (maybe) will be read by 100 people is not vanity. It’s hope. It’s […]