Features

There’s a fairly brutal take on Frank Daniels’ futureproof, which seems unnecessarily negative but brings up some questions about how self-publishing will possibly be regarded in the future. One of the reasons I’ve advocated self-publishing is because if the book does eventually get picked up by a mainstream publisher, it’s a story that can eventually be written about the book – self-published writer hits it big.

If you go from small press to large publisher, or self-publishing to small press, there’s less of a story there. And publisher’s like any way that can get a book press. But what […]

Amazon has just released very healthy figures for the last year and this should be a strong nudge to the shoulder of publishers that they need to be serious about ebooks sales. They need to cast aside the mixture of lethargy and bemusement which was evident at last week’s unveiling of the Kindle 2 in New York City’s Morgan Library. While there are many ebook readers about, from the Kindle, Sony and the European produced Irex—even games giant Nintendo see the possibilities in this area. They released their own ebook styled software reader of books for the 2008 Christmas market.[…]

Somewhere on the internet I’ve mentioned that Cantarabooks-Cantaraville was inspired by Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 by the writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Like authors before them—and certainly authors after—they began their small press as a way to ensure that their own works, and the works of their friends, would always find publication. As far as Hogarth Press’s scale of operation, the Woolfs’ ambitions were modest: a tabletop handpress, tools, lead type and a how-to pamphlet on typesetting were their only capital assets. Truly, Hogarth Press was a do-it-yourself strategy that would not have been out of place in the […]

Obviously, I’m a self-publishing advocate, but I can acknowledge that there are some hilariously bad self-published books out there.  Thankfully, they haven’t come my way in the form of submissions.  Maybe my reviews have been too critical, but it’s my experience it’s the people who write the better books who are the most obsessed with marketing – see Kristen Tsetsi and Frank Daniels.  So maybe the people who write more-ridiculous titles don’t send their books out that often.

Thankfully there are sites like Selfpublishedbooks.info, which is a kind of anti-Self-Publishing Review, as it only lives to mock self-published […]

A fascinating new study about people’s attachment to objects has been conducted at Ohio State University.  What’s this have to do with self-publishing?  A lot.  We’ve mentioned here before that the ability to actually feel a book in your hands can do a lot for book sales.  This why having a book in bookstores is so paramount. Stellar reviews on an Amazon page are no doubt helpful, but no web-based sales can approach seeing, and feeling, an object in store.

It’s not just a case of reading an excerpt and seeing if you like the person’s writing.  By picking up […]

There’s a new article in the New York Times about self-publishing.  Not as interesting as Time Magazine’s recent piece about self-publishing – and certainly not the first article in the Times about self-publishing – but piece by piece self-publishing is gaining clout.  The article says,

Vanity presses have existed for decades, but technology has made it much easier for aspiring authors to publish without hefty upfront costs. Gone are the days when self-publishing meant paying a printer to produce hundreds of copies that then languished in a garage.

This could be one of the things to further the cause of […]

From an excellent comment by Frank Daniels, which could be a post in itself, comes a link to this article about self-publishing in Time Magazine, which basically echoes why the SPR began in the first place. Articles like this could signal the beginning of self-publishing being taken seriously. In a dream future, which is quickly approaching, as technology increases daily, self-publishing could be regarded as a first resort, not a last resort.

At the very least, it will not be seen as the avenue of the pathetic and untalented – which, truth be told, is how many people regard […]