Henry Baum | Self-Publishing Review

About Henry Baum

Author of three self-published novels and one traditionally published (Soft Skull Press, Canongate, and Hachette Littératures). Recipient of Best Fiction at the DIY Book Festival, the Gold IPPY Award for Visionary Fiction, and the Hollywood Book Festival Grand Prize. He lives with his wife Cate Baum in Spain. He's the founder of SPR.

Indie Means Genre Fiction

David Gaughran has a good post up on Indie Reader – The Future is Indie – which dovetails well with Tom Lichtenberg’s post about the meaning of indie. The question has been why indie publishing doesn’t get the same respect as indie music and indie film. The answer is pretty simple: they’re entirely different. Though there are self-released CD’s and independently-financed movies that are attempts to be commercial, the main meaning of indie is “different than the mainstream.” With independent publishing, this is also the case. With indie publishing, it’s not the case at all.

I knew that readers

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Henry Baum2011-11-06T11:16:49+02:00November 6th, 2011|Categories: Features|

Bad Language in Self-Published Fiction

I recently sent an old novel off to reviewers from the ginormous list of indie reviewers. There are so many more reviewers than when the book was first released (in 2006) that I thought, why not? Literally, there were 5 blogs devoted to self-publishing at that time. Now, hundreds. In the back of my mind I wondered if some of the reviewers would have a problem with the language, as this is an issue that I’ve seen come up frequently on review blogs. And lo and behold, this was exactly the response the book got. Some nice reviews, but […]

Henry Baum2011-11-03T12:33:54+02:00November 3rd, 2011|Categories: Features|

Problems and Opportunities with Kindle’s Automatic Pricing

A cautionary tale this week about a writer whose book was set to free for the Kindle by mistake. Amazon saw a free preview on Barnes and Noble as being a complete book – and so given Amazon’s policy to never have a higher priced book than any other outlet, they matched the price of the free preview.

For some, this is good news – it means you can get your book set to free on Amazon if you want to do a free promotional blitz. Just set to free on Smashwords – it’ll distribute as free to other […]

Henry Baum2011-11-03T17:00:13+02:00November 3rd, 2011|Categories: News|

Kindle Lending Library for Self-Publishers

The Kindle Lending Library went live today and there’s some consternation about what all this means. First off, this is only for Amazon Prime customers, who pay $79 a year, or around $6.50 a month. These titles cannot be accessed on Kindle for iPad, Kindle for desktop – only on Kindle hardware. At first, Amazon is only releasing 5000 titles, which includes titles like Moneyball, The Big Short and Liars’ Poker by Michael Lewis, The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, and Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen.

There are also reports that the big six publishers are not […]

Henry Baum2011-11-03T09:45:50+02:00November 3rd, 2011|Categories: News|

Infographic: The Growth of Self-Publishing

From the Wall Street Journal article: Secret of Self-Publishing: Success

Self-publishing these days is increasingly a tale of two cities.

There are established authors, like Nyree Belleville, who says she’s earned half a million dollars in the past 18 months selling direct rather than through a publisher..

Then there are new authors, like Eve Yohalem. More than a month after self-publishing, she has grossed about $100 in sales— after incurring costs of $3,400. She said she’s in no rush, though.

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Henry Baum2011-10-31T14:13:41+02:00October 31st, 2011|Categories: News|

Smashwords No Longer Partnering with ScrollMotion

Mark Coker writes at Smashwords:

Last month I provided a brief update about the ScrollMotion relationship (September 19 Site Updates update below) where I linked to an interview I did at The Savvy Book Marketer. In that interview, I commented about the delays ScrollMotion faced in distributing Smashwords ebooks as apps. Despite the fact they completed thousands of apps, last week we ended the project. The app world has changed dramatically in the last few months and it no longer makes sense for either of us to continue pursuing it. They originally planned to distribute the apps to the

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Henry Baum2011-10-31T13:14:54+02:00October 31st, 2011|Categories: News|

Mad Magazine Illustrator Self-Publishes

I can’t claim to entirely know the market for comics, but this story seems pretty significant. An illustrator for Mad Magazine decided to self-publish his collection of caricatures via his own imprint, Deadline Demon Publishing. Given his connection to big time publishing, he likely could have gotten a deal, but he weighed his options and saw self-publishing as the better choice.

Interestingly, what separates comics from fiction is that you can tell on first glance if the book is worth buying. Looking at his cover (and his credits), you can clearly tell that he’s a good artist, which makes […]

Henry Baum2020-02-21T06:32:27+02:00October 31st, 2011|Categories: News|Tags: Comics & Graphic Novels Reviews|

Let’s Get Digital: An Interview with David Gaughran

We removed this interview because the author David Gaughran decided to attack SPR’s new hybrid business model Kwill for no good reason on his Twitter account on Sept 9, 2015 after we took the time to put together this promotional interview for free as a favor to help promote his book.

We also had a link to his website in our footer to help him gain visitors to his site. We thought he was a good egg, and a contemporary who believed in self-publishing as much as we do. We were mistaken.

Due to the extremely libelous nature of his […]

Henry Baum2015-09-09T08:20:02+02:00October 31st, 2011|Categories: Interviews|