Henry Baum

Important info, from Aaron Shepard’s blog:

Over the past month or two (or three?), Amazon.com has quietly been letting its stock of many Lightning Source books dwindle and disappear. It has then been assigning most of those out-of-stock books an availability status of 2-3 weeks. In more rare instances, a book shows no direct availability from Amazon at all.

This is very different from how Amazon has operated in the past. For some time now, Amazon has kept substantial stock on hand for all books that sold even marginally—about three weeks worth, the last times I tested it. More

Wow. You might have heard of Pottermore already – the new internet venture for the Harry Potter franchise – but may have thought it was a product of her publisher. The Pottermore site is being completed via a partnership with Sony, but the ebooks will be released as part of her own imprint. The biggest publishing phenomenon on the planet is now a self-publisher.

After a week of heavy speculation, JK Rowling has revealed that she is to self-publish the e-books to her mind-bogglingly successful Harry Potter series through her newly-announced proprietary platform, Pottermore.

While self-publishing in itself is

Via Galleycat:

In the above video, Nagin talks to Jon Stewart about how he chose to self publish the book rather than go through a publishing house, after shopping it with a literary agent. He said: “Once you turn over your manuscript to a publisher, you never know what is going to happen.”

Translation: I’m not sure what. Couldn’t find a publisher?

Here’s the book:

Published via Createspace – currently #436 in books.[…]

Via press release:

Amazon.com today announced that John Locke has become the eighth author to sell over 1 million Kindle books, becoming the newest member of the “Kindle Million Club,” and the first independently published author to receive this distinction. As of yesterday, John Locke has sold 1,010,370 Kindle books using Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). Kindle Direct Publishing is a fast and easy way for publishers and authors to start selling to Kindle customers worldwide via Kindle, Kindle 3G, Kindle with Special Offers, Kindle 3G with Special Offers, Kindle DX, iPad, iPod touch, iPhone, PC, Mac and Android-based devices.

Very interesting development.

With big publishing buying only the crème de la crème of books, and more authors turning to self-publishing, many literary agents are getting squeezed right out of the middle.

But some savvy agents are acting as literary consultants to help their authors self-publish, a role that offers up new opportunities and challenges for everybody in the industry.

I talked with three agents about their experiments to serve authors by widening their middle ground.

Ted Weinstein (left), a San Francisco-based agent who represents non-fiction authors, said that self-publishing “has added one more serious option for my clients