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.

An Argument Against Self-Publishing

This post about self-publishing is from February, but new to me. It makes a persuasive case against self-publishing.

Professional editors of the level I work with now make money. Grown-up money that I cannot pay them, because I am not a rich person and never will be. Let alone copyediting, typsetting, and cover art (which is vastly important, don’t be fooled). I have zero interest in paying out $7000-$15000 before the book gets published, and almost certainly seeing minimal profit (especially since that 70% Amazon deal everyone’s so sweet on has a whole lot of strings attached). I like it

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Henry Baum2011-10-08T18:05:34+02:00July 20th, 2010|Categories: Features|

The Trouble with Amazon Critics

There’s an interesting post at the Nation called The Trouble with Amazon that’s a few shades too negative about Amazon’s influence on publishing. Though Amazon has done some seriously shady things regarding pricing and strong-arming publishers, it also has advantages. The main issue I have with the piece is this:

Take the issue of choice: when it comes to the books it stocks, Amazon makes no pretense of selectivity. Provided it carries an ISBN and isn’t offensive, Amazon is happy to sell any book Joe Schmo cares to publish. “We want to make every book available—the good, the bad and

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Henry Baum2017-01-24T05:29:45+02:00July 19th, 2010|Categories: Features|

This Week in Self-Publishing

A few interesting developments in the changing landscape.

Marta Acosta Lands Print Deal After eBook Success

For Novelist Marta Acosta a free eBook was her way to print. After not getting a print deal, the novelist decided post her YA vampire title The Shadow Girl Of Birch Grove on Scribd. It became the #1 book on the site and got a bunch of reviews.

Galley Cat reports, “Novelist Marta Acosta posted her entire vampire novel for free on Scribd, earning 17,676 views and becoming the top ranked YA book on the site. Now she landed a deal with Tor

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Henry Baum2011-10-08T17:26:17+02:00July 15th, 2010|Categories: News|

RIP Harvey Pekar: Self-Publisher

A couple of posts back I wrote how self-publishing may go the route of underground comics – once mocked, now part of the mainstream. Today there’s news that underground comics pioneer and legend- and one of my favorite artists in any medium – Harvey Pekar has died at the age of seventy. If you don’t know Harvey Pekar, he’s a first-person chronicler like Charles Bukowski or Jack Kerouac, and on par with both of them.

He’s also a self-publisher. From Wikipedia on American Splendor:

Pekar produced seventeen issues of American Splendor from 1976 to 1993, which, except for

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Henry Baum2014-07-16T19:09:47+02:00July 12th, 2010|Categories: News|

An Interview with Henry Baum by Todd Keisling

<—That’s me, the editor of Self-Publishing Review.

Self-promotion time. I don’t do a huge amount of self-promoting about my own book here, but here goes. Case in point, didn’t mention that my novel, The American Book of the Dead, recently won the Gold IPPY award for Visionary Fiction. It also won Best Fiction at the DIY Book Festival.

Today there’s an interview up by Todd Keisling. I talk about the roots of the novel and self-publishing. On self-publishing, a snippet:

TK: How about self-publishing? What got you started there?

HB: My first novel was released by Soft

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Henry Baum2011-10-08T17:28:38+02:00July 7th, 2010|Categories: Interviews|

Dan Clowes and Philip K. Dick on Self-Publishing

OK, not really. But in the tradition of Cheryl Anne Gardner’s What a Pod Peep Reads, here’s what I’ve been reading:

and

The trajectory of underground comics is somewhat similar to that of self-publishing – something that no one took seriously, and now is given art exhibitions. From an interview with Dan Clowes:

Early in your career, did you find that people had a difficult time labeling you? The type of work you produced wasn’t your typical style of comic.

They still have a difficult time. I’ve been called everything from a “graphic novelist” to a “comic-strip novelist”

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Henry Baum2011-10-08T17:30:13+02:00June 29th, 2010|Categories: Features|

Self-Publishing Has Arrived

When this site started up in December 2008, self-publishing was still something you didn’t really talk about in polite company. It was really big news in January 2009 when the New York Times published a piece called Self-Publishers Flourish as Writers Pay the Tab. There were detractors to the rosy picture of that article, but it seemed like a breakthrough.

Now, in 2010, self-publishing is everywhere, rightfully so. It’s not always flattering – but even when it’s being criticized, it’s seen as inevitable, and that inevitability isn’t seen as a bad thing. Recently, there was an epic post in […]

Henry Baum2011-10-08T18:23:35+02:00June 23rd, 2010|Categories: Features|

Review: Starving the Artist by William Aicher

Building on some of the ideas in this post, Starving the Artist makes the persuasive case against stealing an artist’s work. Aicher, the author of the self-published novel, The Trouble with Being God, is also the director of marketing at Musicnotes.com, so the book covers the gamut of copyright theft. Much of the book methodically lays out the amount of time and effort that goes into creating any work of art – so you can’t just boil it down to the materials involved, but the hours it took and other sacrifices to make any work of art. […]