Henry Baum

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.

It's Hard Out There for Everyone

One thing that is lost in the self-publishing/traditional publishing debate is just how hard it is to sell any kind of book.  It’s as if pointing out that it’s difficult to sell self-published books, it implies it’s easy to sell traditionally-published books.  It’s not – it’s hard to sell everything.  One of the criticisms of self-publishing is people saying, “But self-publishers need to market all the time! When is there time to write???”  Unless you’re Dan Brown, or some other high-profile writer, most writers have to spend a whole lot of time marketing.

This could be an argument against self-publishing: […]

2011-10-08T18:47:53+02:00December 3rd, 2009|Categories: Features|

More on Harlequin, Vanity Publishing, and True Self-Publishing

One of the major things revealed by the Harlequin self-publishing debacle is how much of a stigma about self-publishing still lingers. Some would say that it’s not self-publishing that’s the problem, but vanity publishing – the subsidy houses that charge too much for too little. But in much of the dialog about the controversy, self-publishing was talked about as a single entity: as if a writer is ever shelling out any amount of money to publish, this is an illegitimate road. Nora Roberts chimed in with “When a big brand publisher uses its name and its resources to sell this […]

2011-10-08T18:48:23+02:00December 2nd, 2009|Categories: Features|

The American Book Release

In an interview I recently did with the Creative Penn, Joanna Penn asked how I used the Self-Publishing Review to market myself.  Beyond the footer which contains links to my books at the bottom of each post, I haven’t done a lot of plugging my own books in the posts.  But it’s my site – I started it and do most of the writing – so here we go.  My novel, The American Book of the Dead, is now out.

The reason I started this site in December 2008 was because I knew I’d be releasing a […]

2009-12-28T20:59:16+02:00November 27th, 2009|Categories: Book Reviews, Lead Story|

Harlequin Starts Self-Publishing Partnership with Author Solutions

In a similar move to the recent partnership between Thomas Nelson and Author Solutions, Harlequin has started a romance self-publishing wing of its own, which is coming under some of the same scrutiny and criticism as the Thomas Nelson partnership, but perhaps with even greater reason.  Whereas the Thomas Nelson partnership created an entirely new entity – WestBow Press – the Harlequin partnership will be called Harlequin Horizons, raising the specter of fooling writers into believing their publication is closer to traditionally published than it really is.

Though this site applauds developments in self-publishing and sees the value in […]

2011-10-08T18:49:13+02:00November 17th, 2009|Categories: News|

Smashwords Teams Up with Shortcovers

Another week, another major announcement from Smashwords.  From the Smashwords blog:

If you haven’t heard of Shortcovers, they’re a hot startup created by Indigo Books, Canada’s largest book retailer. They offer a family of free e-reading apps supporting all major smart phone platforms, including the iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Pre and Google Android. They also support several eInk devices.

The mobile channel, Shortcovers’ strength, is extremely important to the future success of all authors and publishers. Already, more ebooks are read on cell phones than on dedicated e-reading devices. Over the next few years, billions of ebook-ready smart phones

[…]
2011-10-08T18:49:31+02:00November 17th, 2009|Categories: News|

Traditional Publishing is Still a Mess

It’s been a while since I wrote a post about the faults of the traditional publishing system.  For anyone looking to criticize self-publishing for being an inadequate system only has to look at traditional publishing as a rival.  I’m not going to single out the particular agent who participated in the #askagent discussion on Twitter because it speaks of a larger problem.  Within the Twitter thread there are many choice quotes that had me pulling my hair out:

Asked whether the agent would be interested in web fiction, the answer was –

If your blog got thousands of hit per

[…]
2011-10-08T20:34:12+02:00November 12th, 2009|Categories: Features|

On Collectives and Crowdsourcing

There have been two new developments in the last two weeks showing just how much digital publishing is changing.  When this site was started a year ago, there was still some holdover from the previous assessments of self-publishing – that is was a fringe type of publishing meant for people with limited talent.  This stigma is quickly diminishing, due in part because of the very high-profile people who are looking to self-publishing as a legitimate model.

Recently, Book View Cafe released a press release about their straight-to-digital publishing collective:

Traditional publishing, new media, ebooks, and now “vooks”… the publishing world

[…]
2011-10-08T20:34:25+02:00November 11th, 2009|Categories: News|

Reading (Might Be) Cool Again

On the heels of the post, Ebooks are a Disaster, here’s something a little more positive.  The annoyance with the number of formats aside, I find this commercial for the Kindle fairly amazing.  Looking past the saccharine sweetness of the commercial it’s a very interesting development:

What you have there is not just a commercial for the Kindle, but for books itself – for the act of reading. And that’s not something you usually find on mainstream TV.  It doesn’t appear that commercials for actual books are going to take off any time soon – certainly not on mainstream […]

2009-12-29T08:26:56+02:00November 9th, 2009|Categories: Features|
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