News

As a sequel to SPR is Charging for Reviews, here ‘s the lowdown for reviewers, as I’m not sure how many people yet know about this yet.  Reviewers are paid $40 per review, and the site is getting a steady stream of people looking for reviews so far. But as the idea is to find many different reviewers who have different genre preferences/experiences, there’s not always a match.  So far, there have been a lot of science fiction submissions, and a limited number of sci-fi reviewers.   For the system to work it needs to bring in all types of […]

Indie Reader has a bestseller list of indie titles.  I used my new favorite web tool, Storify, to make it embeddable.

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Interesting tidbit in this recent New York Times article about how Amazon is ripping apart the publishing industry.

For a sense of how rattled publishers are by Amazon’s foray into their business, consider the case of Kiana Davenport, a Hawaiian writer whose career abruptly derailed last month.

In 2010 Ms. Davenport signed with Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin, for “The Chinese Soldier’s Daughter,” a Civil War love story. She received a $20,000 advance for the book, which was supposed to come out next summer.

If writers have one message drilled into them these days, it is this: hustle

Lulu has seen the writing on the wall and is going full bore with ebooks, moving away from its print on demand model.  They recently came out with an ePub converter (good), but are now automatically distributing books to the iBookstore and Nook (not as good). I just received this email:

Lulu wants to make sure that your title is available to every potential customer on the planet, starting with the 120 million+ readers who own an iPhone®, iPad®, or iPod touch® or Barnes & Noble’s NOOK™ brand of e-reading products and shop at our eBook distribution partners.

You can

OK, that title is a little tough, but Eisler, who briefly was the poster boy for self-publishing for turning down a traditional deal to self-publish, is now going a more-traditional route.  Granted, it’s an untraditional, traditional route.  Via an interview on NPR (audio at the link as well):

“Amazon read about it and approached me with what is essentially a hybrid deal, the best of both worlds,” Eisler tells NPR’s Lynn Neary. Eisler retained control over packaging and business decisions that were important to him. The digital title was released about a month after the manuscript was finished. And he

Via David Gaughran’s blog: Indie Author Traci Hohenstein Signs Four-Book Deal With Amazon.

I published Burn Out on April 1, 2011. I thought April Fool’s day was a fitting date to try self-publishing my first novel. That was a short five months ago and since then my world has been turned upside down. My sales went something like this.

124 in April

375 in May

2339 in June

6762 in July

10K in August

In July I finally hit the Top 100 paid sales chart. I have been bouncing around in the Top 10 in Action/Adventure and Top 20

This news from Smashwords comes at an appropriate time, given the death of Steve Jobs.  The self-publishing revolution is entirely because of Apple. Entirely.  You can point to the Kindle as being the change agent, but the Kindle more than likely wouldn’t exist without the success of the iPod.  Though ereaders existed prior to the iPod, the iPod and iTunes changed how people access content.  As always, Apple provided the model which other people then adopted into other platforms.  The Kindle Fire is now mimicking the iPad.

Also worth noting that the Mac spurred the age of desktop publishing[…]