Features

The post about the ways that people criticize self-publishing brings up the idea that a traditionally published book has a stamp of approval and so traditionally published books are more reliable.  This is true.  Some amount of vetting does count for something, but in an age when it’s more difficult to get published, it is not the only measure of a book’s worth.

What’s also problematic is that writers may take this one step further and consider that their writing is indeed better because it has been accepted by an editor.  I don’t want to limit the idea that getting […]

Part of the reason I’m so attracted to self-publishing is that it’s so reviled.  It’s for misfits.  It truly is the publishing version of punk rock – something that anybody could do and something that people snubbed their noses at.  Something that inspired conservative outrage.  Really, when you boil it down, self-publishing is a very positive development: the ability for writers who were not able to get a book deal in a highly competitive industry to be able to find readers.  It’s totally democratic and a great example of free expression.  Why you’d want to crap over something that has […]

The last stigma that may need to fade about self-publishing is not that self-published books are bad, but that self-publishing services are all scam outfits, draining unsuspecting writers of their money. My guess is that many more self-publishers know that the investment in self-publishing is going to be lost money.  It’s like buying a couch – you’re never going to make back the money from buying that couch, but it’s a nice and useful object to have in your house.

Publishing a book is a good deal more personal than that, but I would imagine that a lot of self-publishers […]

Editor’s Note: This post welcomes Bonnie Kozek, author of the novel Threshold, to the Self-Publishing Review.

In the 1960s, Roger Wolcott Sperry, a neuropsychologist and neurobiologist, developed a revolutionary concept about the brain called the Right brain/Left brain or “split-brain” theory. (In 1981 Sperry received the Nobel Prize for this research.) His theory challenged the established and accepted view that the brain, although comprised of two hemispheres, was basically one entity with interchangeable parts.

Through experimentation, Sperry showed that instead of being composed of interchangeable parts, the circuits of the brain are largely hardwired – each nerve cell tagged […]

This may fly in the face of what’s normally said about self-publishing, and even lose the site some credibility.  People often implore writers to hire an editor to go through a book before releasing it.  Of course, this makes sense and every writer should do it.  But one of the major advantages of self-publishing is that it is a more democratic process: everyone can find readership and no one is boxed out of the opportunity.  And given the high cost of hiring an editor, this cuts into one of self-publishing’s major advantages.

For a typical novel, the cost of hiring […]

Cross-Posted from Christopher Meeks’ blog on Red Room.

Last night I attended a panel at USC entitled “The Changing Face of Publication,” hosted by one of my favorite novelists, Gina Nahai (Cry of the Peacock). The five panelists, with five different jobs and all deeply involved in publishing, offered a view on how publishing is done now and where the industry is and is not going.

The latter was the most important, which, to authors reading this, may change your view of what you can expect in 2009. It certainly sobered my expectations in publishing. From my own […]

You don’t need to be paying close attention to notice the fragmentation that characterizes much of America’s contemporary life. Your home town newspaper has ceased to print or will soon do so. This is happening to the ANN ARBOR NEWS (never a very good newspaper, but one that did a fair to middling job of holding its community together). Some of the nation’s biggest and best papers have already folded and THE BOSTON GLOBE seems likely to follow. These, and the NEW YORK TIMES are my own favorite print sources of news and the TIMES is also having problems.

Elsewhere […]