Features

In March 2008, I delivered a lecture on Print on Demand publication to a creative writing class at the University of Newcastle in Australia. Adjusting for scale and for regional habits of reading and writing, much of what I said applies to the United States, England, and others of the more literate and technologically-advanced countries of the world. Here, updated, is that lecture.

The Declining Value of the Traditional Book

In June, 2007, my wife and I spent a day in the New York offices of McGraw-Hill, the publisher of a university textbook that we have edited for thirty-five years. […]

In life, certain things have a way of happening just at the right time. This week’s book publishing news was no exception. I have two quotes below from two senior principles from very diverse areas of the book publishing world, who in their own right believe they are making a difference. Here are the quotes. Follow the theme.

Quote One:

“We regard ourselves as independent in the sense of independence of third-party corporate ownership and feel at home with the other members.”

Quote Two:

“Now, through indie book publishing companies like AuthorHouse and iUniverse, authors can let the readers decide […]

Dear SPR,

No matter how much positivity surrounds self-publishing today (it’s a growing trend, more “good” writers are self-publishing their work, etc.), it still has a long way to go before people are able to overlook the stigma that invariably goes along with it .

I agree that it can be rewarding to self-publish. I’ve enjoyed having worked to sell my book, I’ve enjoyed the reviews it’s received absent of a big-name publisher logo often required to get people to read past the cover, and I’ve enjoyed knowing that, even without that publisher, many have been able to enjoy my […]

Podpeep links to an interesting article about the DIY music phenomenon and why self-released music gets so much more respect than self-released writing.  The article quotes the editor of Paste Magazine as saying: “In the book world, it’s so fragmented, with so many publishing houses out there, that somebody doing something on their own has more of a stigma because it suggests that everybody else passed on it.”

That hardly seems to be the problem.  I have no firm numbers, but I would imagine there are more small indie labels than there are publishers – especially when you factor in […]

There’s a fairly brutal take on Frank Daniels’ futureproof, which seems unnecessarily negative but brings up some questions about how self-publishing will possibly be regarded in the future. One of the reasons I’ve advocated self-publishing is because if the book does eventually get picked up by a mainstream publisher, it’s a story that can eventually be written about the book – self-published writer hits it big.

If you go from small press to large publisher, or self-publishing to small press, there’s less of a story there. And publisher’s like any way that can get a book press. But what […]

Amazon has just released very healthy figures for the last year and this should be a strong nudge to the shoulder of publishers that they need to be serious about ebooks sales. They need to cast aside the mixture of lethargy and bemusement which was evident at last week’s unveiling of the Kindle 2 in New York City’s Morgan Library. While there are many ebook readers about, from the Kindle, Sony and the European produced Irex—even games giant Nintendo see the possibilities in this area. They released their own ebook styled software reader of books for the 2008 Christmas market.[…]

Somewhere on the internet I’ve mentioned that Cantarabooks-Cantaraville was inspired by Hogarth Press, founded in 1917 by the writers Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Like authors before them—and certainly authors after—they began their small press as a way to ensure that their own works, and the works of their friends, would always find publication. As far as Hogarth Press’s scale of operation, the Woolfs’ ambitions were modest: a tabletop handpress, tools, lead type and a how-to pamphlet on typesetting were their only capital assets. Truly, Hogarth Press was a do-it-yourself strategy that would not have been out of place in the […]

Obviously, I’m a self-publishing advocate, but I can acknowledge that there are some hilariously bad self-published books out there.  Thankfully, they haven’t come my way in the form of submissions.  Maybe my reviews have been too critical, but it’s my experience it’s the people who write the better books who are the most obsessed with marketing – see Kristen Tsetsi and Frank Daniels.  So maybe the people who write more-ridiculous titles don’t send their books out that often.

Thankfully there are sites like Selfpublishedbooks.info, which is a kind of anti-Self-Publishing Review, as it only lives to mock self-published […]