What is vanity press? (The Case Against Author Solutions, Part 1: The Numbers)
Independent publishing and self-publishing should not be confused with vanity publishing, which is a completely different animal, epitomized by Author Solutions.
Publishing Business
Times for submissions
Call me old school. I started writing on typewriters. And that meant Courier was the font. (Actually I liked Elite a bit more, but I digress.) You typed your pages in Courier, and you typed them double spaced. If you search online for manuscript formatting …
Independent Publishing vs. Traditional Publishing: Pros and Cons
After months or years of writing and rewriting, editing and revising, reworking and polishing, you’ve finally done it—you’ve completed your novel! You have your manuscript in hand, substantial in heft, ready for the next step. Now what? What is an author to do with a …
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E is for eBooks
For decades, the music industry believed that what they sold were albums (on vinyl and then on CD). When mp3s became a standard electronic file format for audio files, the music studios had no idea what to do. The idea that they were selling music …
The Disruptive “D”
Publishing is undergoing disruption. Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen introduced the world to his analysis of technological changes in his seminal “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” where be coined the word (and idea) of “disruption.” Long standing firms (incumbents) suddenly lose the power and dominance to …
B is for Bookstores
We love bookstores. The smell. The richness. We browse through, hoping for discovery, open to serendipity. What other kind of store carries so much in thought, in ideas, in story? What other sells worlds, adventures and dreams? [Photo: The Tattered Cover bookstore, one of the …
Experts on Publishing
I saw this article, Self-Publishing and Community Experts: Are We Getting The Balance Right?, and was entertained by the author’s skewering of some self-publishing “expert” stereotypes. It’s all in harmless fun, right? Towards the close, though, he says: Few serious writers who self-publish their books spend any …
The traditional publishing option, just by the numbers
What kind of money can you make from a book you’ve written? Is traditional publishing or self-publishing the better way to go? The numbers in Hugh Howey’s reports on how self-/indie published authors are faring in comparison to traditionally published authors are intriguing, but very narrow. I …
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"The Report—Author Earnings": hard numbers, without the hyperbole
Something amazing hit the internet today: The Report – Author Earnings, a new data-crunching analysis provided by Hugh Howey and an unnamed database engineer. We’ve already seen a lot of anecdotal information about how much authors are making these days. Here’s something much more methodical. This …
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Infographic on Successful Books
What genre? How long? Who’s reading? Very interesting infographic! by NowSourcing. Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually.