Self publishing is generally thought of in terms of a few different options. A good portion of self published authors end up turning to vanity presses. Some authors choose to have a small print run of 500 or 1000 books (or more) done by a local printer. Others opt to use a POD service (like CreateSpace or Lulu) to publish their book. And still others just go the ebook route, making their book available through the Kindle or sites like SmashWords.

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First of all, let me say I can’t believe it’s already May! This year is flying by for me, probably because I’ve been so busy with all these different projects.

I don’t have a whole lot of news to share this week, as I’ve been busy again. But here are some highlights.

With the financial crisis what it is, it doesn’t surprise me that Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand are seeing renewed interest. Atlas Shrugged is my absolute favorite book. I only read it last year (and my copy is currently loaned out to a friend) but it had such a profound, life-changing effect on me. If you haven’t read it yet, I would strongly recommend you do.

The Espresso Book Machine has launched in London. This machine has the potential to completely change the publishing industry, making it possible for book stores (and any other business) to carry a virtually unlimited variety of books. Basically, the Espresso is a print on demand machine that prints and binds a book in less than five minutes while you wait. Since books are stored electronically, there’s virtually no limit to the number of books a shop can carry, including out of print and self published titles. If anyone has actually laid their hands on one of the books printed by this machine, I’d be very interested to know the quality of the finished product (feel free to post in the comments).

There was an interesting article written by Leo Babauta (of Zen Habits) over on Write to Done about copyright and why it actually hurt artists. I’m not entirely sure I agree with him on this issue. I may put my own views on the matter into a blog post at some point over the next week or two. One of the biggest issues I have is that once a work becomes really popular, the chances someone other than the original creator will be the one profiting from it increase (probably exponentially). I’ll have to look into it all a bit more before expressing a definite opinion. In the meantime, go read the article Leo wrote.

On a related note, Leo wrote a post over on his own blog, Zen Habits, about a certain author contacting him claiming he’d infringed on her trademarked book title. What was that particular phrase, you might ask? “Feel the fear and do it anyway”. In this case, I have to agree wholeheartedly with Leo. The phrase as he used it had nothing to do with her book (or any book) and was simply a reference to something a friend of his said on Twitter. Sometimes the whole copyright/trademark thing does go a little bit far. People need to use some common sense. To me this smells of an author trying to get a little free advertising on a very popular blog (though I could be wrong). And no, I’m not going to add the legalese this woman was requesting of him either. If you want to know who the author was, click through to Leo’s blog.

Writing forward had a great post on using questions to come up with writing ideas. It’s got some awesome information, so I definitely recommend you check it out.

Yesterday was supposed to be the (self-imposed) deadline for finishing the first draft of my new non-fiction book. I have three chapters left to write. A bunch of paid work popped up at the last minute and consider it’s the end of the month, I had too much other work to get done. So my goal is now May 3rd (this Sunday) for finishing the first draft. I’ll post as soon as it’s done!

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time researching self publishing in an effort to make sure I’m well informed as I proceed with self publishing my own book. One of the things I see over and over again are statistics about how self published books sell so poorly. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week I’m going to do a roundup post with the week’s news, any particularly popular posts on this blog, and links to any articles I’ve written elsewhere. To me, this is a cleaner way of presenting relevant information, rather than posting a short post or four every day with newsworthy items.

CNN had some great coverage on web and Print on Demand publishing.

The Guardian covered the #queryfail and #agentfail extravaganzas, and the comments section brought out a lot of great information on self publishing.

My suggestion for one of the best writing how-to books, Between the Lines by Jessica Morrell, was featured on Editor Unleashed in their “The 10 Best Books for Writers” post (it’s the 4th one down). Other books on the list include Stephen King’s On Writing and Plot & Structure by James Scott Bell, both of which I also own.

Writing Forward had a couple of excellent articles this week: Writing on the Go and How Poetry Writing Improves All Other Writing. I wrote poetry in high school and at this point I’m glad I lost all those notebooks (or burned them…whatever).

Nathan Bransford has a great rundown of other publishing news for the week, as he does every week.

This isn’t exaclty news this week, since it was published last August, but it’s still worth reading. Novelist Paulo Coelho finds the perfect alchemy of print & digital from the Guardian talks about how using the Internet and even releasing books for free online boosts sales.

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m currently writing a non-fiction book (details on exactly what this book is about will be revealed within the next month or so, once I’m a bit further into the project). When I first got the idea for the book, I planned on writing up a proposal, an outline, and a couple of sample chapters, and shopping it around to agents and publishers. It’s a long process, finding an agent, and sometimes an even longer one to find a publisher. Read the rest of this entry »