I’m working on international distribution at the moment. The issue I’m running into is shipping costs. For international priority mail, the cost is about $13. But what I’m seeing is that first class mail is nearly that much to most areas (with the exception of Canada) and it can take twice as long. Can international orders be done through Amazon.com? Or through Barnes & Noble’s US website? If anyone knows the answer to this, please let me know!

At some point in the next couple weeks I plan on writing a post outlining the entire publishing process. Until then, feel free to ask any questions you might have in the comments here. And thanks to everyone for their support!

Amazon is dealing with backlash over the removal of gay and lesbian lit books from their sales rank statistics. Their reason? They’ve deemed them “adult” content. The big question now is why they didn’t do the same for a collection of Playboy centerfolds? An article over on The Guardian offers a good overview. Here’s Amazon’s response to the whole thing (they’re calling it a glitch on their part) and here’s another article where a hacker/troll is claiming responsibility (though Amazon appears to deny this claim). The whole thing has been one giant mess, but I’m glad to see it’s being sorted out. Here’s another article from seattlepi.com that offers up an insider’s account of what happened.

Write to Done has a great post about energizing your creative writing.

If you follow me on Facebook, you may have already seen this one. Fast Company had a short article about HarperStudio, a newish imprint from Harper Collins. It’s a very interesting business model and hopefully one that will catch on.

My favorite post on this blog this week was Why Self Published Books Fail. It’s a look at the reasons why so many self published books tend not to do as well as those put out by traditional publishers. And here’s a hint: it’s not because they’re self published.