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.

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.

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.

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.

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.