Australian humorist David Thorne, whose first book was a New York Times bestseller published by Penguin and who runs a wickedly funny website where he publishes his hilarious, prankish email correspondences with unsuspecting friends and colleagues (for starters, sample “Missing Missy,” then move on to…
There’s a cautionary tale this week from India, which has been experiencing a publishing boom for a decade now. As detailed in this Spectator report of late last year: … dynamic economic growth has combined an increasingly vocal, upwardly mobile middle class readership with a…
Ever more options for the self-publisher: the new service GetBookCover allows self-published authors to buy an image, add their title and captions using an in-browser editor, and generate and download a cover in a selection of formats, for print and digital distribution. They’re touting themselves…
The Bookseller reports that Orna Ross, a former literary agent and twice Penguin-published, now self-published author, is soon to launch the first non-profit organisation representing self-published authors’ interests, The Alliance of Independent Authors. Specifically, that will mean organising conferences, establishing a network, providing support, and…
“81% of Americans feel they have a book in them … And should write it,” wrote Joseph Epstein in a New York Times Op-Ed in 2002, citing a survey by the Jenkins Group. Yesterday at The Guardian Ewan Morrison mentions this fact while arguing that the recent excitement about digital…
Another week, another entry into the jostling self-publishing market. Dominic Rushe and Jeevan Vasagar report in The Guardian that on January 19, Apple announced iBooks Author, a software application that helps textbook authors create interactive teaching ‘iBooks’ for the iPad. At first glance, iBooks Author…
Just before Christmas, MobyLives featured an interview with Rebecca Swift, founder of The Literary Consultancy (TLC), about the various ways a writer might land themselves a publishing deal today. Publishing Perspectives reports today on the recently announced first-ever TLC conference, Writing in a Digital Age,…
The New York bookseller McNally Jackson here posts a fascinating list of its bestselling titles of 2011, but there’s one big surprise: the bestselling thing in the store isn’t a book from a publisher large or small, nor is it a book at all: it’s…
Yesterday, Edan Lepucki in The Millions wrote a great piece on the perils of self-publishing and the benefits of working with a small publishing house. She also noted that “the conversation about self-publishing too often ignores the role of independent publishing houses in this shifting…
So who will be Kickstarter‘s Amanda Hocking? That’s the question that immediately comes to mind after reading this article in Publishers Weekly by Todd Allen. Kickstarter, if you don’t know, is a sort of public venture capital fund where you post projects that you’d like…
