Category: Self-Publishing

Book Promotion, Book Reviews, Self-Publishing, Viral Marketing

On Self-published Book Reviews

Every Saturday I post self-published book reviews on this blog. What you won’t find in those is critical review in the vein of James Wood or the New York Times book review. (I am a fan of both.)

The reviews posted here are not intended to be on par, mimic, or compliment a James Wood. The reality is book marketing is changing as fast as book publishing – exponentially. As Stephen Marche noted in a recent Esquire, “…written criticism — literary, music, and movie reviews by trained professionals — has never been less relevant. There is no Lester Bangs to announce to the cool kids that the Doors actually suck.”

Learning to view this as neither good nor bad, but instead different, is the key. It’s not a fight anyone is going to win, after all. For those literary buffs out there, I encourage you to read some James Wood. And I hope you find our book reviews here at the very least a good resource for learning about new titles and relevant niche reads.


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Self-Publishing, Viral Marketing

The Future of Publishing

In her end of the year address, Simon & Schuster CEO, Carolyn Reidy had this to say of the book market, “The US bookselling market has been truly lackluster, and year-on-year sales at most of our major customers have declined significantly … the lower sales volume attributed to the soft marketplace was impossible for us to overcome.”

But is the marketplace soft? Have book sales truly declined? Or, as Seth Godin would suggest, has the marketplace, instead of going soft, changed radically?

Self-published author, Keith Knapp, has nearly dominated the Kindle store sales rankings for months. As Knapp points out, it’s not easy to get readers to pick up titles from authors they’ve never heard of. But here is an example of an author adapting to the changing market to find success, in spite of disliking the practice of marketing itself.

As Seth identifies, “Competition and the market are like water. They go where they want.”

I encourage you to take two minutes and enjoy this video, The Future of Publishing.



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Cheers.

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing Tidbits

News today broke of yet another Author Solutions partnership between ‘self empowerment’ publisher, Hay House. As you may recall, this comes after similar partnerships over the past year with Harlequin and Thomas Nelson, which brought on quite a bit of criticism throughout the industry.

Like it or not, self-publishing proves again to be on the move, as reported in a recent New York Times article: “But times have changed, and radically. Last year, according to the Bowker bibliographic company, 764,448 titles were produced by self-publishers and so-called microniche publishers. (A microniche, I imagine, is a shade bigger than a self.) This is up an astonishing 181 percent from the previous year.” Be sure to check out the comments section, beginning with the insightful first response.


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Self-Publishing

Guest Post: Ask the Book Doctor about Quotation Marks

Grammar advice for the self-publishing author:

Q: I am editing an article for a periodical and cannot find anything in my grammar books or copyeditor’s guide that addresses this issue. There is a sentence in quotation marks that lists within it the names of several songs. I am confused as to whether to use single quotation marks around the names of the songs or to use double quotes as you would usually do with a song.

A: Single quotation marks are used to indicate quotation marks inside of double quotation marks. Because the sentence is in quotation marks, any items within it that would have quotation marks around them would have single quotation marks.

Examples: “John, did you say ‘Thank you’ to your teacher?” Mary said, “I loved the Tommy Edwards song called ‘It’s all in the Game.’


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Bobbie Christmas, book editor, author of Write In Style (Union Square Publishing), and owner of Zebra Communications, will answer your questions, too. Send them to Bobbie@zebraeditor.com. Read more “Ask the Book Doctor” questions and answers at http://www.zebraeditor.com.

Self-Publishing

Self-publishing Writing Tip: Ask the Book Doctor on Quotions

Q: I have a question about quotation marks. I know the punctuation goes inside the quotation marks when writing dialogue, as in: Ray asked, “What about quotation marks?” What happens when they’re used in titles, though, as in this example: Three very different styles are represented by “Nude Descending a Staircase,” “The Scream,” and “The Mona Lisa.” The punctuation (including the serial comma) doesn’t look right inside the quotation marks. I tried it outside, though, and it looked even less right. Which way is right?

A: The answer is not going to be what you expect. If you are writing a book and correctly following the guidelines set forth in The Chicago Manual of Style, the titles of works of art will be in italics (underlined in manuscript form), rather than in quotation marks, so the punctuation point is moot.



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Bobbie Christmas, book doctor, author of Write In Style (Union Square Publishing), and owner of Zebra Communications, will answer your questions, too. Send them to Bobbie@zebraeditor.com. Visit Bobbie’s blog at http://bobbiechristmas.blogspot.com/. Read more “Ask the Book Doctor” questions and answers at http://www.zebraeditor.com