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Self-Publishing News: 10.23.2017 – Publishing Trends

hello October word abstrtact in wood type

And now for the news!

Some highlights from this month in the world of self-publishing, specifically regarding publishing trends within the publishing industry, and their implications for all authors!

This article by Jim Milliot for Publisher’s Weekly is the perfect way to bludgeon your way into Monday, packed with fascinating tidbits on the state of self-publishing by way of a new report from Bowker. It would seem that, now we’ve reached October 2017, we’re finally drawing conclusions about 2016, a year in which we apparently (collectively) purchased 786,935 ISBNs. According to the report (and Milliot), this serves as “an 8.2% increase over 2015,” which is, well, statistically significant. This number averages out the numbers for print books (which rose significantly) and for e-books (which dropped a bit). What does this report mean for you and me? First, there are several conclusions we might reach: firstly, that the drop in e-book ISBN purchases is leveling out (in 2015, there was an enormous drop), Amazon is still purchasing the bulk of ISBNs, and there are still plenty of companies jockeying to pick up the bulk of the remainder. There are perhaps more gems of wisdom we might identify here, and we encourage you to dig into the original article, which you can access here.

“Marvel and DC could learn a thing or two from their indie competitors,” writes Alexander Huls as he opens this article for the Pacific Standard. What are those things that might be learnt? That women make, buy, and read comics in which they are well-represented! We might examine that idea at length, but Huls has already done such a fantastic job we highly recommend you take a peek at the original piece for brilliant insights into the established comic publishers (like Marvel and DC) and what they have done to lose their edge in appealing to what is now a significant market share of the comics industry–a shortsightedness which is now paying dividends to independent and self-publishing comics companies. We’ll just leave you with one final quotation:

Women Write About Comics’ Purdy echoes that sentiment. “When you get through a convention or an industry space, it’s always: ‘Where are the women? Is this generation of women going to be the one to finally break through?’ We already broke through,” Purdy says.

You can read the rest of Huls’ fantastic article at the link.

We’re not disputing that there are plenty of pitfalls to landing a traditional publisher, as Loren Kleinman chronicles in her article for HuffPost … but we might dispute that a newcomer to the self-publishing industry is the way to cure all those ills. After all, there have been (as the Bowker article reveals, above) plenty of contenders attempting to redress the gaps and shortfalls of the traditional publishing industry, and if they haven’t found the solution in aggregate, it’s unlikely that just one new company would. Still, it’s worth exploring all options, right? So, what is Publishizer? According to Kleinman, it is “a NYC-based startup and crowdfunding platform that’s helped hundreds of authors get published,” which sounds a little bit like sales copy. Still, the rest of the article is fascinating, as it is made up of an interview with Lee Constantine, Publishizer’s Head of Growth. According to Constantine, Publishizer was established to combat one of the perceived shortcomings of self-publishing–namely, its lack of legitimacy, and its inability to compete with the “elusive” traditional publishing option. How does Publishizer aim to do this? Algorithms. Of course it’s more complicated than that, but we highly recommend you read Kleinman and Constantine’s full interview.

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As a self-publishing author, you may find it helpful to stay up-to-date on the trends and news related to the self-publishing industry.This will help you make informed decisions before, during and after the self-publishing process, which will lead to a greater self-publishing experience. To help you stay current on self-publishing topics, simply visit our blog every Monday to find out the hottest news. If you have other big news to share, please comment below.

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news from the self publishing world, self publishing news, Self-Publishing, Uncategorized

Self-Publishing News: 10.16.2017 – New Releases!

hello October word abstrtact in wood type

And now for the news!

Some highlights from this month in the world of self-publishing, specifically new releases written by self-publishing authors and published by independent presses! Today we’ll be featuring brand-new releases in the Outskirts Press Bookstore!

Are you looking for a whodunit to liven up your October evenings? You can’t go wrong with Reginald Buchanan’s Deceived, a killer story with a serious twist. It follows the story of Joan Witherspoon, a rising star of an athlete and the kind of senior everyone hopes their children grow up to be: a bright spark, full of life and passion. But her life is about to get very complicated indeed. Tragedy strikes while she’s away at volleyball practice, and while her parents’ deaths are explained away by the local law enforcement at the time, she finds herself years later at the heart of a burgeoning serial murder story. There’s plenty of deceit to go around, as the book’s title indicates, but you won’t see the end coming until it arrives! Sure, it may not be as overtly spooky as a book with “Halloween” in the title, but Deceived is a fantastically creepy exploration of the various sides of grief, tragedy, and the mind of a killer.

On a lighter note, who hasn’t wanted to go backpacking or river boating or parasailing through Europe? (Okay, so that last one may be a bit too much, but there’s always room for a personal fantasy or two in the midst of a book review!) Francis J. Clauss is here to walk us through the jewel of the grand European tour of ages gone by: Italy, land of Roman ruins and lush wineries and volcanoes galore. But Clauss has something more to offer than just a smidgen of sight-seeing! A regular at the San Francisco Opera, West Bay Opera in Palo Alto, Opera San Jose, Santa Fe Opera, the New York Metropolitan Opera, and many foreign venues, he and his wife have volunteered behind and in front of the scenes at various venues and know the lay of the operatic land, so to speak. In this volume, Clauss takes readers on a journey through not just the heart of Italy’s opera scene, but also the history of opera and why it has become such an emotional lynch-pin for those like him, and why it has become a city- and nation-building force throughout the ages. Fascinating, right? More than worth a look!

Following up on the joyous ride that was the first book in this series, Tom Boyhan is back with a new installment! If you or someone you know has loved Harry Potter, The Adventurer’s Guide to Successful Escapes, or How to Train Your Dragon, here’s another fantastic fantasy series for young readers that really knows how to blow your socks off! With fire! Dragonfire! What’s cooler than that? I’ll tell you what: a story which combines the allure of martial arts (they win belts!) with boarding school (which we’d much rather read about than attend, except when it’s a magical boarding school for magical kids and DRAGONS) and podracing. I mean, dragon racing! Dragon racing is even cooler than podracing, in our humble opinion. But of course, not all is fun and games at the academy, and our intrepid cast of heroes must fight a shadowy organization in order to survive, save the world, and make it to class on time in the morning. They’ve got a full semester ahead of them, and we have a full evening by the fire reading ahead of us. Can’t wait for book three!

spa-news

As a self-publishing author, you may find it helpful to stay up-to-date on the trends and news related to the self-publishing industry.This will help you make informed decisions before, during and after the self-publishing process, which will lead to a greater self-publishing experience. To help you stay current on self-publishing topics, simply visit our blog every Monday to find out the hottest news. If you have other big news to share, please comment below.

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news from the self publishing world, self publishing news, Uncategorized

Self-Publishing News: 10.9.2017 – The Interviews!

hello october

And now for the news!

Some highlights from this month in the world of self-publishing, specifically interviews with or articles written by self-publishing authors and experts!

There is literally nothing more exciting and potentially explosive (in a literary sense) than a group of like-minded individuals getting together to accomplish something, and when that something happens to be writing and publishing one’s memoirs, the possibilities are endless! Or so the experiences of the Toledo Writer’s Workshop, interviewed at length by Nicki Gorny for the Toledo Blade, would seem to indicate–everyone there has a different story, both in terms of what they want to write and how their publishing process has gone. The workshop, which is made up of Chris Kwapich, Sarah Charles, James C. Mack, Chris Cummings, Don Slessman, Mohan Pandey, Bob Beach, and Mary Bush Shipko, is just as varied in terms of who chose to pursue a traditional publishing route and who opted to self-publish. Gorny dedicates page space to each author in turn, and each has something valuable to say about the process of writing a memoir. You can read the full article at the link!

Talk about a story for the ages! “Author Mark Cantrell was never expecting to have something in common with the protagonist of his latest novel,” begins Philip Cullinane’s article for the Stoke Sentinel, “But when the company he was working for went bust, the 46-year-old suddenly found himself unemployed, much like the character in his new book Citizen Zero.” So the story begins, yes, but it definitely doesn’t end there, as Cullinane chronicles Cantrell’s journey to self-publication, and his recovery after such a major career check. Citizen Zero, according to the article, conveys a world in which the gap between rich and poor is continually growing, where heavy-handed authoritarian governments are considered normal, and jobs are continually at risk of being rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence. Sound familiar? Well, maybe most of us don’t have to worry about AI yet, but some of us do. For more of Cullinane’s article interviewing Cantrell, visit the Stoke Sentinel website.

Every now and then, we like to talk comics, graphic novels, and heavily illustrated works on this blog, in part because they are just as commonly self-published as “word-based” literature, and in part because some members of the comics community are so totally, incredibly dedicated to their work–and we ant to honor that! This interview, conducted by Philippe Leblanc as part of a series at Cartoon Crossroads Columbus (CXC), takes advantage of the four-day festival’s intense concentration of independent artists to interview Marnie Galloway. Galloway, a Chicago cartoonist whose latest collection of publications includes Burrow, self-published in part with funds from the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, also uses Patreon to raise support in order to pay for daycare. A new mother, she speaks openly and frankly about the pressures of being both parent and artist in this interview, which you can read in full on The Beat. 

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As a self-publishing author, you may find it helpful to stay up-to-date on the trends and news related to the self-publishing industry.This will help you make informed decisions before, during and after the self-publishing process, which will lead to a greater self-publishing experience. To help you stay current on self-publishing topics, simply visit our blog every Monday to find out the hottest news. If you have other big news to share, please comment below.

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news from the self publishing world, self publishing news, Uncategorized

Self-Publishing News: 10.2.2017 – The Company Files!

And now for the news!

Some highlights from this month in the world of self-publishing, specifically news from or regarding self-publishing companies!

Rejection is a part of every author’s experience, isn’t it? But even the most determined author starts to question what’s good and what’s not after 47 rejections … unless that author is Ashwin Sanghi, who received that exact number of rejections before carrying on to publish huge hits The Rozabal Line, The Krishna Key and Chanakya’s Chant. If you think that’s a punch of encouragement to get you through the morning, get this: Sanghi is a believer in self-publishing. “The technological tools available today are so immense that there is no reason why you should not be able to make your book at least visible,” he says, and self-publishing now offers the kinds of opportunities you’d only find with traditional publishing houses when he first started out. “Self-publishing as a concept didn’t exist prior to 2007. In fact, in those days what existed was vanity press, where you paid to have copies of your book printed.” He then proceeds to walk readers through the benefits of self-publishing, and to encourage them to push forward. The rest of the article is well worth a read!

Susan Miles Gulbransen, of Santa Barbara’s Noozhawk, has some words this last week on the subject of bestsellers … and how they’re often made, not born. Now, most of us involved in writing and publishing harbor no illusions that publishing is a fair and equitable environment that rewards those who’ve put in the labor in order to produce masterpieces. But just in case you did … well, maybe bursting bubbles isn’t the most worthwhile thing to do with our time. And maybe it is. Gulbransen has some serious questions: “What is the difference between individual and bulk sales? Which books have the right literary quality? Does it take money to get a book listed? Or, which bookstores get counted? When I researched what it takes to make the NYT bestseller lists, it became obvious that the system is complicated, secretive and not based on straight sales calculations.” Want to know how the magic is made, and the implications for self-publishing authors? Dig into the rest of her article at the Noozhawk.

Ben Fox Rubin of CNet has some insights into Amazon’s latest attempt to tweak the ebook platform it has spent so long carefully building, and they’re not all optimistic. Says Rubin, “The online retailer on Wednesday filed five separate legal actions through the American Arbitration Association to cut down on a variety of alleged scams used to make money on Amazon’s Kindle self-publishing service.” These scams have plagued the platform since its beginning, although Rubin reiterates that they are not the majority of transactions taking place on Kindle Direct. But Amazon is getting serious about fixing things: “Amazon since 2015 has been using these kinds of legal actions to fight against scams and already sued over 1,000 entities involved in allegedly creating fake product reviews on its sites. The company last year also sued alleged counterfeiters.” It’s a step…but will it be enough? Rubin has some interesting speculations on that score, well worth reading up on.

spa-news

As a self-publishing author, you may find it helpful to stay up-to-date on the trends and news related to the self-publishing industry.This will help you make informed decisions before, during and after the self-publishing process, which will lead to a greater self-publishing experience. To help you stay current on self-publishing topics, simply visit our blog every Monday to find out the hottest news. If you have other big news to share, please comment below.

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Self-Publishing News: 9.25.2017 – Publishing Trends

september

And now for the news!

Some highlights from this month in the world of self-publishing, specifically regarding publishing trends within the publishing industry, and their implications for all authors!

We’re coming out of the gate with a controversial item today, an article by Gautam Bhatia for The Times of India, one of the region’s most widely-read and well-regarded dailies. In this article, Bhatia digs into what he calls “the rapid privatisation of urban life, and the consequent trivialisation of public culture” and how this has altered public perceptions and quality control in achievement-based celebrations like architectural and literary awards. He hearkens back to a golden age when “Newspapers reported facts; opinions were reserved for the few whose long-term experience of those facts gave credibility to their voice” (which are highly debatable assumptions) and takes time to lament what he considers the downsides of self-publishing, too:

An accountant friend uses Photoshop techniques to make paintings and then sells them as signed prints; another penned a salacious novel, self-published, and critically reviewed and acclaimed by himself on the internet. “I am not a writer,” he claimed modestly, “it just came to me one night.” Both were good reasons for disqualification.

Bhatia is determined to vilify technology, social media, and the “‘I-me-my’ world with its instant gratification [which] has replaced the long-term value of a selective discriminating public space.” What do you think? Do you agree that the way our world works today, including self-publishing, has cheapened perceptions of value and the push for quality? Our own bias may be implicit, but we’re genuinely curious.

On a more positive note, Jane Friedman of Publisher’s Weekly released an article this week about the new ways and means available to authors seeking to reach new readers and therefore sell more books. “Start where you are,” she writes: “Use the power of your community—and the people you know—to gain momentum.” But … how exactly does that work in our modern, tech-savvy age? She argues that “indie authors can become obsessed with Amazon rankings and optimization.” And:

It’s not that those things don’t have a role to play, but national attention and great rankings are sometimes the result of doing a great marketing and promotion job within a community that knows you. It’s often easier to gain traction that way, and encourage word of mouth to ripple further out as a stepping-stone to the more difficult PR wins.

Hm. There’s a lot to unpack in Friedman’s article, which deconstructs the experiences of several specific authors and their books before moving on to providing some key pointers and recommendations. What with Facebook’s targeted ads making news headlines every other week, it’s well worth a look to see what ways going local–and going targeted–can benefit you!

Last but not least, this week we recommend you take a look at a new series just begun on The Guardian‘s website, chronicling the weird little intricacies of making money. This first article traces the path of one book series–J.K. Rowling’s crime fiction series, published under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith–to success. But this article, by Donna Ferguson, has a twist: she wants to know what algorithms have got to say about literature, and about success. Self-publishing only merits a passing mention, but much of the meat and potatoes of the article applies to authors everywhere, no matter their means of publication. “It doesn’t matter whether a book is published as literary fiction, romance, sci-fi, crime or any other genre, there are some latent features of bestseller-dom in manuscripts and these patterns are detectable by a computer algorithm,” Ferguson quotes expert Jodie Archer as saying. What are those patterns? You’ll have to read the full article to find out. And then, of course, report back to us whether it shapes up with your experiences or not!

spa-news

As a self-publishing author, you may find it helpful to stay up-to-date on the trends and news related to the self-publishing industry.This will help you make informed decisions before, during and after the self-publishing process, which will lead to a greater self-publishing experience. To help you stay current on self-publishing topics, simply visit our blog every Monday to find out the hottest news. If you have other big news to share, please comment below.

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