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Jan 4
The Top Five Self-Publishing and Print-on-Demand Links From The Publishing Spot

With Hitler in New York: And Other StoriesFirst of all, a big welcome to all the GalleyCat readers coming through The Publishing Spot today. It's a real honor to meet all these new people.

Over at GalleyCat, Ron Hogan has been running some fabulous self-publishing advice, and I dug through our archives to bring out some more wisdom from writers I interviewed here. Here are my Top Five Self-Publishing and Print-on-Demand Links... 

1- Richard Grayson- This New York writer rescued his book, With Hitler In New York using the print-on-demand Back in Print bookstore at the Authors Guild--allowing us to savor every surreal page.

2- Victoria Strauss- This professional novelist blogs about the pitfalls of self-publishing at Writer Beware!--debunking myths about the profitability and popularity of our humble profession. Read this essay for more cautionary tales.

3- Nick Mamatas- This science fiction writer took his first novel and re-packaged it as a web project with a Creative Commons license. His project spawned a conversation that included novelists like John Scalzi and Charles Stross.

4- M.J. Rose- This writing and marketing guru (with a number of self-promoted books under her belt) runs some of the smartest book marketing websites on the Internet--helping self-published and published authors alike. Here's a sample essay about self-publishing.

5- Josh Kilmer-Purcell- While this memoirist landed a deal with a publishing company, he did it through the support of The Memoirists Collective, a band of supportive writers (that he helped build) who helped each other self-publicize their books.

Do you have a success story to add? Drop us a line in the comments section and I'll summarize the best posts next week. 

 


2 Comments/Trackbacks




Richard Grayson (who happens to be a friend of mine), also has three POD books at Lulu:

http://stores.lulu.com/graysonric

The two fiction titles have each had criminally low sales, so do yourself and Richard a big favor and buy one or both of them. Lorimer Street was a great read, and I just bought Highly Irregular Stories yesterday.

Getting Published Through a “Self-Publishing Company.”

Writers are confused and it’s not their fault. In searching for the best way to break into print, they come across self-described “self-publishing companies”. I get emails asking if I can self-publish for writers. That is impossible!

The problem is that many vanity publishers are calling themselves “self-publishing companies.”

We have been building name recognition for self-publishing for more than 35 years; there are more than 85,000 of us in the U.S. Self-publishers, write, publish and promote their own books.

According to Wikipedia, Self-Publishing is the publishing of books and other media by the authors of those works, rather than by established, third-party publishers.The only “self-publishing company” is you—by definition. If you contract with a publisher, your book is not SELF-published.

Now that people know what self-publishing is, we find we have to re-educate the public to the fact that we are the real self-publishers and the other DotCom digital publishers are really just vanity publishers masquerading as us. They are trading on the good reputation we have built.

For information on the choices for breaking into print, get the f-r-e-e Information Kit #2 on Publishing at
http://parapublishing.com/sites/para/resources/infokit.cfm

Let’s respect historical and common definitions. These publishers are “vanity” or “subsidy” presses. Stop confusing people new to the book trade.

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