Category Archives: Self Publishing

Dead Tree Books, eBook, indie-publishing, Questions and Answers, Self Publishing, Writing

Why do writers still need publishing companies, when you can self publish?

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Writers don’t need publishing companies. They haven’t needed publishing companies for more than a decade.

Writers also shouldn’t self-publish. With the maturation of the indie publishing community, there are professionals (the exact same professionals who work for publishing companies) who can help any anyone with a manuscript go from writer to author.

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Questions and Answers, Writing

Question: Do you think that novelists can write about what they don’t know?

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Answer: Nope. If you write what you don’t know it rings false, and that transfers directly to the page, and the reader will always pick up on it.

To correct some misconceptions:

  • How many submarines did Jules Verne ride in? None. But he was intimately familiar with the French submarine experimenters of the time – including the submarine “Le Plongeur” designed and built by Simon Bourgeois and Charles Brun, which (gee, coincidentally enough…) just happened to be around for seven years before 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was published, and which Verne actually saw when he was writing the story.
  • Fiction isn’t about “what you don’t know” at all. It’s about storytelling. Good storytellers write what they know. They always have, they always will.
  • Those who claim you should write what you don’t know – using the “crusading knights” and “dragons” and “space travel” and all the Hogwarts stuff doesn’t exist argument – clearly don’t understand storytelling. A story isn’t about the inner workings of hyperdrive, the quantum physics of a witch’s spell, the anatomy of a dragon or any of that ancillary ‘color.’ A good story is about heroes and villains and love and hate and human emotion. THAT is what good storytellers always write about; they write what they know.

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eBook

Scribd cuts off romance and erotica

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Scribd, the subscription-based content platform has apparently alerted its publishing partners that it will be dropping a number of romance and erotica titles from its ebook catalog.  Smashwords CEO Mark Coker announced the news on the Smashwords website yesterday, along with the estimate that Scribd will drop 80-90% of the Smashwords romance and erotica titles.  Mark is a strong proponent of indie publishing, and has been critical about the viability of a subscription model for ebooks (Amazon has updated its author compensation model for their Kindle Unlimited subscription platform starting July 1, 2015; authors now get paid “per page” read).

From Mark Coker’s post:

Scribd, the fast-growing ebook subscription service, today announced dramatic cuts to their catalog of romance and erotica titles.

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eBook, Writer Reference

The Case of the Complaining Author

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

There are many reasons that authors fail.  The most glaringly obvious one is that they don’t treat their writing as a business.

Scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed, I came across a post that seemed to indicate that an eBook listed on Amazon was showing the wrong content when a potential buyer clicked on the “look inside” feature.  The poster was “damning” the Look Inside feature.

So I asked a simple question: Did the original poster call and ask why the wrong content was showing?

The response showed that they had not done so.

Here’s the thing: YOU are the author. YOU are your business. YOUR BOOK is your product.  Take some damned responsibility for it! Act like a professional!

Further examination showed that the eBook in question – which I looked up, accessed the “look inside” feature and downloaded the sample for – had been first published on December 19, 2013.  By using the post date of the FB complaint, the date the interior file was updated can be extrapolated to March 27, 2015.

The eBook has no reviews.

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