eBook, Success Stories

USA Today: Companies book profits from self-publishing

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Jeremy Greenfield (Special for USA Today) has posted a new article on the USA Today website about how new firms have sprung up to help writers get their ebooks published:

In the spring of 2010, Amanda Hocking, a social worker from Rochester, Minn., uploaded several books she had been working on to Amazon.com. In the first weeks, she sold a few dozen copies — success for someone who just wanted to have her work read.

In the next few months, she published several more manuscripts, and soon, the sales started piling up. By the end of the summer, Hocking had made enough money to quit her job, and in January 2011, she sold “an insane amount of books,” she said, estimating the total at 100,000.

Continue reading →

eBook, Success Stories

‘Tired Of Waiting’ Teenager Self-Publishes Novels

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Mary Isokariari has posted on Young Voices about Lloyd Harry-Davis, 16, who “juggles studies with writing works of fantasy fiction.” She writes:

AN ENTERPRISING teenage author has self-published a series of urban fantasy novels.

Lloyd Harry-Davis, a 16-year-old first year sixth-form student at St Dominic’s Sixth Form College in Harrow, northwest London, wrote his first book Preternatural at the age of 12 and completed the second a year later.

Continue reading →

Activities, Writer Reference

Manifrotto recommends a great book for landscape photographers

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Jose Antunes has posted reviews of a number of great photography books, including one of the great ones about landscape photography.  From the post:

There are tens of eBooks about landscape photography, making it hard to choose one. Still, if I could only buy one, this would be it: “Visual Flow – Mastering the Art of Composition”, by Ian Plant, with photographs by this author and George Stocking. If there’s one easy way to enter 2014  widening your horizons in terms of Photography, it surely is through the reading of Visual Flow – Mastering the Art of Composition.

Continue reading →

eBook

Penguin teams up with Readmill on booksharing app

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

The Guardian UK is reporting that Penguin UK has teamed up with the Berlin-based ebook app developer Readmill to bolster direct ebook sales.  From the article:

The app allows readers to share ebook highlights and to talk to each other while they’re reading, “liking” one anothers’ updates and discussing the books.

The deal includes more than 5,000 digital titles – Penguin UK owns digital rights to works by authors such as Zadie Smith, Hari Kunzru, and John Updike, as well as Morrissey’s Autobiography. People who buy ebooks from Penguin.co.uk will have the option to “send to Readmill”. The arrangement sidesteps Amazon’s Kindle and means that Penguin can retain more data on customers.

The free app, designed for iPhone, iPad or Android phones, lets readers share highlights, and supports digital conversations about books by linking reading to social media. Readers can use the app to update Facebook and Twitter when they begin reading a book, if they want to highlight passages or when they finish a book.

Continue reading →

Dead Tree Books, eBook, Writer Reference

Writing: Should The Self-published Author Use A Pen-Name (Pseudonym)?

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Alli the Self-Publishing Advice Blog has posted an editorial on their site:

Trade publishers are notoriously wary of using the same author name across different genres, or of using a name that they feel is inappropriate for a particular book  – hence the morphing of Joanne Rowling into the more masculine J K Rowling, even though she doesn’t have a middle name. While self-published writers have the freedom to choose their own pen-name, the decision isn’t always easy or obvious. A group of self-published authors discussed the options on ALLi’s lively private Facebook forum earlier this week. Here are some of their conclusions:

Continue reading →