The Guardian and L.A. Times continue crusade against self-publishing

The L.A. Times is parroting an article first reported in The Guardian:

“98 British publishers folded last year due to e-books, discounts”

The original article published November 4th in the Guardian has a headline screaming “Ebooks and discounts drive 98 publishers out of business” with a subhead of “Number of closures is 42% up on last year, as digital books and huge pressure on margins push companies over the brink” … and it’s all nonsense.  Bollocks.

The quote by Anthony Cork of the accountancy firm Wilkins Kennedy included is “the rise of Amazon and other discount sellers with massive buying power means the pressure on publishers’ margins is now immense. While publishers might be able to sustain relatively small margins on a bestseller, it is much harder for niche publishers.”

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Amazon Extreme Package from Outskirts Press Prepares Self-Publishing Authors for Success

From PRWEB:

Outskirts Press, the fastest growing self-publishing and book marketing company, announced today it is giving away its most popular marketing package (nearly $250 value) to authors who start their publishing process this month. The Amazon Extreme marketing package includes a Kindle Edition, Search Inside the Book Submission and Amazon Cover Enhancement, as well as a complimentary copy of Sell Your Book on Amazon by Outskirts Press CEO Brent Sampson — everything an author needs to jump start their book sales on Amazon.com.

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From zero to published author in 3 weeks

Mediabistro is offering Self-Publishing Intensive, an online step-by-step webcast course starting December 5th, that will help aspiring authors urn their manuscript into a PUBLISHED eBook in three weeks.  The course runs from December 5th through the 19th.

From the website:

Learn the steps to take your book from manuscript to published eBook – without a publisher or agent. Over the course of three weeks, you’ll participate in a dynamic online event and tune in to live weekly video webcasts, participate in ongoing discussions, complete homework assignments, and through small group work, receive personalized feedback on your self-publishing plan from both your peers and industry experts.

How does this work?

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NaNoWriMo: It’s a matter of trust for some writers

Not really a trust issue for me; I have a whole lot of keys on this keyboard and I’m not afraid to use any of them.  But there’s a different perspective from Lynn Viehl:

Tomorrow it will be one week since writers around the world began working on their National Novel Writing Month book. I always love the first week of writing a new novel, but I always hate it, too. There’s the excitement of beginning a new story, which clashes with the dread that I’ve chosen the wrong idea to write. I’ve probably had the characters in my head for quite some time, and yet I’ve never heard them before on the page (a bit of synethesia there; I hear my characters via the dialogue I write.) Unless I’m working on a series book I’m generally in a new place with a lot of unfamiliar folks doing things unknown to me, and this can be both exhilarating and exhausting.

For some of you this first week has been instructive; it’s given you a chance to engage in a work routine, figure out how much you can comfortably write per day, etc. You’ve discovered self-discipline, internal or external motivation, and how you may best do this thing. For some of you it’s been the exact opposite; you’re fighting with the words and the characters and the concept; the story is getting away from you (or hasn’t appeared at all as you imagined it), and you may even be thinking this was a very bad idea, and/or you’re considering tossing in the towel now before you end up looking/feeling/writing like a fool. Most of you will waffle between these two states or land somewhere in the middle of them for the next twenty-five days.

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Toyota kills the FJ Cruiser

Toyota has announced at the SEMA show in Las Vegas that this is the last year for the distinctive FJ Cruiser.  From the beginning Toyota said that the FJ Cruiser would be a single-generation vehicle, and – after an 8-year run – they’ve made good on that statement.

I remember with fondness my 2007 Sun Fusion 6-speed FJ Cruiser.  Never understood the lack of sunroof, but I dearly loved the bolt-on wonderfulness that is Toyota design (pretty much everything came pre-drilled and pre-wired on the FJ; all you had to do was plug in a switch, add a foot of wiring harness, or pop-off the covers and you had everything offered in the Toyota options list added to your base model FJ.

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