Tag Archives: self-publishing

Dead Tree Books, eBook, Success Stories

Kindle Direct Publishing Announces Kindle MatchBook

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Amazon is officially launching Kindle MatchBook in October.  The announcement on their website can be seen HERE.

According to the announcement, “For thousands of qualifying books, your past, present, and future print-edition purchases will soon allow you to buy the Kindle edition for $2.99, $1.99, $0.99, or free.”

The program is making ebook versions of print books purchased new from Amazon, going all the way back to 1995 when Amazon first opened its online bookstore.  This is great news for customers … and it can be great news for indie publishers as well.

Amazon’s official notice to us authors and publishers:

Kindle MatchBook is an innovative new program which enables you to offer your Kindle book at a discount when readers purchase your print book, so you can sell more books.

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Dead Tree Books, eBook

CALL FOR ENTRIES: Shelf Unbound Writing Competition

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

SHELF UNBOUND WRITING COMPETITION FOR BEST INDEPENDENTLY PUBLISHED BOOK, SPONSORED BY HALF PRICE BOOKS

Shelf Unbound book review magazine announces the Shelf Unbound Writing Competition for Best Independently Published Book sponsored by Half Price Books. Any independently published book in any genre is eligible for entry. Entry fee is $30 per book. The winning entry will be selected by the editors of Shelf Unbound magazine.

“Independently Published” books include self-published books (such as those published through CreateSpace, Lulu.com, iUniverse, etc.) and/or books published through small presses releasing less than five titles per year. Books entered in last year’s competition are eligible for re-submission in this year’s competition. There is no limit to the number of books an individual can enter; each book is a separate entry.

The official rules for the competition can be found at here.

To submit an entry, email a PDF or Word Doc of your entire book, including the cover, toMargaret@shelfmediagroup.com, subject line Contest Entry (or mail a physical copy of your book to: Shelf Media Group, PO Box 852321, Richardson, Texas 75085-2321), and send a check for $30 made out to Shelf Media Group to Margaret Brown, Shelf Media Group, PO Box 852321, Richardson, Texas 75085-2321, or pay via PayPal (click on this link and select “Competition Entry Fee”). All entries received (and entry fee paid) will be considered.

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eBook

Calibre pops out release 1.3!

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Whether you’re an eBook aficionado, an aspiring writer, or ar just trying to get a handle on all of your eBooks across all of your devices the open-source Calibre program is your solution.  You can manage your library, sync your files to virtually every device you’ve got, and even convert eBook formats.

Calibre is free to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.  You can get it HERE.

While relatively glacial in pushing updates, Kovid Goyal has now updated this excellent program twice in a month!

About

Calibre started life on 31 October, 2006, soon after the release of the SONY PRS-500, the first e-ink based reader to be sold commercially in the US. At the time, I was a graduate student, with a lot of time on my hands. The PRS-500 did not work at all with Linux, my operating system of choice, so I decided to reverse engineer the USB protocol that it used, to get it working on Linux. This was accomplished with the help of the fine folks over at mobileread.com and calibre was born, albeit named libprs500.

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Dead Tree Books, eBook, Success Stories

Is Self-Publishing here to stay?

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

This question was recently asked, and some mighty strange answers were provided:

“…Is self publishing here to stay? Hogwash. Self publishing will be here to stay when self published authors start showing up on Good Morning America or The View or the front page of the Huffington Post or Salon or the New York Times Book Review, and I don’t mean well known marketable authors who’ve jettisoned the mainstream publishers without which they’d still be a bunch of nobodies tweeting their asses off about their latest novel. Sure, once in a blue moon an “indie” author will break through into one of those venues, but the major publishers are still dictating what America reads. Go ahead, shoot the messenger…”

And:

“…Excuse me, I forgot this is an ebook group, so let’s add the ebook phenomenon to the print on demand phenomenon! You can publish an ebook for nothing too. Of course, with both ebooks and POD, you could pay a couple of hundred dollars for a professionally designed cover, and a few hundred dollars on up to an editor, and then you could pay I don’t know how much to a blog tour broker, and you could pay to have your book displayed on a web site promoting great reads to people looking for something to read…”

And:

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Dead Tree Books, eBook, Success Stories

Wait, WHAT? A self-published author turns down a publisher?

Posted on by Shawn E. Bell

Author Aubrey Rose recently wrote a blog post explaining why she decided to turn down an offer from Amazon Publishing’s Montlake Romance imprint.

Why would a self-published author turn down an overture from a publisher?  An offer that included royalties, even?

From her post:

“…Naturally, I was thrilled. A real publisher wanted my work! I chatted with her briefly on the phone and asked her a ton of questions: What kind of cover would they create for me? What promotions would they do? What control would I have over everything? Although I was excited to work with Amazon, I wanted to know that they would treat my book right. She told me my novel was a great read and very clean writing, and that she would love to “partner” with me in relaunching my book through Amazon’s imprint.

However, she couldn’t guarantee anything – from cover image to pricing to marketing…”

Ah, ha!  Well, that’s par for the publisher course.  But wait, there’s more:

“…The advance they offered was less than I had made in my first month of sales. As I looked through the Montlake catalogue, I saw a mix of breakout hits and complete flops, with some recent books that just had the worst covers imaginable for romance. And I would have to pull my book from every publisher except Amazon…”

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