Amazon wade back into serialized content with Kindle Vella

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A new addition to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, Vella is an online writing platform where readers can purchase tokens to read serialized content. Initially Vella will be offered only on the Kindle iOS app and Amazon.com, not on Kindle devices or the Kindle Android, Mac, or PC apps, suggesting this may be aimed at stealing some iPhone users away from Apple Books, or it may be a means of beating Apple to the punch. Serialization of paid digital content first became popular in Asia (particularly China, Korea, and Japan) and Read More …

The perils of using song lyrics in your book (and how to do so anyway)

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Many indie authors ask me if they can use song lyrics in their books, and if doing so constitutes fair use or if permission is required. The short answer is this: yes, you can use lyrics, doing so might or might not fall under fair use, but in the end that is irrelevant because copyright of most lyrics is aggressively defended by powerful licensing agencies who can make your life miserable if you fail to pay for permission. So forget fair use: you can’t afford it. Permission to use song Read More …

Interview on Vancouver Co-op Radio

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I was interviewed yesterday on Writing Life, on Vancouver’s Co-op Radio, 100.5 FM. We covered some of the basics of self-publishing as well as marketing and international publishing. You can listen here or download here.  

Third Edition of The Global Indie Author is now available in U.S. and Europe

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The third edition of The Global Indie Author is out now in print on Amazon U.S., UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. All other territories coming soon! eBooks are also on the way. As mentioned in my previous post, the third edition features a new cover, new subtitle — to reflect the truly global phenomenon that self-publishing has become — and a great deal of new content (over 80 pages). The technical chapters have been completely overhauled to deal with the complexities of image handling, the increasing frustrations of font Read More …

Writers under attack again

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[UPDATE: the video originally posted and referenced here has been removed from YouTube.] The above video was posted on YouTube in the hope of stopping an educational exemption in the proposed new copyright bill. Whether or not the exemption is fair-dealing or the video fear-mongering (as some have suggested) isn’t, to me, the real issue; to me, this proposed exemption is just one more example of the myriad ways in which people seem to think that writers should work for free. Consider Ariana Huffington’s insistence that her contributors are happy Read More …