Will there be professional writers in future?

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In a recent Globe and Mail article, British writer Ewan Morrison makes the bold proclamation that “There will be no more professional writers in the future.” Putting aside the hyperbole of that statement, or what defines “professional,” article writer John Barber does make a few salient points about the trajectory we writers have been on for some time now: From the heights of the literary pantheon to the lowest trenches of hackery, where contributors to digital “content farms” are paid as little as 10 cents for every 1,000 times readers Read More …

CreateSpace add European distribution, decrease payment thresholds

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Over the past few weeks CreateSpace have made two important changes: they have decreased their payment threshold from $20/£20/€20 to $10/£10/€10; and they have now added direct distribution to Amazon.co.uk (UK), Amazon.de (Germany), Amazon.fr (France), Amazon.es (Spain), and Amazon.it (Italy). I hesitated to write about this immediately as I wanted to check first what the Amazon catalogue would list as the estimated delivery time for each site. Would it be as with Amazon.com where all CreateSpace titles would be listed as “In Stock” or would it be the same as Read More …

System-wide mess-up at Amazon affecting Christmas shopping

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In an unfortunate twist of fate for indie writers who sell globally (and for smaller, independent publishers), a system-wide error at Amazon is affecting the display of delivery dates for print-on-demand books. This appears only to be affecting titles sold on Amazon sites outside the U.S. This from my distributor Lightning Source/Ingram: “As Amazon prepares for the upcoming holiday season, they recently implemented a sudden system-wide change on all vendor products, including books. The result had an unintended impact on some POD book stated delivery times on the Amazon site.  Amazon Read More …

Why I chose to self-publish

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The first thing you learn as a writer is that writing is the easy part; getting published is the long slog. When Amazon embraced ebook technology and opened their format to self-publishers, ebooks exploded into popular culture, taking the publishing world by storm — and many by surprise — with its rapid growth. New writers see in the ebook format a way to bypass the gatekeepers and build their own audience; established publishers see a new revenue stream with minuscule manufacturing costs. But the decision to self-publish shouldn’t be a Read More …