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.
(This is abbreviated text from The Global Indie Author.) The advantages to owning your ISBNs are: Increased Distribution Options Most vanity publishers and aggregators have limited distribution partners (often only one for print and maybe a half-dozen for ebooks). If you own your ISBN you can contract with as many wholesale distributors as you wish including Lightning Source, which is owned by Ingram, are U.S.-based and have two international subsidiaries, an extensive list of distribution partners, and give you access to the libraries and academic markets as well. Optics If Read More …
(This is abbreviated text from The Global Indie Author.) If you elect to use the ISBN system, and to purchase your own numbers, you do this before you put your book on the market, as you must include the number on your copyright page. In some countries the ISBN agency and national registry are one and the same — in Canada, they are combined into Library and Archives Canada — while in others they are distinct agencies: in the U.S., Bowker is the ISBN agency, while the Library of Congress Read More …
(This is abbreviated text from The Global Indie Author.) What’s in a Number? There are five parts to an ISBN, separated by either a hyphen or a space. Only the first three digits and the final check digit are of a fixed length; the remainder vary according to language, publisher identifier, and the number of ISBNs assigned to the block. The five parts of an ISBN are: • the current ISBN-13 prefix of “978”; • the group or country identifier; • the publisher identifier; • the title identifier; and • Read More …
Author and blogger Kristine Kathryn Rusch has written what is the most comprehensive blog I’ve read to date on what happens to writers who fail to read agency and publisher contracts; and in particular how our traditional advocates — our agents — are often electing to serve themselves and their agencies at the expense of their clients. It’s a harrowing read and one that confirms my decision to self-publish. Rusch’s blog reminded me of another contract-related issue that bears adding to the conversation: different clauses in a contract can contradict Read More …
In the process of converting my novel’s Word doc to the Kindle format, I ran into troubles when, although I had formatted my document exactly as instructed, the ebook wasn’t working properly when previewed on Kindle’s Previewer. After struggling for two days, trying everything I could imagine and getting nowhere, I went onto the Kindle community forum. Within two days I received the help I needed and got my book finished and up on Amazon’s Kindle site. (Turned out the Kindle Previewer doesn’t actually contain all Kindle functions, so you Read More …
While self-publishing my novel, Baby Jane, to Amazon’s Kindle was relatively easy, publishing to the other devices is proving more challenging. Sony, who own the eReader, Apple, who own the iBookstore, Kobo, which is mostly owned by Indigo Books and Music Inc., and Barnes & Noble, who own the Nook, have all adopted business policies that exclude small publishers and self-publishing authors or, as in the Nook and iBookstore, have installed barriers that make it difficult for non-Americans (or non-Mac users) to sell on the their sites. Sony and Kobo Read More …
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 …