I often talk to authors who are shopping their latest work around to agents and publishers. Many get disillusioned about the whole traditional publishing game, because it isn’t really interested in unknown writers. The point at which writers contact me is when they start to consider self-publishing.

We’ve all encountered websites and blogs where we must “solve” a word puzzle in order to have a message sent, or a message posted. The reason this technology is used is to defeat the “bots”—programs crawling through the Internet looking for ways to launch attacks and spam. (Personally, I have problems reading the words about [...]

Recently, Alan Shelton of Red Hatchet Press, a distribution client of mine, did a post for Joel Friedlander’s The Book Designer blog (if you don’t read Joel’s blogs, or follow his monthly ebook cover awards, you are simply missing out on one of the self-publishing world’s greatest information treasures). Alan detailed his path to publishing—and was [...]

You can’t grow without criticism. You’ll never grow as an artist. You won’t understand your customers as a businessperson if you won’t hear what your customers really want (and once you become a publisher, you enter into the realm of business).

Last week, I had lunch with a Barnes & Noble Community Relations Manager (CRM). As usual, she had a lot to say about self-publishers. I’ll just hit the highlights of our talk.

This past weekend, Dan Poynter – a legend in the self-publishing and small press community – was on NPR on a program entitled “The Future of Children’s Books.” He said all children’s publishing will transition over to tablet-based e-readers. I had been pondering a response to his thesis, which I think has some merits, but [...]

This past weekend, Dan Poynter – a legend in the self-publishing and small press community – was on NPR on a program entitled “The Future of Children’s Books.” He said all children’s publishing will transition over to tablet-based e-readers. I had been pondering a response to his thesis, which I think has some merits, but goes too far, when I was contacted about it by Sheila Ruth, a friend and fellow publisher. Here’s her reply, which will be in two parts.

We took a look at what goes into a print bid in Print Bids – Parts I and II. Now let’s look at the information we get back from the printers.

Regular printing still happens more often than not – especially when we’re talking about color printing, which is still not practically priced in the POD realm. I thought I’d show what goes into a print bid and how to evaluate the responses you get back.

In an era of ebooks and POD (Print on Demand, also digital printing), it may seem old fashioned to discuss bidding a book for an offset print run. But regular printing still happens more often than not, and I thought I’d show what goes into a print bid and how to evaluate the responses you get back.