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Sunday 28 June 2015

Website update at cheekyseagull.co.uk - smashwords links

At the other place where I occasionally hang out on the web at cheekyseagull.co.uk. I've plugged in a few modifications to the book pages. Each of the Grange Novels now has a direct link to smashwords to make life easier. Simply click on the button that says download or buy now on the home page or on the individual book page and grab your own piece of the action.

Enjoy!

Monday 22 June 2015

Disruptive Behaviour

Discussion ranges widely about changes in the landscape of publishing over the last decade, and the Passive Voice ran a couple of posts recently about how publishing as we know it wasn't going anywhere.

The biggest shift has been the meteoric growth of self-publishing;not through it's long standing derided Vanities but via the more direct self-publishing across the Internet.

A comment that the Big Publishing House (BPH) would survive, albeit by merging into larger conglomerate has some merit, Penguin Random House have already acquired their entrée into self-publishing via Author Solutions and the links between other publishers and the vanities have been extensively chronicled here and on other blog sites.

Tuesday 16 June 2015

Independent Means

Self publishing; a straightforward enough phrase, not complicated, and yet the very words generate confusion. I tried to explore what it means in my last post, along with definitions of Traditional, Hybrid,Vanity and a couple of other types of publisher.

The Passive Voice posts a blog post from The Creative Penn on Happiness and the Self Published Author, and the comments generated an interesting level of discussion around the meaning of self publishing and the continued blurring of the distance between vanity and true self publishing.

Sunday 7 June 2015

Close to the mark!

How close can you get to the ideal of someone else footing the bill for publishing your magnificent opus? The traditional publisher will do that, but what if you decide, or have no other choice and decide to walk the walk yourself.

The traditional/commercial/trade publisher buys the rights to publish, and occasionally the subsidiary from the author. The largest publishing houses and the bigger independents will pay an advance on royalties, which the smaller presses may not. They are highly selective and only a small fraction of the submissions ever reach the bookshelves. For the select few who make it down that road  every aspect of editing, publication, marketing and distribution is taken care of by the publisher; at no cost the author!

A very small number reach the public this way and to read the various offerings in the "How to Get Published" genre - we're looking at a scenario of such improbability you might as well pack up, throw the manuscript in the shredder and grow rhubarb instead.

Yet the manuscript is intact, not mulched for rhubarb fodder and our author is up for the challenge, and the heartache, so where do we go from here?