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  • PW Select April 2012: Spreadability: Books, Ideas and the Domino Project

    Seth Godin, marketer extraordinaire, entrepreneurial maverick, and publishing visionary, says the latest exercise in reinventing publishing, the Domino Project, is an effort “not to be a hypocrite.” What he means is that after 25 years and 13 books often focused on what is wrong with the publishing industry, he set himself the task of showing the way forward.

  • PW Select April 2012: Blurb Grows as Authors Benefit

    In the five years since Blurb, the self-publishing platform, went live in mid-2006, the Silicon Valley startup has grown with the book publishing industry overall. Founded by Eileen Gittins, who was frustrated when she couldn’t find an affordable way to print 40 copies of her photography book, Five Hours in Napa, to give to friends, Blurb.com was launched to help others who wanted to make high-quality, one-off books of baby pictures, photo collections, or journals. Personal books continue to play an important role as Blurb moves forward, making up 50% of its business.

  • PW Select April 2012: Self-Publishing Speeds Book to Reader: Matt Ivester

    Unlike many authors who turn to self-publishing, Ivester didn’t receive a host of rejections from publishing houses. He didn’t send his manuscript out to agents. In fact, he never looked for representation of any kind. He simply didn’t have the time.

  • PW Select April 2012: A Growing Chorus of Voices in DIY Publishing

    This sixth PW Select quarterly—our first was in Dec. 2010—is our most robust: the most submitted titles and the most (52) that merited a review in our editors’ estimations. Among the highlights in fiction: a “confident debut” by Peter Christian Hall; Helena Soister’s Dan Brown–worthy thriller; a charming whodunit by Robin Lamont; and a winning portrait of the pre-AIDS gay community by Jeffrey Sharlach. In nonfiction, Stacy Dymalski’s “laugh-out-loud funny” mom memoir; and the enterprising Matt Ivester’s lol...OMG!, a guide to digital citizenship.

  • PW Select April 2012: Reviews and a Look at the Self-Publishing Scene

    Here's our complete Spring 2012 PW Select supplement, with reviews, features and listings of new self-published books.

  • S&S Acquires Self-Pubbed 'Life's a Witch' in Three-Book Deal

    Brittany Geragotelis's YA novel Life’s a Witch, self-published this fall via Amazon/CreateSpace, has been acquired at auction by Simon & Schuster in a three-book, six-figure deal.

  • Swamped by Offers, Self-Pubbed YA Author Gets Agent and More

    Since PW published a story about Brittany Geragotelis's novel Life's a Witch, the self-published author has been overwhelmed with inquiries from publishers, foreign rights agents and TV and film producers.

  • PW Select January 2012

    In this installment, in addition to listings and reviews of new self-published books, we talk to two authors whose PW Select titles were picked up by Amazon, look at a violin maker investing more than $1 million in a good self-publishing cause, and examine the beneficial relationship between e-books and self-publishing.

  • A Self-Publishing Veteran: Vivian Yang

    A decade before self-publishing her second novel, Memoirs of a Eurasian, with Amazon’s CreateSpace—a chapter of which won an award in the 2007 WNYC Leonard Lopate Essay Contest—Vivian Yang released her debut, Shanghai Girl, with Xlibris.

  • January 2012 PW Select Listings: Quality & Diversity Among The Self-Published

    Highlights from the offerings to be found here, our fifth PW Select, include: (trumpet please!) our first title to receive a starred review, Audrey Lynn’s novel about a Russian soldier returning from Afghanistan; an exciting medical thriller about illegal trafficking in venomous snakes; Vivian Yang’s fictional memoir about a Chinese teenager set during WWII and after; an important work by two pioneers in autism research and treatment; and many more that altogether reflect the diversity of interests and enthusiasms that find voice through self-publishing.

  • E-book Boom Boosts Self-Publishers

    In the December 2010 inaugural issue of PW Select, the heads of different self-publishing companies talked about the way e-books were becoming a bigger part of their business. That trend accelerated in 2011, helping to keep the number of titles produced at the major e-book vendors soaring.

  • Big Bet for Good Cause

    It’s self-publishing on a grand scale. It took Tom Wilder 10 years and a C$1.2 million investment to publish The Conservation, Restoration, and Repair of Stringed Instruments and Their Bows. The three-volume, 1,600-page bible on the subject sells for $1,395, but so far sales are going well, says Wilder.

  • PW Select January 2012: The Reviews

    Reviews of Fiction, Nonfiction and Children's self-published titles from this round of PW Select submissions.

  • PW Select Fall 2011: The Reviews

    All the reviews of books by self-published authors from our Fall 2011 PW Select supplement.

  • Past Meets Present: PW Talks with Kit Bakke

    In Dot to Dot, Kit Bakke’s self-published first book for children, 12-year-old Dot comes to terms with her mother’s recent death with some across-the-centuries help from Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, and Dorothy Wordsworth.

  • PW Select: Fall 2011: A Wide Range for Self-Published Titles - The Listings

    Among the offerings here: novels about bioterrorism, California in the 1980s, a messy divorce, a woman who receives a face transplant, and a murder set in the world of classical music. In nonfiction: books about golden retrievers, flying horses, and a (Playboy) bunny. In children’s: a picture book about a chipmunk family, a garden of verses, and a wartime romance about an older brother lost in Iraq.

  • PW Select Fall 2011: Mercer Re-ups with FastPencil

    Late last month, the self-publishing company FastPencil re-signed bestselling children's author Mercer Mayer to another multibook deal. Mayer shared his experiences working with FastPencil with PW, and why he decided to do more books with the company.

  • PW Select Fall 2011: E-Book Master Class: PW Talks with Joshua Tallent

    If self-publishing is a major part of the future of the publishing business, then its most uncharted region, and the frontier of greatest possibility, is digital self-publishing, where authors can make their own names and sell infinite numbers of books with the help of a handful of increasingly well-established platforms and standards—Amazon, Apple, EPub among them.

  • PW Select: Fall 2011: Jane Ward: The Mosaic Artist

    "At the time, it seemed like a foreign thing to me, to go through self-publishing. But really not so foreign, once I started thinking about it—I was doing a blog and doing online articles, so I started giving it another look."

  • PW Select Reviews: July 2011

    Here are the reviews of the book we selected from this round of submissions.

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