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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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PW Select Reviews: July 2011
Here are the reviews of the book we selected from this round of submissions.
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PW Select July 2011 Listings: More—and Better— Self-Published Titles
In this, our third PW Select, the quality of editorial is going up, and more serious authors are choosing self-publishing. In these pages you will find a compelling biographical novel about Leadbelly; a gripping tale about domestic terrorism; a strong first novel about the radicalization of an Arab-American; a collection of letters between Thomas Jefferson his women friends; and a first-person chronicle narrated by a shih tzu; and more. The production qualities are also improving, as committed authors and service providers help the business evolve.
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PW Select July 2011
This time, we've got pieces on booksellers who are also self-publishers, the former New Orleans mayor who is self-publishing his own story, a profile of an author who rewrote the story of Leadbelly, plus the listings and reviews.
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A Word from the Mayor
Former New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin is the latest prominent figure to choose to self-publish a book. Released on June 22, Nagin's book, Katrina's Secrets: Storms After the Storm, covers "the intense crisis period right before the hurricane and then 30 days after," the author told PW.
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Self-Published in Seattle
If anyone is still unconvinced that attitudes toward self-publishing have changed, an informal meeting with a group of Amazon CreateSpace authors during BookExpo in May offered still more evidence. The three authors we encountered at the CreateSpace booth showed that whether you're a businessman looking to document your entrepreneurial history, an artist investigating a new medium, or a more conventional writer just hoping to break into book publishing, self-publishing can be a viable option.
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Lock, Stock, and Publisher
Booksellers have the industry connections to publish their books just about anywhere, but for some bookstore owners, self-publishing is preferable to going the traditional route.
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Self-Publishing: A Second Life for Leadbelly Novel
Behind every book is a publishing story. Some good, some bad. Some hackneyed and familiar. We've all heard about the short story collection that was rejected by 30 publishing houses before finally becoming a bestseller, or the debut novel that sold for a bundle, flopped commercially, and ruined the author's career.
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PW Select: The Complete March 2011 Supplement
The complete supplement, including the reviews, listings and features.
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With a Little Help: Hitting My Stride
When I first conceived of this project, I found myself idly coming up with great new wrinkles on my plan every day. By the time the project was live and the book was for sale, my idle moments had become brutal self-criticism sessions in which I lambasted myself for making stupid mistakes. But , none of my mistakes were terminal.
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Self-pubbed Title Resurrects Racist Murders
The cover of Stokes McMillan's self-published book, One Night of Madness, represents a familial connection and a link to excellence bridging two generations. It includes both a photo taken by his father that won the 1950 National Press Photographers Association prize, and a gold sticker signifying that the book received a 2010 Independent Publishers Book Award.
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PW Select: A Wide World of Self-Published Titles--The Listings
From a lavishly illustrated volume on a Chicago architect, an exposé of D.B. Cooper, and a Ouija board–controlled family sojourn to Kabul, in nonfiction, to novels based in early Hollywood, the Depression-era Corn Belt, and a segregated rural community in Maryland, plus plenty of self-help books—about yoga, baking bread, moving households, training dogs, and an exploration of the lives of wolves: this installment of PW Select has something for everyone, and again shows the enormous breadth of stories people have—and are able—to tell.
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PW Select: Book Publishing Success Measured by More than Sales Alone
Publishing continues to evolve and change as digital readers and digital formats rule the day. Interactive, media-rich apps are changing the very definition of book. And online retail outlets like Amazon have forced bricks-and-mortar booksellers to rethink their business models, and in the case of Borders, to contract.
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PW Select: Agenting Gets Untraditional
For years agents have been grumbling about the death of the midlist author—those writers who are not bestsellers but consistently move tens of thousands of copies. Midlist authors, who once made up the core of major publishing houses, are now forced to take lower advances or head to smaller presses.
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PW Select: Self-Published Children's Books Thrive in the Mainstream
Tales of self-published kids' books that have become backlist staples for trade houses are familiar publishing lore. Two are titles written by young readers themselves: Christopher Paolini's Eragon, first published by his family, then found a home with Knopf in 2003, and Alec Greven's How to Talk to Girls, which grew out of a school report and was picked up by Collins in 2008.
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PW Select: Booksellers Reveal Secrets to Self-Published Success
If there was ever a stigma about selling self-published books, independent booksellers in the Midwest and Rocky Mountain states have long since gotten over it. Self-published books sell well at most of the stores in the region contacted by PW. The Bookworm in Omaha, Neb., disclosed that two self-published books—Pleased but Not Satisfied by Berkshire Hathaway executive David Sokol, and Five Minute Talks on Life, Love, and Faith by Fr. James Schwertley, a retired Catholic priest—currently are their top-selling titles.
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