This Week in the Blogs, July 29 – August 4, 2012

POSTED ON Aug 5, 2012

Joel Friedlander

Written by Joel Friedlander

Home > Blog > Self-Publishing, Social Media > This Week in the Blogs, July 29 – August 4, 2012

August may have arrived with its vacation time and tons of out-of-office replies to your emails, but that doesn’t mean the bloggers have slowed down one bit. There’s lots to read today about the future of bookselling, pricing your ebooks, social media marketing, printing choices and finding a way through the self-publishing maze. Go to it.

Catherine Ryan Howard (@cathryanhoward)on Catherine, Caffeinated
Low E-book Pricing: The Compensation Problem
“The point is that the money you earn from your writing is not a question of how much you make from individual sales of your work. It’s about how much that work makes in the long run, over time. And this is what you should consider when you price your book.”

Mick Rooney on The Independent Publishing Magazine
Morrison, Shatzkin and The Value of Social Media in Publishing
“The vast majority of users of social media, as a marketing tool, invest more time and money than it is actually worth. It works best when used at local community level to build a small brand delivered to a moderate and selective audience—this is why it can sometimes work well for self-published authors.”

Morgan Mandel (@morganmandel) on The Blood-Red Pencil
Which is Right for You—Lightning Source, CreateSpace, or Both?
“Because the stigma associated with self-publishing has almost completely disintegrated, a publishing company’s name doesn’t carry as much urgency as before.”

Clark G. Vanderpool (@CGVanderpool) on Smudged But Legible
CAUTION – Self-Publishing Is Too Easy
“The unfortunate stigma associated with self-publishing is justified in part by the abundance of works that are published before they are ready. Because the process is increasingly easy, poorly written or poorly edited books in poorly conceived covers are out there for all to judge–and readers freely do so.”

Michael Larsen (@SFWriters) on San Francisco Writers Conference Blog
Marrying Commerce to Community: The Next Bookselling Revolution
“One way to assure the future of print books is to regard them as artifacts of culture, not just commerce. The solution to online bookselling is for the publishing community to create its own Amazon as a non-profit cooperative, formed and administered by American Association of Publishers and the American Booksellers Association with the advice and support of The Author’s Guild, the Association of Authors’ Representatives, and other writing and publishing organizations.”

Blog Notes

I’m running a poll on the blog for a few days, and many people who read the blog in their inbox were confused about the post that went out on Friday. That’s because the survey widget doesn’t get into the feed stream that delivers the blog to your email.

Live and learn, and I’ve answered numerous inquiries from readers asking whether they were just “missing it” but it really wasn’t there.

I’m still tallying the poll, and I would love your input. If you’d like to help out by telling me your 2 favorite subjects for a new series of webinars for self-publishers, here’s the link, and you’ll have to click through to the blog to do it:

I Need Your Vote! New Webinar Series Questionnaire

Thanks, and watch out next week for the results. I’ll also have an interview for you with publicity guru Joan Stewart that’s one of the most practical interviews I’ve ever done. Tons of useful tips in this one! Have a great weekend.

Photo by Lee Bailey

Joel Friedlander

Written by
Joel Friedlander

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