Lots of talk these days about giving books away as a strategy for selling books, so you know things are still tinged with a bit of chaos. This week we’re lucky to have some incredible guides, to Amazon, self-publishing beyond the book, publicity and DIY formatting. Have fun.

David Gaughran on Let’s Go Digital
Amazon & The Importance of Popularity
“Today I want to focus on something else, namely, the differences between the Bestseller List and the Popularity List, and how this is affording extra visibility (and thus sales) to those participating in KDP Select.”

JW Manus on JW Manus
Adventures in Self-Publishing: Fear Not The Process
“Every writer should self-publish a short story. Not for fame, not for fortune. To learn the process.”

Seth Godin on The Domino Project
Launching a new idea in a post-paper world
“We still don’t have a good way to demarcate when a book ends and when something else (a manifesto?) begins. How long something has to be, or how involved, before it crosses from tweet to blog to manifesto to book…”

Carolyn Howard-Johnson on Sharing With Writers
The Amazon Launch for Your Book: What You Can Learn from My Mistakes
“I probably shouldn’t have made any mistakes with the online launch of the second edition. And I probably wouldn’t have if I had been taking my own advice.”

Lianne Simon on Self-Publishing Review
Formatting your book with OpenOffice – Part 1
“Although I’ve got a great publisher for the e-book edition of Confessions of a Teenage Hermaphrodite, I decided to self-publish the paperback. Since I was already familiar with OpenOffice and unable to afford Adobe InDesign, I decided to invest some time to see if using OpenOffice was feasible.”

Photo by LaggedOnUser