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Welcome everyone to another episode of the Self-Publishing Roundtable, the weekly news and interview show for indie authors, by indie authors.
Have we really done 30 of these already? I can’t believe how much the show has adapted and grown since our first episode, over thirty weeks ago. Things are continuing to change and we have some really exciting content and guests coming up in the next few weeks. It’s going to be epic!
Speaking of guests…
The Self-Publishing Roundtable is excited to welcome Theresa Ragan to this show this week. Many of you may recognise Theresa’s lovely face from the Kindle Direct Publishing Newsletter. Yes, Theresa is the poster girl for KDP! (Okay, we aren’t sure if her picture is still on there but it was!)
Theresa self-published a pair of time travel romances in March of 2011. Two years later, in March of 2013 she clocked her one millionth sale. We are beyond excited to have her with us today, and look forward to picking her brain. We’ll be discussing everything from pricing to translations.
We’ll be monitoring the comments, so if you have a question please post it there. If it isn’t on our list, we will make sure to get to them all by the end of the interview.
As always, we will be discussing the big news stories of the week and hopefully Theresa will stay with us to add her opinion to that discussion.
There are quite a few stories, but we will probably only have time to feature the first four or five on the live show. I’ll include links of the rest for your own interest.
Here’s the news…
| Author Rant After Agent Fleecing | shared by Trish |
A blog post by an author that had a really bad time with, and got scammed out of $800 by an agent. While that it’s an interesting story, it should be a good topic to discuss where you can find a good agent, and how to evaluate starting that relationship.
| Publish America Joins Foreign Translations | shared by Trish |
It would appear that Publish America has changed their name to America Star Books. They also have a new gimmick, translations.
Like its spiritual cousin, SBPRA, America Star/PublishAmerica seems to have discovered that foreign authors are the new growth market in publishing. The company does have a poor reputation, so it will be interesting to see what comes of this, and those foreign authors who get involved.
| Chuck Wendig Says Indies Should Start Acting Professional | shared by Trish |
Now this was a controversial, but in my opinion, needed blog post by Chuck Wendig. It has certainly sparked a lot of heated debate across the Indieverse, including the Kindle Boards and the comments on his blog. He has also done a follow up post due to the reaction. There was a particularly lively discussion between Chuck and Hugh Howey in the comments. I personally agree with most of what Chuck had to say, and feel all indies should start acting like a professional business. That view isn’t shared by everyone. I think this hot topic will bring some more interesting discussion.
| Penguin Prints On Demand | shared by Trish |
Which isn’t actually the issue, the issue is that apparently the job they do on these POD books is really bad–so bad and involved agent blogged about it. Is this a strange move? I’m not sure what the end game is or the motivation behind it. Almost anyone can make a decent POD book with Createspace or Lightning Source these days.
That’s about all we are likely to cover live.
Other stories in the news:
| Authors: Publishers Do A Better Job At Publishing | shared by Crissy |
Take the results with a grain of salt, but an interesting article anyway.
| Sensory Fiction | shared by Trish |
The reader is hooked up to an apparatus which will cause the same sensations in the reader’s body that the character in the book is feeling. Does anyone else see the potential for a horror story here? I don’t think anything our good friend David W Wright writes should be allowed in the program. People would never be the same again.
| The NEW Self-Publishing | shared by Trish |
Taking a look at two authors who went straight into self-publishing without every trying the traditional route.
| Women Can’t Write Sci-FI? | shared by Crissy |
There has been an argument festering among a lot of the writers over at SFWA. It’s gotten some press. So has the Hugo awards. And while this mainly impacts trad writers, it does also bleed over into self pub ranks because of the stigma that “ladies can’t write scifi”.
Crissy found this Kickstarter interesting, and I bet there is some interesting news behind it to come. We may talk about this subject in the future in more details.
| Epilogue | shared by Carl |
I just wanted to post something this week… so there you go.
I hope the show has your interest peaked. We had a huge show last week with Brenna Aubrey. This is going to be huge too! You never know who may show up in the comments live, so be sure to join us for all the fun on the site.
If you want to be sure not to miss any of our uploaded videos, then you can subscribe to our YouTube channel here: Self-Publishing Roundtable.
Looking forward to seeing everyone, Thursday Night at 7 PM PST / 10 PM EST.
