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By the way, on Saturday, May 28, 2005, I'll be speaking on a self-publishing panel in Hamilton, Ontario, for the annual conference of PWAC, the association of Canadian freelance writers. I think the panel starts in the late morning. Please come if you're close by.
Ok, so I have a lot of catching up to do. Having a new baby has decreased my productivity somewhat, but it has also hurt my concentration, which was never good to begin with. As a result, many independent publishing-related stories have gone unheralded and uncommented on here as of late. My planned blog redesign (if "redesign" is an appropriate term for a blog that never got any design attention to begin with) has also fallen by the wayside for the time being. But on the other hand, I've been taking tons of cute baby pictures.
The New York Press ran a typically shrill story yesterday on a stealth move by megapublisher Macmillan to cut off companies like Lulu, Publish and Be Damned, and CafePress at the POD pass, titled "INVASION OF THE POD PEOPLE," by Joshua Cohen:
With I-Universe, X-Libris and others of their ilk, a writer pays around $500 and gets a few hundred books expertly edited and marketed; most importantly, the writer retains the copyright. In not a few instances, these POD books attract the attention of a larger publisher, who then buys the rights to the book, directly from the author.
This is, of course, not entirely up-to-date in terms of a description of self-publishing business models. Susan Driscoll, of iUniverse, is quoted in the story, as is someone from XLibris (a company that is dwindling by the day if the desperate spam marketing they are doing is any indication). And truthfully iUniverse is probably the company most threatened by this move; they are the POD company most closely tied to the conventional publishing model. The new generation of print on demand companies consists of innovators--they are more technology companies than publishers--and no Macmillan or Random House, companies hopelessly bound to the middleman publishing model, can come along and suddenly transform themselves into innovators.
And while I'm at it, several weeks ago the NYT ran an in-depth story on self-publishing and its ongoing surge in popularity called "How To Be Your Own Publisher." I was so incensed at the lack of research on the part of the article's author, Sarah Glazer, that I sputtered and stuttered and composed a scathing post in my mind--about journalists who take the road of laziness, quote only the sources quoted in stories from five years ago, and who fail to see the big picture-- but never actually wrote anything. I draw your attention to it now, belatedly, with apologies and little-to-no editorial commentary. I'm glad they ran a long piece on the topic, but sorry it wasn't better.
Along those lines (and while I'm wrapping up loose ends), an author named Mike Vogel is chronicling the ups and downs of independently publishing a novel on his blog Isn't That Bigamy, which is also the name of his book, described as a "crime-comedy about a man who witnesses a murder and ends up in a polygamous town in rural Utah." Looking forward to following his story. Thanks to Mr. Vogel I am astonished to run across this: POD-dy Mouth, a blog he says is written by Michiko Kakutuni (yes, the Michiko Kakutuni), that appears to have been set up to wade through POD titles for the purposes of reviewing some of them... this definitely warrants a closer examination and longer post later.
The photo in the previous post features baby Lula and her papa. It was taken at a reunion of babies from our birth class that took place yesterday at our house. At right are all the babies--averaging around five weeks old--who were born to parents in the class, save one who did not make the visit. Pretty funny sight.
In my attempts to find new and better ways of sharing photos of my new daughter (yes, for those of you who don't know me, that is why my blogging has been so sporadic lately), I've been tinkering with a new Flickr account. Flickr is perhaps best described as a photo community site, and it boasts lots and lots of features including, I discovered today, the ability to post a photo straight to my blog. Amazing.
There's an interview with Matthew Frederick Davis Hemming, aka Darth Vader (the blogger who pens The Darth Side: Memoirs of a Monster), aka Cheeseburger Brown, posted on Maurice's Blog About Technology and News (nice, search-engine-friendly title, eh?).
Cheeseburger Brown's illustrated story 17 Drawings gives us StoryZoo Studios, the Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday, May 18, 2005.
The fine folks at WebdelSol offer a compendium of book blogs in the new feature, House of Blogs.
The BBC reports (and if it's on the BBC then it must be true) that the average age of the author of a bestseller is just over 50: "The age of 50 marks authors' peak."
A friend points out that this is old news: we have long known that (lyric) poets do their best work before 30, while novelists do theirs after 40. But the people behind this study may be in the process of developing a statistical profile of the perfect author. It's been a fun day so far here at Lulu.
Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, May 12, 2005: Extreme Democracy, "a collection of writings by leading thinkers about the Internet's impact on media and politics" edited by Jon Lebkowsky, CEO of Polycot and blogger.
Lulu storefront of the day for Monday, May 9, 2005: The James Taylor Encyclopedia, a publication of the folks behind the web site James Taylor Online.
[Could this be a spin-off of the mini-wave of Rick Springfield-related publishing on Lulu?]
| Lulu storefront of the day for Thursday, May 5, 2005: The books of David Warlick, including Classroom Blogging: A Teacher's Guide to the Blogosphere. |
Lulu storefront of the day for Wednesday, May 4, 2005: The erotic fiction of Han Li Thorn, which includes a novel called Zendyne that boasts an entertaining plot summary:
Lee is an up-and-coming designer of seductive love dolls, until the day his sexiest product yet goes murderously wrong. Sent to the crime scene to defuse a delicate situation, Lee finds that the rogue doll has been infiltrated by a mysterious, self-aware entity called Lilith who can’t seem to make her mind up whether she’s a silky-smooth seductress or a state-of-the-art assassination system. Within hours, Lee's encounter with Lilith has escalated into a life-or-death race with her creators, the shadowy and relentless Elect, and ultimately into a battle for the very stuff of his humanity — a battle in which his best hope of salvation turns out not to be human at all.
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