First, read David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Digital, it’s free on his site. That will give you a basic understanding of the self-publishing process. Hopefully it will also inoculate you against the most common scams aimed at writers.

Secondly, peruse the Kindlepreneur articles on book publishing and book marketing from the past year or two. Some of them are a bit dense, but they do have good advice. Also, pay special notice to the parts warning about scams. (more…)

This is another one of those things that crop up all the time on writer’s forums: help, I don’t dare to post/critique/ask for beta reads of my book because I’m afraid that it will be stolen.

Don’t worry, I’m here to lay rest to that fear. But first, some honesty: yes, books get stolen.

Hemingway had a suitcase with his manuscripts in it stolen in the 1920’s…

But in all seriousness, it doesn’t happen unless you’re famous, and even then it’s very, very rare. (more…)

I keep hearing, often from new writers or aspiring writers, that it’s pointless to write, you’ll never make a career of it today because AI is coming and spamming Amazon with rip-offs, knock-offs, or plain crap. AI will kill writing! AI will kill publishing! The Great Wave of Spam is coming!

Nope.

It’s already here, and it’s been here for a long, long time. (more…)

Getting your books pirated can be the best thing to ever happen to you in a particular market. Like what happened to Neil Gaiman:

Just what the title says, Chris Fox on boredom, and how to use it to be a more productive writer.

Here’s a story for you:

Alice in Wonderland was morphed into a morphine addict and transported into the 1990’s in “The Cheshire” by Bill Kte’pi.

Then singer Michelle Dockrey read the story, and made a song out of it.

All of them are recognizably Alice. None of them infringe on any copyrights.

Oh, and here’s the song:

Seriously, watch this before you attempt to write anything set in WWI.

The title says it all. From Military SF writer Rick Partlow.

In 2007, Terry Pratchett (and if you haven’t heard of Terry, you really have no business calling yourself a fantasy reader) was diagnosed with PCA, a form of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 59 years old at the time, making it an early onset dementia.

Choosing to battle it, he made a public announcement a few months later, and agreed to have a BBC camera crew follow him every day for a year to show how living with Alzheimer’s could be.

Here’s the first part of the documentary:

Great article from Tim Grahl of Booklaunch.com on how we view piracy, especially ebook piracy, in the wrong way.

It’s summed up nicely in this quote by Tim O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly Media:

“The problem with writers isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity. It may be hard to monetize fame, but it is impossible to monetize obscurity.”

Read the entire thing here: Ebook Piracy = Sell More Books by Tim Grahl