The Vandal – Derek Haines

What do you know about self-publishing? Self-publishing has come in for its fair share of bashing over the last year or so by those who seem to either fear it, misunderstand it, or simply have their selfish grievances about new writers playing in their sandpit. Most of the articles and posts I have read that deride self-publishing, and even worse, conduct bitter attacks against the validity, capability or worthiness of self-published authors, are in my mind written by those who have failed to grasp what the future holds. Additionally, that this future is here now, and will not be going away. The most basic point missed by many is that

The publishing world is full of hypocrites I rarely get upset and resist using my blog as a soap box, but hypocrites, charlatans and snobs do sometimes just become too much to swallow. It is an unfortunate fact that there are those riding on the wave of the success of self-publishing by boldly calling themselves publishers, editors, agents and any number of other titles. Most of these have surfaced since the advent of ebook Most of these have surfaced since the advent of ebook self-publishing and use free online self-publishing and POD tools and services, yet find it necessary to systematically denigrate, criticise and damn self-publishing. I read a blog post recently

The big problem with social media is that it’s a snowball. Once it starts rolling for you, there is simply no way of stopping it increasing. If you have a book you want to promote, social media is naturally the most logical starting point and with the success of ebooks, it’s a no brainer. However, once you get over the initial few months of hard work and hours of grind; following, engaging, chatting, posting and doing all the things that we all know are the basics of successful social media, you discover that you are now a social media addict and have traded almost everything else you do for Twitter,