The Vandal – Derek Haines

Kindle isn’t the only ebook reading device With the clear dominance of Amazon and Kindle in the ebook market, and particularly in its almost ever presence in social media mentions, there is a natural assumption that this is a worldwide phenomenon and that ergo, ebooks and self-publishing must equal Kindle. However, in my judgement, this is just simply not true. The popularity of the Kindle as a reading device is predominantly in the United States. Where I live in Europe, and I have heard the same from my UK friends, the Kindle is a rarely seen device. Amongst my own friends and family, both in Switzerland and Australia, not a

Why would I pirate my own ebooks? There have been two words that have sent shivers down the spines of owners of digital content on the Internet. Piracy and BitTorrent. Piracy being the act of copying and BitTorrent being the vehicle to distribute the pirated content around the Internet – to over 400 million active BitTorrent users. Well, it had to happen eventually that Bittorrent sites got into a trouble with copyright owners, and the law, and in the last year or so, many have either closed down or been closed down. Except for a few enterprising Bittorrent sites that have cleaned up their act by removing all the illegal

There are two facets to self-publishing An all too forgotten side of self-publishing is the humble book. Yes, that’s it. The thing with a cover and pages. Cast aside by many in the last year or two, the book survives however, and I’m sure that passionate authors still want to see one with their name on the cover. Oddly enough, Amazon is one of the companies that can make this happen via their Createspace print on demand subsidiary. There are other companies such as Lulu who can offer the same service, but what is fascinating about Amazon’s Createspace is that unlike their KDP wing, they are very happy to distribute a

Do it yourself publishing I have written a lot about self-publishing, and it occurred to me while I was writing a post for one of my other blogs about the traditional publishing ‘smear’ that is dressed up as advice for self-published authors that I should clear up a few fallacies. Firstly, let’s get one thing straight. Self-publishing gets its name from the logical interpretation that the author does everything. The author writes, researches, edits, markets, sweats, spends money, spends time, gets covers and well, I think you get the idea. The author does everything. If an author writes, and a team of people are paid to edit, copy edit, market,