From Mashable:

It wasn’t until 2012 that [Atari co-founder Nolan] Bushnell sat down to write the whole story: all about Jobs and Wozniak offered him a third of Apple for $50,000 and how he turned it down. How the first mass-produced Apple computer was made with Atari parts. How he stayed a friend and advisor to the growing company over the years.

And most importantly, it’s about what you can learn from the whole experience. “It’s less of a biography and more of a book on creative infrastructure,” Bushnell tells Mashable.

But when he tried to find an outlet for the book, How to Find the Next Steve Jobs, Bushnell got frustrated with the traditional publishing houses. It would take up to four years to edit it and publish it, they said. “I don’t have that kind of time,” replied Bushnell, now 70. He also didn’t accept that publishers should keep 80% or more of the book’s sales, as is traditional.

So Bushnell turned to Net Minds, a brand new publishing platform that officially launched Wednesday. Net Minds is the brainchild of Tim Sanders, a former Yahoo executive and the New York Times bestselling author of Love Is the Killer App. It will publish regular books as well as e-books, and lets authors build a team to edit, design and market the book in exchange for a cut of the sales.

Sanders’ founding principle: books should be run like startups. “The industry is incredibly inefficient at every level,” he tells Mashable. “Frankly, for a lot of authors, it’s incredibly unfair. Advances are dropping. And there’s no reason why it should take three years to publish.”

Net Minds has built software that can turn a document into a printed galley copy (used by authors to check for mistakes) in just three days, rather than the usual few months. Flipping the traditional royalty model on its head, the startup keeps 20% of all book sales. The author gets 80% (or 90% in Bushnell’s case), and gets to apportion that as he or she sees fit. The startup says it will connect authors to freelance editors, designers, marketers and PR folks to get them going.

Link to the rest at Mashable

From author Jennie Nash via Rachelle Gardner’s blog:

My first six books were all published by major New York houses, including Scribner, Simon & Schuster, Crown, and Berkley/Penguin. I adored my editors and their teams, but I was a midlist writer getting midlist attention, and the midlist was starting to feel like purgatory. For my seventh book, Perfect Red, a historical novel set in 1950’s New York, I decided to self publish.

. . . .

2. I underestimated the thrill that comes with being in control – as well as the fear. I get to pick my cover! Set my own price! Make a special holiday edition for my friends and family and send it out tied up with a red bow! When I do something well, I feel like a rock star entrepreneurial author on the cutting edge of the brave new world of publishing. But book publishing is a detailed, complex enterprise requiring a range of skills completely different from writing a book. There are a thousand opportunities to screw up. Suddenly, it’s not just my writing that’s out there being judged, it’s my eye for design, my sense of how readers behave, my business acumen. I used to wonder why it took traditional publishers nine months to produce a book. Now I get it; it’s a lot of work.

. . . .

4. I overestimated my ability to sell books. I have lists of bookstores at which I’ve done appearances, book clubs who have hosted me, readers who have loved my work and bloggers who have reviewed my books. I didn’t think I had to build a platform. I thought that with a few flicks of the mouse, I’d quickly sell thousands of books and build a buzz that would carry me to even greater sales. It didn’t happen, so now I’m out doing what every writer has to do, which is figuring out how to connect with readers – only I’m doing it with a lot more humility.

Link to the rest at Rachelle Gardner and thanks to Anthea for the tip.

From Charleston City Paper:

 Self-published authors have long been the underdogs of the literary world. Unable to land book deals, they often publish their work using their own money in a last-ditch effort at exposure. They send them to media outlets where, more often than not, they are immediately dismissed. If you were really mean, you might say that self-publishing is where failed authors go to die.

But that would just be harsh. And untrue, if Hugh Howey and Fifty Shades of Grey are any indication.

Little more than a year ago, Howey was just another sci-fi author trying to maneuver his way through the world of self-publishing after a not-so-successful experience with a small publishing house. Today, his book Wool is a smashing success with more than 300,000 copies sold in the U.S. alone and a film optioned by 20th Century Fox and Ridley Scott. He’s the face of a new era in publishing, and he’s just as surprised as anyone.

“It feels like it happened overnight,” says Howey, a Florida resident who attended the College of Charleston in the early 2000s. Wool started out as a novella. He posted it online in July 2011 and forgot about it, deciding to focus instead on promoting his full-length novels. But through the magic of the interwebs, readers took notice of Wool and word spread. Newfound fans clamored for more, so within six months Howey expanded the story into four more installments, which eventually became a 540-page novel about a post-apocalyptic world where people live underground because the outside world has gone to hell. He published via CreateSpace (print) and Kindle Direct Publishing (Kindle book). “It was just kind of all out of my hands,” he remembers. “So by January the full story was written and I couldn’t even keep up with the media demands. I was running ragged with my job and everything, so I had to put in my notice and quit my day job at the book store and I’ve been writing full-time ever since.”

. . . .

The funny thing was, Howey didn’t need a publisher. He was doing just fine on his own. “You do so well self-published, it’s hard for publishers to compete with what you can do on your own,” he says. “I make 70 percent royalty rates on sales here in the U.S., and if I went with a publisher, that would be cut to almost one-sixth. And so, you know, we sat down with them, and they had some nice offers, but I’m handing them a bestseller with a film contract attached and all of these other things attached and what they’re offering is just not as good as what I’m doing currently. I showed them what I’m earning now, and they kind of said, I don’t know if we can compete with that.”

. . . .

“In a lot of different entertainment industries now, sole ownership is kind of becoming the new standard,” Howey says, citing Louis C.K., who self-produced his latest comedy special. “In a lot of ways, what YouTube has done for filmmakers, the Kindle, the Nook, those are doing for writers. You can control your content, produce the best work possible, and you have a distributor that has worldwide access at your fingertips. It’s just remarkable.”

. . . .

As with many other success stories, Howey found domestic promotion to be shockingly easy; he barely had to lift a finger. The word really started spreading when readers sharedWool on Facebook and Twitter. “The power of social media is that if you create something that resonates with people, it has a much greater chance of spreading,” he says. “It has dried out the underbrush, if you will. Throwing sparks can now lead to bonfires.”

. . . .

Howey released his latest self-published novel, I, Zombie in August, and his Kindle Single, The Walk Up Nameless Ridge, became available in early September. “I’ve prepared myself by reminding everyone that this will end as soon as it began. But I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything,” he says. “One day, I’ll look back at this brief career and marvel that it ever happened. I’ll still be writing, I’m sure. There will be many more people wanting to read my books than there was a year ago, but something like Wool happens once in a lifetime. I’m certain of that. And it makes me feel fortunate, not anxious.”

Link to the rest at Charleston City Paper and thanks to Jim for the tip.

From author Liz Long:

While on vacation a couple weeks ago, I made the decision to go with indie publishing. I’ve sent out somewhere from 20-30 agents in the last 3 months, most with the generic “No, thanks” but a few with an “Interesting premise” response.

. . . .

Some people might think I’m jumping the gun on this, that I need to take my time and do my research. Believe me, I have; I did months of research (not contacting) on agents and their desirable manuscript needs when I probably should’ve been polishing the last few chapters instead.

. . . .

[S]ometimes, we get so caught up in researching agents, writing query letters, and hiding in corners from rejection letters that we forget to work on what needs it most–our writing! And therein lies my problem-I’ve been so busy getting caught up in the whirlwind excitement/nausea of trying to put my first book out in the world that I’ve neglected working on the next adventure for my characters. I need to get working on Book 2 of my “Gifted” series. Like, real bad. After I finished the final edit and sent off a couple copies to beta readers, I took some time to relax (plus take a real vacation). But now I need to get serious and start working on the next outline. I’ve got Scrivener now, which will be a HUGE help with my outlines (I’m a pantser, not a plotter, which means I kinda throw a bunch of words on paper and go from there…okay at first, but not after you’ve written 190 pages and have no idea where to put a scene).

. . . .

Some people may ask, “You’ve already waited this long to put it out there, why not wait and keep seeing if an agent/traditional publisher will take it?” Because quite frankly, I’m done waiting. If I have an option to get my work out there, I want to do it. I’m a damn hard worker and the thought of marketing myself in an indie world doesn’t frighten me–whereas the thought of sitting around for months, praying someone emails me back to look at a full MS makes me cringe.

Link to the rest at Liz Long

From Boston.com:

The massive event Amazon held Thursday to debut its new line of electronic readers and tablets included an unexpected shout out for a local start-up: The covers of three of its books flashed on the big screen behind Amazon boss Jeff Bezos as he introduced a line of serialized fiction for the Kindle.

The “stealth literary studio,” as its founders term it, is Plympton, named after a tiny side street in Harvard Square where the founders often met to discuss the future of literature and publishing.

Plympton cofounders Jennifer 8. Lee and Yael Goldstein Love had finalized their publishing deal with Amazon not 24 hours before Bezos hit the stage Thursday. Now suddenly the small electronic book publisher, based in the Boston area, is at the forefront of what Amazon hopes will be a revival of a venerable literary tradition, with a modern twist: serialized fiction delivered in digital form.

The obvious historical precedent is Charles Dickens, who wrote many of his classic titles in chapters that were serialized in magazines and newspapers. There have been attempts to revive the format since then, but the economics of bookselling always got in the way.

. . . .

Readers pay once for the serial and new installments are automatically sent to their e-readers as they are published. Such books can be inexpensive because of their digital format: no paper, no printing, no shipping. All three Plympton serials are currently selling for just $1.99 each. Future updates will be free. Plympton’s products are digital only: They are not available in paper editions.

Link to the rest at Boston.com

“and that is very bad.”

Over on Write it Forward:

“I have a fundamental problem with the idea of “business as usual”. Not in the sense that we have to run a business and it has to be done on a day-to-day business, but most business today are fluid and if you don’t keep up with the fluidity, well, for those of us living Rochester, NY it’s one word: Kodak. My father worked for Kodak way back in the day as a Regional Sales Rep for the Motion Picture Division and even then he said (mind you this is way back in the late 70’s) that if Kodak didn’t move with the times when it came to cameras they’d be a hurting company… Of course, Kodak was really a “film” company but you know there is this little thing called digital that seems to be turning many businesses upside down and inside out.

“Well, not my business.

“Bob and I have been in business together since December of 2009 (officially). Since then, we have changed or modified our business plan every 6 months. We just did it back in January and we’re doing it again this July (already making notes in Google docs for the Cool Gus Business meeting at Thrillerfest).  It’s exhausting and often times frustrating, but our industry is changing and we have to make adjustments or we’re going to go down with the Titanic (even though we got off a long time ago).

“Business as usual is a form of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results. Perhaps making a very slight adjustment like reducing print runs and deciding to remove DRM from eBooks. Well, I guess better late than never. Yes, I know, authors are screaming that I think smaller print runs are a good thing. How about lower advances? I once said that it wasn’t just publishers that had to change the way they think and do business, but that the author had to as well. Funny thing about change, most of us don’t like it. It took Bob a good year to wrap his brain around what we were doing. Not that I got there any sooner, but my perspective was different. I’d never been traditionally published and I read eBooks.”

Read the rest at Write It Forward.

–  Julia Barrett

From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the differences between traditional publishing and indie publishing this week. Almost every day, some writer writes to me and asks if they should go traditional or indie on some new project.

. . . .

Usually I can’t help them. It truly is a personal choice. For the most part, contract terms and confusing royalty statements make long-term earnings in traditional publishing dicey at best. But indie publishing has its own drawbacks, including a bit of financial outlay up front to make certain the book is the best it can be.

. . . .

But, for a minute, let’s forget the contract terms, the financial realities, the business decisions, and pretend all books are equal.

If we do that, if we get rid of the individual decisions, and look only at the way the two publishing systems work, we can see the differences in very stark terms.

Here’s what you’re choosing between:

Hurry up and wait

Or

Wait and hurry up

Seriously.

The industry has bifurcated. The two parts of book publishing are so drastically different in their approaches that they can barely talk to each other. Mostly, they fail to realize that they don’t even use the same language. As a result, they measure success differently because they measure everything differently.

. . . .

Hurry Up And Wait

…could be another name for indie publishing. You finish a book or a short story or a blog post [cough, cough], and you want it out in the hands of readers right now.

Actually, all writers want their books in the hands of readers right now, but some writers are willing to delay that gratification for other reasons, which we’ll get to.

You have the finished manuscript edited, copy edited, and proofed. You design a cover, follow all the instructions to distribute your book electronically and in print-on-demand formats. Then you sit back and wait for the cash to roll in.

And wait. And wait.

. . . .

But really, what you’re waiting for is time to pass. Five sales per month over 120 months will make you quite a bit of money. Only it won’t seem that way at first.

The indie writer, particularly the indie writer with very few books published, has to be patient. The readership—and the income—will grow exponentially if the writer continues to produce work. One day, the indie writer will wake up and realize she’s making $1,000 per month on a single title, and that amount spread out over a year is more than she would have gotten as an advance for a first novel. (Most first novel advances in all genres are under $10,000.)

The thing is, if she earns $12,000 one year, nothing will stop her from earning the same or possibly more the next year, and the next, and the next.

. . . .

Wait And Hurry Up

…could be another name for traditional publishing. You finish your book. Then you mail it to editors (and if you’re not too bright on the business side of things, to agents). The book editors take months, sometimes years, to respond. If you stick an agent in the middle of that, an agent will take months, sometimes years to respond, and then if you’re lucky, the agent will send the book to editors who will take months, sometimes years to respond.

. . . .

Let’s say you hit some editor on a good day, and she wants to buy your book. It will then take her six months or so to get that book through the purchase process at her publishing house—all before you even know what’s going on.

. . . .

Add three to six months to get a contract, three to six months after signing the contract to get the first part of the advance, a year after the contract to officially turn in the already completed book, six months to a year after turn-in to get the book into the stores, and you see another one-to-three years pass.

. . . .

So why do I say hurry?

Because the traditional publisher looks at the sales numbers from the moment the book is available for preorder to six months after publication. Whatever the book has sold in that six-to-nine month period is pretty much what the book is going to sell.

It took you five years to sell the book into traditional publishing and get that book on the shelves. That book will have less than a year to prove itself or go out of print.

. . . .

Since folks steeped in traditional publishing only look at how well a book does in its first  year—really, its first month–on the stands, traditional publishing folk look at almost all indie titles as failures.

Think about it: If you expect a book to sell thousands if not tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of copies in its first year, and you hear that someone is happy with 500 sales scattered over 12 months, you’d see that as a failure too.

The folks who believe in indie publishing only hear that a book goes out of print in less than a year, and is probably done earning after that point (except for a few high-priced e-book sales), and they wonder who would ever sign a deal like that.

. . . .

Traditional writers don’t look at the long term because in traditional publishing there is no long term.

Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch

From author Jessica Park on IndieReader:

I am an author.

I still can’t get used to that title, but I suppose after having written seven books–five of them traditionally published–that’s what you’d call me.  The funny thing is that I feel more like a real author now that I self-publish than when I had the (supposed) support of a publisher behind me.

How did I end up on my own?  It began when I couldn’t get my first YA book, Relatively Famous, published, despite getting stellar feedback from editors and nearly selling the film rights to a teen pop star. I was at a loss for what to do. I couldn’t keep writing books without selling them. What if the next thing I wrote flopped? I took a risk, in many ways, and wrote Flat-Out Love. It was the first book that completely came from my heart, and it was a book that ignored all the industry rules. I knew in the back of my head that I could self-publish it, but at the time it seemed like that would have been an admission of defeat.

I spent months thinking that I needed a big publisher in order to be a writer, to legitimately carry that “author” title. To validate me, and to validate Flat-Out Love. I needed a publisher to print my books and stick a silly publishing house emblem on the side of a hard copy. They were the only way to give my books mass distribution, and having them back me would mean that readers would know my book was good.

. . . .

It turns out that I was entirely wrong. I was missing what I really wanted. One of the major reasons that I write is to connect with readers, not publishers. The truth is that I couldn’t care less whether New York editors and publishers like me. I don’t want to write for them. I want to write for you. The other undeniable truth is that readers could care less that my books aren’t put out by a big publisher. They read for the content, not the publishing house emblem.

. . . .

And then one day I got yet another rejection letter and instead of blaming myself and my clear lack of creativity, I got angry. Really, really furious. It clicked for me that I was not the idiot here. Publishing houses were. The silly reasons that they gave me for why my book was useless made me see very clearly how completely out of touch these houses were with readers. I knew, I just knew, that I’d written a book with humor, heart, and meaning. I’d written something that had potential to connect with an audience. As much as I despise having to run around announcing how brilliant I supposedly am and whatnot, I also deeply believed in Flat-Out Love. I knew that editors were wrong.

And I finally understood that I wanted nothing to do with these people.

I snatched the book back from my agent and self-published it. With great relief, I should note. I could finally admit to myself that the only thing I had really wanted was to be told, “You’re good enough.” You know who gives me that? My readers. My generous, loving, wild readers.

. . . .

You know who I do like, though? Amazon. Well, all online ebook sites that let me self-publish, but Amazon is the true powerhouse right now. Say what you want about this company, but it’s because of them that I can continue writing. It’s unclear to me how a big publisher thinks that I could live on their typical payouts, and why they think I should drop to my knees in gratitude for their deigning to even publish my book in the first place when I’ll do all the work myself. I’m not going to be grateful for that nonsense, but I am going to be grateful as hell to Amazon.

. . . .

Because of Amazon and other sites, I’m making enough money that I can continue writing. I’m averaging sales of 3,500 books a month, not including the month that Amazon featured Flat-Out Love in a list of books for $3.99 and under. That month I sold 45,000 Kindle copies, and sold over 10,000 the next month. Those numbers are insane to me. Absolutely insane. The fact that I continue to sell well a year after the book’s release is humbling. Yes, I wrote a book that has earned me excellent reviews, so I take credit for that, and I worked myself to death finding bloggers to review my book (God bless my loyal bloggers who took a chance on me!), but I have to credit Amazon with giving me such a strong platform with such overwhelming visibility. I can be a writer. I am a writer.

Link to the rest at Indie Reader and thanks to Karl for the tip.

From Armando Fox, an Adjunct Associate Professor at UC Berkeley and a co-founder of the Berkeley RAD Lab:

Many colleagues have asked us about the experience of self-publishing our textbook [Engineering Long-Lasting Software: An Agile Approach Using SaaS and Cloud Computing].

. . . .

In this post I’ll talk about being self-sufficient and doing the other things publishers presumably do for you.

Advice: have a plan for proofreading and errata. I’ve never had a publisher, and I’m a stickler for writing, so proofreading with a fine tooth comb is something I do anyway. But if it’s not something you do, you won’t have a publisher to help with that.  Dozens of minor errata were reported by readers; we used a Google Form (HTML form backed up by a Google Docs spreadsheet) to collect them.  This has been challenging, because Amazon has their own mechanism that allows readers of Kindle books to report errors.  However, the information reported through that mechanism is relayed sporadically and not sanity-checked; factually incorrect “corrections” from readers are passed straight through, as are complaints from readers who aren’t sophisticated enough to operate their ebook reader devices.  However, those people are Amazon’s customers (and as an author, you are not), so we just have to learn to deal with this.

. . . .

Advice: tell your purchasers to follow you or otherwise let you notify them of updates.A key reason we wanted to do an ebook was the ability to get bug fixes and new content into readers’ hands quickly.  Each release of the book has a version number, starting from 0.8.0 in January 2012 up to 0.8.5 in May 2012.  We applied the errata fixes ourselves, using GitHub to track all book content and tagging the releases as we would with code, and every erratum has a corresponding version number.  Amazon initially told us they’d notify purchasers and allow them to re-download updated versions of the ebook, but they waffled.  (This is now fixed, but only by Amazon’s decision to give us special treatment.)  Without that support, I’m not sure we’d be able to get updates into readers’ hands.  Even so, while readers can now re-download updated versions of our book, it’s up to us (not Amazon) to notify readers when new versions are available.  We can use the MOOC registration email lists to hit many of those people, but others will have to find out for themselves.  We’re now encouraging readers to follow us on Twitter, and we’ll put that text into the next release of the book.

Advice: have a plan for spreading the word via professional forums.  We had already been spreading the word about our course—we had presented posters or talks at CSEET, SIGCSE and ICSE, wrote an op-ed for CACM espousing the teaching of software engineering using SaaS+Agile, and so on.  We’d been collecting names of people who might be interested in trying out our ideas, so naturally we told them about the book too, and offered most of them complimentary copies.  (Unlike with a publisher, the cost of the comp copies comes out of pocket for us, though the print-on-demand house we use, CreateSpace, allows authors to purchase author copies at a price lower than list.)

Link to the rest at Armando Fox

From AppNewser:

For David Thorne, a NYT Bestselling author, self-publishing has been more profitable than working with a traditional publisher.

In fact, the author has made more money from his newly self-published book I’ll Go Home Then; It’s Warm and Has Chairs, than he did from his book The Internet is a Playground, which was published by Penguin’s Tarcher imprint.

. . . .

“I wanted to do something different.  For my first book, the publisher took a lot of control over the layout.  I was not happy with the typeface.  I hated the cover. I had no say over any of that,” Thorne stated.

He set a sales goal that he wanted to earn as much money from his self-published [via Lulu] book in three months than he had with his traditionally published title. In two months, he achieved this goal and since the book was published March 15th he expects his sales on June 15th will surpass his goal by 43%.

Link to the rest at AppNewser