I hope you didn’t find your way here via a search and are expecting something useful.
There are so many blogs and people I should link you to, but if I had to prepare all that, I wouldn’t have time to do the important things like take out the dog and change the cat’s litter box.
It’s probably a generational thing, but term self-publishing still sounds like the old vanity presses to me so I’m opting for calling whatever it is I think I’m doing, “independent publishing.”
The truth is the big houses are dying not having prepared for the digital age or followed what was happening in other industries affected by it. In a few years it’ll all be “independent and self” publishing and people will start referring to what is now “traditional” publishing with some retronym like “corporate publishing.”
In any case, I guess I joined the digital publishing age back in February when I put an excerpt of my novel Loisaida up on Authonomy. I’ve just taken another step and put my novella, The Death Trip on Smashwords (http://www.smashwords.com). It’s free and you can download through this link: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/6095. Take a look!
I’ll clean up this blog later and add some links, and in the coming weeks I’ll keep you posted on my experiences with kindle, starting my own micro-imprint, and the world of POD.
Feel free to leave a relevant comment.
This is how the music industry died. Everybody went to MP3s and you didn’t have to buy an album and you didn’t have to go to a record store. I still think books are easier to handle, but you’re right. Publishing is now conservative and risk-averse so you have the same crap. John Grisham, chick lit etc.