Alexander M. Zoltai's Blog, page 189
November 5, 2012
Distributors of Books Are Oppressing Authors?
I’m confused. Can you help me understand? I write fiction. My publishing aid company, FastPencil, produces and distributes my books. Places like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Apple sell my books. So, I create them, FastPencil invests its operation in producing my books, and other places sell them. Also, I hold the copyright… Along comes [...]
November 2, 2012
Penguin Random House ~ What Does It Mean?
Will the proposed, new largest publisher of the former Big Six change the publishing business? Will it successfully counter the Amazon foot-print? Will anything substantial change? While I feel the future of publishing will be some balance between “Full-Service” Publishers and thriving Self-Publishing, the remaining “legacy” publishers will need to learn from the self-publishers. I [...]
October 31, 2012
Why People Won't Like My Book And Why They Might Want To Consider Reading It...
Reblogged from Notes from An Alien: I’m engaged in a discussion over in the forums of BestsellerBound about why the theme of my soon-to-be-published book will make it hard to sell. I knew as I planned and wrote it that it would be, at the very best, a niche-book–of interest to a rather small audience. [...]
Copyright and Book Piracy
Writers can become manic about copyright. “It’s my intellectual property and I’ll be damned if I’ll let anyone steal it!” I read an interesting article by Scott Bradner (University Technology Security Officer at Harvard University. Writes a weekly column for Network World. Serves as the Secretary to the Board of Trustees of the Internet Society [...]
October 30, 2012
Dear Reader, — Do Long Sentences Still Have A Place In Your Life?
Naturally, I’m not just addressing the Reader in this post—writers are the ones who make sentences; so… Dear Writer, Do long sentences still have a place in Your life? I must let you know Shalon Sims’ blog gave me the prompt for this post. She quotes a sentence from Pico Iyer as example: “Enter (I [...]
October 29, 2012
NaNoWriMo and Publishing . . .
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is just around the corner. This is something I, personally, would never do but I certainly can recommend it to others. The concept is simple—for the thirty days of November put down 1666.67 words per day. In brief, from their site, you can: Write a novel in a month! Track [...]
October 26, 2012
Is Self-Publishing Good or Bad? & Are Self-Published Authors Doing It “Right”?
I’m sort of a “self-published” author—it depends on one’s definition in a rapidly changing field—but, I prefer the title “Publishing-Aided” author. Many folks use the term “self-publishing” for any book that isn’t produced by the Big Six (and two of those look to be merging). Also, even though there are 64 posts on this blog [...]
October 25, 2012
Do Libraries Still Matter?
It all depends on who you are if libraries still matter to you. And, I’m going to go out on a moral limb here and declare that, if you’re a sane and upright person, libraries Matter. So, it seems there are quite a few insane, downright confused people in our world… If you click on [...]
October 24, 2012
Blogging About Reading, Writing, and Publishing . . .
This is what I do—Blog—when I’m not attending to my duties as Events Manager on Book Island in Second Life or writing my books or dealing with various aspects of what folks like to call Promotion ( but, never that nasty word, “Marketing” :-), or talking to my Best Friend… I’ve learned a few things [...]
October 23, 2012
Some Questions for The Serious Writer . . .
There are few other blogs I follow—would like to follow more—far too busy being a writer… One other writer I do follow is Lynn Biederstadt of Sky Diaries. In fact, I’m as careful to leave comments on each of her blog posts as I am to reply to comments here. I feel the aloneness of [...]
