News and Notices from the Writing Trenches #4…

#21:  There was an interesting frontpage article in Monday's N.Y. Times about Amazon going into the legacy publishing business.  Well, not really.  What I gleaned from the article is that Amazon has a secret board of editors who cherry pick from all the self-published books, both trade paperbacks and eBooks, and offer some contracts.  The conditions of the contracts are also secret.  No agents are involved, but authors can get advances.  The slushpile here is all self-published material...