As some of you may know, I have a blog elsewhere devoted to the art, craft and craftiness of self-publishing.
Over the years I’ve published all sorts of things. I’ve written articles and columns for dozens of different print magazines. I’ve published a paperback book on Ruby programming with a US publisher. At one time I had my own magazine publishing company. More recently I’ve published a book of my old interviews (with 80s pop stars) and some novels (about 80s pop stars and horrible murders) for Kindle. And now I’m going through the process of publishing them as paperbacks. My latest article is about simplifying the formatting process with style sheets: http://dark-neon.blogspot.com/2012/02/using-style-sheets.html.
Incidentally, I am a big fan of self-publishing. I am completely convinced that this is the start of a revolution in publishing. I would be very surprised if there were anything like the same number of print magazines and newspapers being sold ten years from now. And I also anticipate that many new and successful authors will emerge via the self-publishing route rather than going through all the palaver of finding agents, publishing houses and retail distributors as in the bad old days.
Of course there will be a lot of bad self-published books. That doesn’t matter. There are lots of bad print books too. There are also innumerable bad blogs and web sites. But the good books, blogs and web sites find their own audiences. Which makes it possible for writers to communicate directly with their readers instead of getting caught up in the meshes of a monolithic publishing machine. I like that idea a lot!
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