This post, by Libby Fischer Hellman, originally appeared on her Say The Word blog on 1/25/12. In it, she shares her experiences as an author in the KDP Select program, and the possibility that the program is training readers to wait until a book is free, rather than buy it at regular prices.

It’s been over a month since the Amazon KDP Select started, and we’re beginning to see the ramifications of the program. And although I’m making good money, I’m scared. 

For those of you who don’t know, Amazon created the KDP Select program to increase their base of Prime Customers (those who pay no shipping costs in return for an $80 annual fee — kind of an online Costco). The program allows customers to “borrow” one e-book per month free. Authors whose books are borrowed get a pretty nice royalty ($1.70 per borrow) if they enroll their books and give Amazon exclusive access to those books for 90 days.

One of the staples of an author website or blog is the Calendar page. Fans can find out the next stop on your blog tour, where you might be speaking at a live event, or other notable happenings.

The problem is, in practice, these Calendar pages rarely get updated. It’s quite common to go to an author’s Calendar page and find out where they were speaking two, three, or four years ago. This makes me sad, so I’ve never put a Calendar page on my blog.

Instead, I’m listing right here the upcoming events I’ll be speaking live at, with links to the registration pages for each. These are all excellent educational opportunities being run by great organizations for writers and indie publishers.

This post, by Lynette Labelle, originally appeared on her website on 1/4/12.

You have a critique group and the members love, love, love your work. They’ve been nagging at you for months to send it out. You finally got up enough courage to submit and even received requests for partials and fulls, but in the end, nobody liked the manuscript enough to take it on. What gives?

Let’s take a look at six reasons agents and editors may not love your work as much as your critique group does.

Author 2.0 encapsulates the spirit of empowerment to create, publish, sell and promote with the amazing online tools available today.

I wrote the original Author 2.0 Blueprint over 2 years ago and things have changed a lot since then.

I have sporadically updated it but now I have rewritten 95% of it to create a 52 page ebook packed with useful information on writing, publishing and book marketing.

The Blueprint is entirely free so please download and use whatever part of it resonates with you.

This post, by Brian A. Klems, originally appeared on the Writer's Digest site on 1/23/12.

When writing your future bestseller you don’t want to have to waste too much time wondering if you should be leaving one space or two between sentences or worried that you’re committing other style faux pas. Here I’ve collected a writer’s set of FAQs about formatting (and formatting-related) issues that will help you navigate the basics.

I’m very much in support of sites like Wikipedia, which [blacked] out in protest of SOPA and PIPA. If you don’t know what they are, there’s this (the only Wikipedia page [that was] NOT blacked out) and this handy infographic. This is something that affects all of us, and it’s very important. Don’t think it’s only those crazy Americans and it doesn’t affect us – this affects everyone and is the start of a slippery slope.

[Publetariat Editor's Note: mature content after the jump]

This post, by Ariel Bogle, originally appeared on the the Melville House Books site on 1/23/12.

It’s almost impossible to resist peeking at a friend’s bookshelf when we’re invited into their home.  But this sentiment becomes a little scarier when it isn’t a welcome guest snooping on us and noting that dog-eared copy of Harry Potter, but a mega-corporation who might sell such information to the highest-bidder.

This post, by Martin Lastrapes, originally appeared on his Inside Martin site on 1/17/12.

(This is an extended and revised version of the article “A Self-Publisher’s Manifesto,” which was previously published in Self-Publishing Review on 7/27/11)

I am an indie author and this is my manifesto.

This article, by Jason Perlow, originally appeared on the ZDNet Tech Broiler blog on 1/21/12.

Summary: Apple may have thrown down the gauntlet for the iPad in education, but don’t count Amazon out.

So. Apple. A huge library of textbooks for $14.99 each and a free authoring program for rich textbook content.

That about sums up this last week’s events.

Oh wait. You can only sell that content produced with iBooks Author on the App Store and of course all of those texts are stuck in Apple’s “Walled Garden”.

One of the most loved and respected authors of western fiction was Louis L’amour.. His fans found his stories to be very realistic because of the accuracy of his settings. If one of his stories mentioned a specific well or spring, you could go to that location and find it. This is because L’amour had done so before he wrote about it. His research was meticulous.

This post, by Chuck Wendig, originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 1/17/12.

Consider this, if you will, a sequel to the gone-viral post, “25 Things Writers Should Stop Doing (Right F***ing Now)” — sort of a mirrored-reflection be-a-fountain-not-a-drain version.

Now, a warning, just in the rare instance you don’t come to this site all that often:

Here There Be Bad Words. Naughty profanity. The sinner’s tongue. Lots of “eff-this” and “ess-that.”

If you’re not a fan of profanity, no harm, no foul. But you might want to turn your tender gaze away before your eyeballs foam up and ooze out of your poor innocent head.

Please to enjoy.

Author websites and blogs are an essential book promotion tool. But far too many websites lack contact information for the author or make the contact information hard to find. This seems to be especially true of author websites that are on the Blogger platform.

What if someone wants to ask a question about you or your book, interview you, request a review copy, invite you to guest post on their blog, tell you how much they enjoyed reading your book, or suggest a joint venture? How will they find you?

ThrillerCast – the podcast I co-host with thriller/action adventure author, David Wood, is back for another year. We chat about anything to do with thriller and genre fiction, and regularly have cool guests on the show.

The first ep of 2012 has just gone live and it’s a corker. We talk about our plans for the year, discuss KDP Select, have some free books to give away AND have a chat with Myke Cole, author of the Shadow Ops books – the first one, Control Point, is out next week from Ace.

As stated in Part One, my goal in joining the KDP Select program had been simple, to get my two Victorian San Francisco historical mysteries, Maids of Misfortune and Uneasy Spirits, back up to the top 5 rank in the Kindle historical mystery bestseller category. Their ranks had dropped to between 18 and 24 after Amazon added hundreds of titles to that category just before Christmas. The experiment in light of this goal was an unqualified success.

This post, by J.A. Konrath, originally appeared on his A Newbie's Guide to Publishing blog on 1/17/12.

Right now I'm looking at the Top 10 Kindle bestsellers in occult fiction.

Every one of them is self-pubbed. In fact, there are only three legacy authors in the Top 30. I count only ten legacy pubbed in the Top 100, and most are brand names.

That's... staggering.

This post, by Derek Murphy, originally appeared on his Creativindie Covers site on 1/14/12 and is reprinted here in its entirety with his permission.

I was a little surprised today to see the cover of Ruth Long’s book “The Treachery of Beautiful Things”. After being warned by a designer friend about using stock images (because the same image might end up on multiple book covers) “Treachery” jumped out at me because I’ve been working with the same stock photo for another cover design.

Note: I've made my latest book, Overshare, available for free download through this Friday, 1/20/12 - it may be informative to download a copy and look at it in the (free) Kindle Reader app or on a Kindle Fire (it's presented in full color, so viewing it on a monochrome Kindle won't give you the full experience) before reading this post.

These days, authors and publishers are beset on all sides by pundits and industry watchers telling them they must innovate, they must redefine the meaning of the word "book", they must experiment with new forms, make use of multimedia and transmedia if they hope to stay relevant in the new, digital frontier of literature and publishing. All of which is well and good, until you take their advice.

This report, by Piotr Kowalczyk, originally appeared on Ebook Friendly on 1/14/12.

Will self-published books continue to expand? Is $0.99 price tag wearing out? Can we expect new success stories from independent authors?

2011 was an exciting year for publishing, full of events changing the landscape of the industry. Self-publishing exploded and became one of the most important factors to shape digital publishing in the near future.

I’m excited to share the report with as much facts and figures as possible to help forecast how the self-publishing phenomenon would evolve in the years to come. To get the bigger picture, read also 2011 self-publishing timeline.

My eyes are stinging and my brain is dizzier than usual. I just finished reading for my bookstore’s review two excellent young adult books for consideration of including them on our shelves and hand-selling them once we do. OK, so why the physical impacts?

Both books were interior designed using serif-less fonts. They’re OK for ads or internet usage, but they are horrendous for reading on paper. Why? and Why were they used? Ah, here is my best guess. It may all be about laziness on the part of the interior designer/typesetter. Follow along as I explain more:

I was packaging a book for my editor and realized I only had one [promotional] bookmark left. I wrote on my to-do list: Order more bookmarks? The fact that I put a question mark after the notation indicates just how much this industry has changed. Even a year ago, having bookmarks on hand seemed essential. I would have never let myself even run low, let alone run out completely. Yet now, I’m not sure I should spend money to buy more.