Graham Storrs

Over the past year or so, wisdom has been accumulating in the blogsphere about who should self-publish, what they should self-publish, and when. The advice seems to amount to this: If no-one else is going to publish it (because, say, it was commercially published once but is now out of print, or it’s new but [...]

And guess which ebook I hope everyone is reading With between 200 and 300 per cent growth year-on-year in the ebook market (different surveys call it different ways) you wouldn’t think there was much need for such an event, but there is. It isn’t just that there is entrenched, almost paranoid resistance to ebooks among [...]

The other day, someone in my online writers group wondered if a particular publisher was still in business. They had submitted a manuscript to them four months ago and had heard nothing. So they’d checked the website and found it hadn’t been updated since some time in 2008. Of course, old hands at the submissions [...]

I’m developing a relationship with Amazon. It used to be a simple relationship. I bought books from them. Well, not quite simple. I occasionally bought books when their low price plus the exorbitant cost of shipping to Australia worked out better than a local bookshop, or it was a book you just couldn’t get here. [...]

A survey of book promotion tactics was conducted by The Savvy Book Marketer in December, 2009, and is reported today. It asked a number of authors what their book promotion strategy would involve in 2010. You can check the method and the outcome there. I just want to look at the list of tactics they [...]

If I wanted an ebook reader, would I buy an Apple iPad? I don’t think so. Would I accept one as a gift? I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t. The only ebook reader I know well is my 6″ Kindle 2 (foreigner’s edition). It cost me $256, and there are no ongoing costs. It’s a great [...]

I ran the complete set of posts from this blog through the Wordle program. Wordle calculates word frequencies, translates them to physical sizes, and uses this information to lay out the most frequent words in interesting ways. The image below, therefore, shows you just what I talk about most in this blog. If you haven’t [...]

I suppose the title sums up my overall reaction to my new Kindle ebook reader but there are all kinds of details of the experience that I should probably add. I was reluctant to get a Kindle. It’s not the best e-book reader in the world and e-ink is not my favourite screen technology. The [...]

A bit of Australian internal politics, guys. You might want to just retweet this and move on if that’s not especially interesting to you. However, if you ever read an Australian book, read on. Those who have campainged hard to ensure that parallel importation restrictions on books are not removed or amended, should be congratulated. [...]

Like many ‘emerging’ Australian writers, I’ve been concerned that the government is thinking of lifting parallel importation restrictions (PIRs). This is legislation that helps Australian publishers compete by giving them the opportunity to publish works over here and keep out overseas editions of the same work. Virtually all countries, including the US and UK have [...]