The latest Author Solutions service is a “Word Clay-ish” self service photo book creator on collaborative steriods: Inkubook.com. Users can upload photos from their iPhone or laptop, add some captions or poems, and crank out a paperback or hardback book for as little as $12.95 each.
Create a free account, download Microsoft’s Silverlight, and you are [...]

Disguised as “faster shipping and fulfillment”, Amazon announced this week that all print on demand book titles sold by Amazon MUST be printed by them (BookSurge.com). They claim:
If the POD printing machines reside inside our own fulfillment centers, we can more quickly ship the POD book to customers — including in those cases where the [...]

Amazon finally released their Amazon Kindle e-book reader device, a clunky ’stone tablet’ looking device that doubles as a wireless laptop hybrid device. I have to say I’m a little disappointed in the design, but not the functionality. Instead of taking the ”book-like” trac that Sony took with their reader digital book, Amazon took the “techno gadget” [...]

Until a few years ago, the term self-publishing usually entailed the likes of AuthorHouse, iUniverse, or Infinity Publishing taking a raw manuscript and converting it into a printed book via print on demand. Nowadays, self-publishing is being redefined as a “do-it-yourself publishing” process where you go online, upload your manuscript, format it, and then use [...]

I was reading an interesting article today in Time Magazine entitled “One Day in America.” A few interesting stats are quoted in the article:
At some point today you will say a prayer, not floss, take a shower for 10 minutes but not sing in it, drive an eight-year-old car to work, spend 95% of the [...]

The wild wild west of self-publishing has a new marshall in town: AuthorHouse and iUniverse.
According to Publishers Weekly, there are an estimated 86,000 self-publishing companies in the United States. With over 200,000 new titles per year flooding the book market, primarily because of self-publishing, consolidation of the space is a good thing for everyone.
As I [...]

I’ve been waiting to write up a review on www.zoho.com until the short-term honeymoon was over. After all, a free online solution to every business’s CRM, database, project management, wiki creator, web conferencing and presentation, calendar, polling, and every other imaginable need in one place seems too good to be true.
But, it’s true!
I originally came [...]

For authors trying to promote their books on Amazon.com, a solution is on the horizon: Clickriver ads. Much like the infamous Google AdWords and Yahoo! Search Marketing programs, Clickriver looks to deliver targeted pay per click advertising on Amazon.com for anyone selling products or services (including books!). While the program is in beta right now, [...]

Honestly, you can publish your blog as a book. Really.
This might seem a little nutty, but you can actually import your Live Journal, TypePad.com, or Wordpress blog into the Blurb.com BookSmart software and create one or many copies of your blog in the form of a book.
Why would anyone want to do that? Isn’t that [...]

I got this email from Google Book Search about a significant upgrade to their program: reference links to your book.
I’m writing to let you know about some recent upgrades to Google Book Search. These features are designed to make Google Book Search much more comprehensive and useful for users and increase the value of [...]