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I’ll be attending unCONventional, the New Zealand SF convention, June 1-4 in Auckland. I’ll be pretty busy over the weekend. I’m participating in a few panels: Overpopulation in SF (Saturday 10am) Armageddon as Allegory (Sunday 9am) Getting Published (Sunday 10am) I’ll be doing a reading Sunday at 3pm, and I’ll head over to the group signing after that. I plan to have a few dead tree books for sale, and possibly some method for selling an ebook bundle as well. …

Photo by jvleis One of the questions I asked in my survey is whether or not people write reviews of the books they like. Many respondents said they don’t. When asked why, not ever thinking to do it was a top answer. Not all readers are writers, and some people also expressed that they felt unqualified to write a review. There are some really excellent review writers out there, and I’ve read my fair share of long, well-thought out pieces. …

The reader survey made it pretty clear that lots of people would prefer to buy books directly from the authors, so to that end I’ve created a store where you can buy an instant download of any of my digital products (ebooks or audiobooks). It’s a pretty slick interface powered by Gumroad, and I’ve never used a faster method to buy something online. You just type in your credit card details and then bang, you’re downloading your book. Check it out!

One of the most interesting parts of my recent survey was, predictably, the comments. I learned some interesting things about readers’ habits and interests, and I’ll be working on some changes thanks to what you’ve told me. I asked people what they would change about getting books and one of the comments really hit home: No DRM. Absolutely none. If eBooks have DRM then I pirate them simply to have them without DRM. I agree that DRM is a non-starter for me as well, …

One of the complaints self-publishers get is that their work isn’t well edited. Sometimes that’s true, and sometimes it’s not, and sometimes it’s something in between. There are plenty of ways to get a better final version (many eyes make light work), but the truth of the matter is that typos, grammar whammies and other bogglers get through. They just do. As a fantastic example of this, I was reading crime author extraordinaire Lawrence Block‘s blog post about a pretty …