Browsing Archive: November, 2012

E-books: shaking up publishing, but not content?

Posted by Paul Samael on Wednesday, November 21, 2012, In : Random thoughts

I recently finished “How Music Works” by David Byrne (my thanks to Tom Lichtenberg for alerting me to its existence), which is full of interesting ideas and analysis about music – and some fascinating facts about how it’s developed over the years. Byrne’s main argument is that we place too much emphasis on the influence of the artist’s personality or “soul” – and too little on more contextual factors like the technology available to them, the environments they had to pla...

The Pirates! In an Adventure with Self-Published Authors!

Posted by Paul Samael on Thursday, November 8, 2012, In : Self-publishing

Ahoy there, readers. Yesterday I discovered that my novel had been put up on Amazon by a scurvy bilge rat claiming to me - and demanding that the reading public pay the princely sum of £1.92 for the privilege of reading it (even though it is available for free on Smashwords and Feedbooks). So I wrote to Amazon and to their credit, they replied within hours and promised to remove it (although to my great disappointment, they refused to undertake to give the culprit forty lashes with the cat...
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Publishers: no better than fund managers?

Posted by Paul Samael on Thursday, November 1, 2012, In : Random thoughts

In my last post, I expressed surprise that commercial publishers weren’t interested in a novel which ticked all my usual boxes (thought-provoking and ambitious yet not at the expense of readability or a good story) but was also by an established author and should have been relatively easy to market effectively. Yet despite all that, it was rejected because it wasn’t felt to be “commercial” enough (which, translated, probably means not enough of a “safe bet”).

But perhaps I am bein...

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About Me

Paul Samael

Welcome to my blog, "Publishing Waste" which will either (a) chronicle my heroic efforts to self-publish my own fiction; or (b) demonstrate beyond a scintilla of doubt the utter futility of (a). And along the way, I will also be doing some reviews of other people's books and occasionally blogging about other stuff.