When you’re publishing your own books easy to get so busy and wrapped up in details that you often miss book marketing opportunities along the way. For instance, I see lots of indie authors publishing books that would be great additions to public libraries. Have these authors tried to alert librarians—a huge group of professional […]

This month, I visit with one of the first organizations to tackle one of the fundamental librarian concerns about self-publishing: quality.

Review site specific to self-published books.

Libraries decide to promote self-published local authors.

Public libraries have been publishers before, largely of annual reports, bulletins, and printed catalogs of special collections–items that are now integrated into the catalog itself or available online. More recently, libraries have facilitated the self-publishing efforts of their communities, such as Sacramento Public Library’s iStreet Press and Temecula Public Library’s Flash Books! And academic libraries have entered the scholarly publishing business in increasing numbers. But what might a publishing imprint run by a local library look like? Over the past two years, two public libraries have begun to explore that question.

According to a new analysis released in October by ProQuest affiliate Bowker, the ISBN agency, self-publishing continued its growth spurt, up 59 percent in 2012 over 2011, from 246,912 titles to 391,768. The gains were even more startling over the longer period for which Bowker collected data: a 422 percent rise since 2007.

Bob Mayer believes the term “self”-publishing means that the author retains most of the rights to his or her work but teams with others in order to bring a story to market.

Douglas County's workflow for cataloguing ebooks.

Some unlucky whales died in certain stretches of the Pacific because inexperienced U.S. airmen mistook the long shapes in the water for Japanese submarines. More than a few offbeat recollections of…

WordPress-to-epub/.mobi/PDF plugin.

Renovations continue on the future home of The Story Center.