Get A Free Copy Of School Police For A Limited Time!

The paperback version of School Police just arrived and they’re beautiful. Sonia Budner’s excellent cover really brings the little book together and I’m acceptably pleased with the inside design (I did it myself). If you’d like a free copy, simply email me at john@biggs.cc but the ebook is free with Kindle Unlimited and it’s a fun little read. Let me know what you think!

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Getting Orwell Wrong

I was ready to come to Amazon’s defense (and I will, eventually). In their long letter to the writing community, they made some excellent points. They inflamed our passions, gave us historical context for our discontent, and then quoted none other than George Orwell on the disruptive nature of paperbacks and the need for evil publishers to crack down on upstart, low-priced alternatives.

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My First Author Interview At @booklikes

The good folks at BookLikes have run an amazing author interview in which I detail some of the secrets to becoming a non-successful fiction author in your spare time!

In all seriousness, it was an honor to appear on the site and I’m even running a paperback giveaway for Mytro right here. Sign up to grab a free book!

Read on for an excerpt from the interview.

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Survey: Which Cover Do You Like Best?

Hey, guys: I’m working on a short story collection that I’ll probably publish in a few weeks. I wondered which cover, by Sonia Budner, you liked better? Given you know nothing about the stories, which one is more interesting and evocative?

Pick the covers that you like best. Vote twice! Vote three times! Go nuts! Thanks!

Amazon, a Friendly Giant as Long as It’s Fed

“Amazon believes the value exchange between publishers and authors is fundamentally broken,” said Scott Jacobson, who worked on the Kindle team at Amazon and is now at the Madrona Venture Group. “In a world where authors can hire their own editors, market their books through the web and social media, and get production and distribution through Amazon or other services, publishers will play a lesser role and their share of the economics will be diminished.”

So writers should get more and publishers less, an assertion with which few writers would disagree. But Amazon also believes that books should be cheap. This makes the pie smaller for everyone; Amazon argues that the publishers will make up on volume what they lose on each sale.

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Why I’m DRM Free

All of my books are DRM free. I know that DRM is useless – I can break Amazon’s in a few clicks and almost every major DRM system has been shattered upon release – and I want people to read my books. That’s why I give them away when it makes sense (you can get Mytro free on the iBooks store now, for example) and try to offer my own download pages when possible. I’ll continue to do this.

I thought I’d share a talk by Cory Doctorow on this very topic and explain my position on books these days.
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Write, Publish, Repeat: One Of The Clearest Books On Indie Publishing I’ve Ever Read

I try to read as few books on writing as possible. With the exception of Steven King’s On Writing and maybe Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist, there’s little you can learn early on in your career from these books and, by the time you’re ready for them, most of the advice is already known. But in Indie publishing – essentially what I’ve been doing – there are few guidebooks.
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