Goodreads: Readers Seek Authors. No longer dependent on the fossil print industry's sham of reviews, readers are actively trawling for the next good read. Readers have lost faith in reviews cranked out like sausage by print industry shills (journals, newspapers, magazines). Readers have lost faith in endorsements from famous authors, who usually have not even read the book they lavishly praise, but who gain free publicity by having their name on the cover as free advertising. Readers are talking to each other via social media (Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter). Their reviews tend to be from the heart. Readers have never displayed any particular publisher loyalty. Goodreads caters indiscriminately to both print and digital authors, and that's a strong element in the new democracy. For publishers, every book is a crap shoot—whether you are Random Hose or Purple Potato Press. Authors are less passive ('getting published'), but are ever more proactive. If you are proactive about writing your book (nobody made you do it, right?), and you see that the most successful print authors are fanatical self-promoters, you see that you must become active ('publish' versus 'being published') and promote your work 7-24. Authors of all stripes are starting to look for their readers in social media, which further trivializes print publishers and other middlemen in their fossil industry…

James Joyce, Author & Self-Publisher. History is replete with famous authors whom the established authorities of their time hated and shut out from their free speech rights. Forsaking the passive ('being published') whereby they would forever be barred from reaching readers with their genius, these authors went active ('published,' 'self-published' which the propaganda of mid-20th Century print industry turned into a dirty word). James Joyce (Irish novelist, 1882-1941) lived in a conquered nation, whose British overlords and their imperial state church forbade all but the most sentimental, state-approved literature. So Joyce took Dubliners (which was deemed illegal and obscene because it dealt with marital infidelity) to Italy. Like many English-speaking authors, he found success by paying Italian printers, who either could not read English, or winked a tolerant eye. A true story: one of my mentors in early life, Professor James F. Mormile of Yale University in New Haven, told a story of how he, while serving as a U.S. Army counter-intelligence agent in Italy during World War II, managed to smuggle an Italian-printed hardcover copy of James Joyce's Ulysses into the United States. Until a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision of 1959, much literature was banned in the United States for the most trivial offenses against obscenity laws that nullified parts of the First Amendment (free speech). The works of James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and many other famous authors, who are today staples of every high school and college curriculum, were banned in the United States. Retailers who sold a copy of such a book were subject to possible $5,000 fines (a fortune at the time), confiscation of inventory, and up to five years in prison. If you traveled into the United States, even as a U.S. citizen, you were subject to intensive examination of your luggage by U.S. Customs agents. They would confiscate any forbidden books (of which there were many), and you could be subject to fines or even jail. Dr. Mormile had the Italian printer create a hard-cover edition with a dark, glossy cover, and the title stamped in gilt on the front: Father of Telemachus. Ulysses, in Homer's Iliad, had a wife named Penelope and a son named Telemachus. The customs inspectors never got it, and the good professor smuggled his illegal copy of the banned book into a Puritanical United States. That little tale is not only true and humorous, but illustrates how far we have come, at a cost of great social pain and chaos. The print industry as we know it—with its tyrannical assumptions, and slash-and-burn destruction of tens of thousands of author lives by not allowing them to see print—grew out of the same world in which Afro-Americans could not ride in the front of the bus, and were violently attacked by racist mobs and racist governors for trying to simply go to school. We've "come a long way, baby," and that doesn't mean just so women can publicly smoke and develop lung cancer in service of the corporate bottom line. We have gained the freedom to read what we want, in service of a First Amendment freed from Puritanical hypocrisy and tyranny. And authors have gained the right and the ability to publish their work without interference from self-serving Big Six print publishers, whose product is largely a production line of identical, fast-food schlock.

IndieReader.com: Almost Legit. As you read this article, please bear in mind that my Master's in Business Administration (Boston University) includes a concentration in Accounting. One of the fundamental rules of Auditing is to not only avoid impropriety, but to avoid the appearance of impropriety. Here is a great idea: a website that purports to serve the indie (independent) authoring, publishing, and reading community. I commend it for all but one thing, as I'll point out. On the good side, it delivers a reasonable service despite its particular commercial twist. It's worth a look. However, here's the rub. "By sending your book to us for review, you agree that we can post that review to the IR site, be it positive or negative. No complaints should IR’s review of your book be of a less than stellar nature. There is a $35 processing fee (for both paper and ebooks)." This idea is, in fact, analogous to Publishers Weekly's new PW Select product, buried under the Authors tab (iteself probably a new concession to the existence of authors in an industry traditionally locked in by the Big Six and their Stockholm Syndrome theft of all author rights). For a hefty fee at PW, you can buy the right to have your book either ignored (most books) or subjected to a slashing review (short list of books). Whether I do or don't have the bottom line, including the fee, quite right, this exposes some vertiginous if not nauseating trends. First of all, the print industry, which for a long time fostered a savage and relentless anti-author campaign on the theory that any author not vetted ("being published") is at best a charlatan, a fool, and a talentless clown, at worst a heretic and something akin to a criminal. As usually happens in human affairs, then the money raised its head, at a time when the traditional print cartel began to lose credibility and income. A great example of this is the sham self-publishing house iUniverse, founded in 1999. Barnes&Noble purchased a 49% stake, thus becoming the world's largest vanity press—a bilious but understandable 180 degree turn from spreading fear and loathing about self-publishers (vanity publishers). The vanity industry in itself has indeed been a historical sham of heart-breaking proportions, harming tens of thousands of trusting and gullible authors who were excluded by New York's Kafkaesque print cartel. I was told by an insider at B&N in the early 1990s (they held their stake until they sold it in 2007 to another scam called Author House) that "we" (meaning Barnes & Noble) "would not touch an iUniverse or other self-published title with a ten foot pole." That means they were extracting up to and over $1,000 in fees from unsuspecting authors, yet there was an absolute policy that the same book would never, ever get near a store shelf of Barnes & Noble. This is not breaking news; it has been widely reported by former employees. You could, additionally, pay hundreds of dollars more to be 'considered' for placement on store shelves; and although thousands of people have apparently fallen for this scam within a scam, it is estimated that only Barnes & Noble's great credit, they dumped this scam. According to Wikipedia and Publishers Weekly, "Nevertheless, according to a 2005 Publishers Weekly article, out of the more than 18,000 titles published by iUniverse until 2004, only 83 had sold at least 500 copies and only 14 titles had been sold through physical Barnes & Noble stores." Personally, I found a better deal (although horrendously bad customer service delivered with full print industry cynicism) in Ingram's LightningSource, which is perhaps the only Print on Demand (POD) source that treats the customer as a publisher rather than a 'royalty' earning 'author.' Having avoided the iUniverse scam, I give Barnes & Noble considerable credit for their more recent openness and assistance to small small presses and self-publishers (same thing, if you think about it without the anti-author propaganda). B&N's Small Press Department are the most pleasant, author/publisher oriented acquisitions people I have directly worked with in the publishing world today. That, in itself, is a rare thing in a buyer's market flooded with sharks and scams. The establishment itself, long so violently and cruelly opposed to author freedoms and rights, quickly becomes a Renaissance Vatican when they smell money. Gone are the dogmatic certainties and the prim loathing of heretics. Welcomes with bread, salt, and red carpets are quickly extended to any way to extract money from the hopefuls living in ragged tents around the gateway into print published paradise. A complete discussion of vanity scams—including those perpetrated by the print cartel despite its ravings and rantings against (their word for it:) 'vanity presses'—is beyond the scope of this short article. Here's the bottom line: When Publishers Weekly, IndieReader, and other companies offer for-pay reviews and for-pay contest submissions, are they avoiding the appearance of impropriety, much less doing what may be defined by some people as a pure scam? My gut feeling is that they are, at best, skating too close to the rip-off pond (by charging fees for what should be a free and therefore independent service). With deep regret, I would advise using extreme caution or even avoiding services like PW Select or IndieReader. They smell too much of the print industry and its limitless ways of ripping authors (and readers) off. (John T. Cullen, Special to Publishing Industry News, 08 May 2011. Copyright • 2011. All Rights Reserved.)