Self-publishing

LJ’s third annual Indie Ebook Awards are almost underway, and we’re looking for voracious readers to serve as judges. Volunteers will be asked to assess books in one of five categories: romance, sf, fantasy, mystery, or YA. This is an amazing opportunity to discover and support local authorship and reward self-published talent.

Sometimes you don’t realize how things are interconnected because you aren’t seeing all parts of the process. That recently happened to me when I started asking catalogers about working with indie titles. The answers I got were surprising.

Everyone has a book in them, it’s said. While Christopher Hitchens completed that phrase with “in most cases that’s where it should stay,” it doesn’t seem the public agrees. This is dramatically demonstrated by the expansion of U.S. publishing, as measured by Bowker, the U.S. issuer of ISBNs, the numbers that help track book sales. In 2002, Bowker issued 247,777. In 2012 (the most recent figures available), demand rose to 2,352,797—an increase of 2,105,020, or a whopping 849.5 percent.

LJ is hosting its second Indie Ebook Awards, celebrating the best self-published titles in the following genres: romance, mystery, sf, fantasy, and YA.

A Computers in Libraries conference got Jim Blanton thinking: ebooks were on the rise. Self-publishing was taking off. How could libraries turn the challenge into an opportunity?

Librarians have long sought more guidance on self-published books as well as books by authors of color. Aiming to answer both needs is a new award offered by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) and BiblioBoard (the company that partners with LJ on SELF-e), called the SELF-e Literary Award.