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From Micro Fiction to Tales of the Afro Strange | Talking with Indie Award-winning author Ran Walker
On a recent August day, Ran Walker, winner of the 2019 National Indie Author of the Year Award, stopped by the LJ offices to talk about writing and teaching creative fiction and poetry, his coining of a new subgenre term, and winning several high-profile awards for his self-published novel, Daykeeper.
Whether she is tweeting her latest collection find, speaking to the New York Times about diversity in romance, presenting at professional conferences, or pushing libraries to purchase self-published (indie) books, collection development librarian Robin Bradford constantly campaigns for readers’ needs.
CALL FOR ENTRIES: We're celebrating the national expansion of the GonzoFest Literary Contest by inviting all public libraries, their independent authors, and writer communities to enter a single piece of literary nonfiction journalism in the tradition of the late Hunter S. Thompson.
Students returning to Pennsylvania State University (PSU) this fall will find four new short story dispensing kiosks installed at libraries across campus, along with a website for submitting their own original stories for distribution through the kiosks. Developed by Short Édition of Grenoble, France, the kiosks’ simple interface allows users to select a story that takes one, three, or five minutes to read. Their story is then printed out on a narrow piece of sustainably-sourced thermal paper the size of a large receipt.
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.
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.
The first SELF-e collection of self-published titles chosen by LJ and hosted by BiblioLab’s BiblioBoard releases this month, in time for the American Library Association’s (ALA) annual conference. On the occasion, LJ caught up with Mitchell Davis, chief business officer of BiblioLabs, to hear how this collaboration originated and where both SELF-e and BiblioBoard are headed.
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