self-publishing | Alison Morton Author

Meet Geri Clouston of IndieBRAG

Today, I’m delighted to welcome Geraldine Clouston, founder and president of IndieBRAG, an organisation whose mission is “to recognize quality on the part of authors who self-publish both print and digital books.”

One fearsome, but in a way reassuring, statistic is that IndieBRAG rejects 90% of books that it considers. Not quite two years old, […]

INCEPTIO is officially “awesome”

What? A while ago, I applied for INCEPTIO to be listed on the Awesome Indies list, a prestigious indie book evaluation site. Determinedly and fearsomely focused on ensuring only the best self-published titles are included, they have an equally fearsome submissions process.

And this is A Good Thing.

With the huge growth of self-published, sometimes […]

Self-publishing times are a-changing

Maybe my RNA colleagues were being polite at the annual conference this last weekend, but I didn’t get one remotely pointed remark about my self-published debut novel, INCEPTIO. That sounds defensive, I know, but what a change from even 12 months, let alone 24 months ago.

Are we all now ‘published’ rather than self/independent/mainstream/traditional? Have […]

Romantic Novelists' Association Conference 2013

The Edge accommodation

Fun, friendship and some serious talk – these were the keys of this year’s conference at the University of Sheffield’s The Edge campus. We’ll take it as read that the evenings were convivial, that was much exclaiming of “How lovely to see/meet you in the flesh!” and comparisons with previous […]

Not all self-published work is grey in the night

Not all self-published work is crap.

Not all mainstream books are good.

Many self-published works are excellent.

Many mainstream books are dire.

All true. But the demarcation between the two is blurring. A reader doesn’t give a toss who produced a book they love. The things they do notice are rubbishy covers, unintelligible blurb, coarse, […]