Note to publishers: Be afraid, very afraid. Because ebooks are allowing authors to self-publish their work and be very successful, without going the traditional publishing route.

No one personifies this more than Amanda Hocking. She publishes her ebooks on the Kindle platform and, by all accounts, is making millions. No agent. No large publishing houses. If her books were published the traditional way, she would probably be on the New York Times Bestseller List.

This article gives a great glimpse of how indie authors are cutting out the middleman and succeeding:

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America’s great literary hope, Jonathan Franzen, has once again made the shortlist for another award. Franzen has been added to the Bad Sex in Fiction shortlist for his newest novel Freedom (aff link). The award is sponsored by British magazine Literary Review, and given to the author who, well, writes really bad sex scenes.

According to this Huffington Post article, Franzen is on the shortlist because:

The scene in Freedom that attracted the judges’ attention was a phone sex encounter between two characters. While the passage is over-the-top in context, it becomes downright garish when excerpted — so much so, in fact, that I couldn’t bring myself to reprint even a sentence of it here. My favorite part, however, is Franzen’s wonderfully descriptive phrase, “protruding pencil of tenderness.” Use your imagination.

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I had the pleasure of attending a book signing by bestselling author Clive Cussler (aff link) at my local Barnes & Noble. I’ll admit

Jonathan Franzen, the literary author who famously snubbed Oprah’s Book Club a few years back, has agreed to let his newest literary opus

Garrison Keillor is the latest author to slam self-publishing in a recent NYT Op-Ed. His rant is typical of those who hate indie authors who go it alone into the world of self-publishing. And in the same Op-Ed, Keillor manages to take a swipe at modern technology.

I don’t know what it is about self-publishing that drives some people nuts. After all, musicians who skip the large record labels and become “indie” are widely respected and have successfully thrown themselves into the mainstream – with little to no criticism. So why are indie authors seen differently?

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Fan fiction (fanfic) is when a fan of a novel, movie or even television show writes their own stories using the same characters.

I always love to read author’s self-publishing success stories. They are not only very inspiring, but these stories chip away at the negative stigma of self-publishing. The route these authors take is a hard one, they don’t have the resources of a large publishing house and distributor behind them. Thus they often have to promote their work themselves using their own websites, Twitter, Facebook and other methods.

But one author has taken self-publishing to a whole new level. Christopher Herz decided to use the POD model with his book

After my grandmother passed away last December, my mom and her brother and sister have been going through her house to get her belongings sorted out. Among those items was a short story I wrote when I was 12, around the time I was in the 7th grade (about 1992). I sent it to my grandparents and they had apparently filed it away for all these years.

I don’t remember writing this specific short story, but I remember it being an assignment for my creative writing class. We had to read them in front of the class – which was probably the worst part. The only other memory I have of this story is was received pretty well by my classmates and my creative writing teacher.

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My local bookstore held a book signing for 3 authors last weekend. It drew a sizeable crowd and there’s no doubt a lot of books were sold to customers anxiously seeking an autograph from their favorite author/s.

I’ll confess, I’m a literary autograph hound myself. I have a small collection of autographed books (a collection I hope to expand). There is something about having an author sign his/her own work that makes owning that book like a trophy – as hokey as that sounds.

But with ebooks rapidly growing in popularity, what’s going to happen to author signings? After all, I wouldn’t want an author to sign my Sony Pocket Edition. As popular as ebooks have become, and as their popularity will continue to rise, I still think there will be a spot for print books in the literary marketplace.

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Ever since I became an ebook evangelist I have promoted the idea that ebooks are the perfect platform to offer more than just the text of the novel/short story. What does this mean? An enriched ebook offers a glimpse of a working author in a “behind the scenes” sort of fashion.

While there are any number of ways to enrich an ebook, I always envisioned them with rough drafts (so the reader can see how the story evolved), outlines, interviews, alternate endings and more.

Bestselling novelist David Baldacci has done just that with his new book