Jane Smith’s How Publishing Really Works is worth a read at the best of times (if you’re interested in publishing, of course), but her five-part demolition of a “self-publishing is the future” screed is particularly delicious. Part five has just gone up; here are parts one, two, three and four.

But the people that you perceive as barriers—agents, editors, publishers—are, in fact, there to help good writers get published well, and to ensure that the reading public has access to good books, professionally produced. There’s nothing stopping anyone from putting their work on the internet if they want, or from self-publishing in print or electronic format: the technology has been there for years. The real problem for writers who can’t get published isn’t that barriers to publication exist, but that their writing just isn’t good enough.

In the comments Dan Holloway quibbles with the word “good” – he reckons “saleable” would be better, and I think he’s right; whether it’s good isn’t as important as whether it’ll sell – but you get the idea, I’m sure.

A memorial library for Kurt Vonnegut opens in Indianapolis this November. Exhibits will include “boxes of rejection letters”.

I’d really like to see it.

Fancy a free book? Publishing firm Simon & Schuster is giving away a free ebook version of Loser’s Town, a Hollywood-set thriller by Daniel Depp. I’ve no idea what it’s like but it’s free, it’s a PDF so it should work on anything, and all you need to do is provide an email address, so you might as well get it while you can.

Here’s the link.

In other news, the new Tim Dorsey novel is much cheaper as an ebook than it is in print: the latter is £11 to £14 plus postage, while the Kindle edition is eleven dollars flat. That’s around seven quid.

This is great: six hours of work in a two-minute clip.

More here:

Over 6 hours of my onscreen compositing, retouching, color correction, type obsessing, all condensed down to a slim sexy one minute 55 seconds of cover design. Trust me, no one wants to watch it in real-time…and even then I left out the not-as-riveting-onscreen stages of my cover design process, such as reading the manuscript, sifting through Alexia photoshoot outtakes, background photo research, etc. And since this is a series look that has already been established for Soulless and Changeless, there weren’t the usual batches and rounds of versions of different designs that happen with standalone or first-in-a-new-series covers. That would be a weeklong video!