John T. Reed’s self-publishing blog

My book How to Write, Publish, & Sell Your Own How-To Book 3rd edition has been out-of-print for about a year. I was going to do a new edition after I did my novel and my first ebook on intellectually-dishonest debate tactics. I am done with the novel but I am having trouble getting to the ebook, so I decided to issue a comb-bound version of the How to Write, Publish… book. That means we will make them one at a time on my laser printer and bind them with one of those office machines that punches 19 small rectangular...

Subject line: My first novel, The Unelected President, comes off the press September 20th John T. Reed’s first novel After writing 34 how-to books, I have written my first novel: The Unelected President. The hero, “Michael Medlock,” is a total non-politician home-office based writer. After being appointed to serve out the term of a Senator who died, Medlock unexpectedly and suddenly becomes President of the United States. Democracy without politicians You got this email as a result of buying my newsletter or one of my how-to books. “President Medlock” goes over the Constitution and laws looking to see what he can...

For longer than I can remember I have been shipping my books in Priority Mail flat-rate envelopes. Originally, the way the book business worked was all books were shipped by USPS book rate. Media mail That’s the cheapest. For my new novel, Media Mail as it’s now called, is $3.57. Media mail is so cheap that many recommended using it for your books, instead of the moving van, if you are moving to a new state. It also takes four to six weeks. It used to be everyone knew that and would say “Four to six weeks?” when they ordered...

I denounce grammar “rules” in my book How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Own How-To Book. There are no grammar rules. Here is a passage from page 26 of the 2015 book The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley: There is a good parallel with teachers of grammar, who do little more than codify the patterns they see in everyday speech and tell them back to us as rules. Indeed, grammarians spend most of their time deploring linguistic innovation. [Ridley’s book is about how good innovation happens.] ‘Whom’ or ‘who’? For example, take the word “whom.” Grammarians say you...

I have written and self-published about 105 books counting multiple editions of some. My first book was published by Harcourt Brace so I have been there and done that, too. In retrospect, it does not seem that hard to me to succeed as a self-publisher of how-to books. Here are the things that matter most: Writing talent—(I think) I say “I think” because it does not seem to me that I have any writing talent. However, in my book Succeeding, I said that talented people are oblivious to their talent. They can do effortlessly something that others cannot do to save their...