Most Popular Science Fiction Authors

From: Internet Comment Copy link January 7

[Summary] Basic Science Fiction Library Note: This list is undergoing regular updates. Please contact us with recommendations! The first year James Gunn offered the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction, a teacher from Buffalo, New Yor

Basic Science Fiction Library

Note: This list is undergoing regular updates. Please contact us with recommendations!

The first year James Gunn offered the Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction, a teacher from Buffalo, New York, asked him how many books a teacher should read in order to have a sound background for the teaching of science fiction: "I said, offhand, about a hundred books and gave her a list prepared by a committee of the Science Fiction Writers of America and published, together with a commentary by Alexei Panshin, in the June 15, 1970, issue of Library Journal. Since then more than 30,000 books have been published and the list is dated. Below is my own list and my own comments. Though based on the original SFWA list, my list has deletions and additions, for the period not only after, but before 1970. An earlier version of this list also was published in Library Journal, November 15, 1988."

100 Most Popular Science Fiction Authors

100 Most Popular Nonfiction Authors

Fantastic Fiction

100 Most Popular Science Fiction Authors

(Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Galaktika was a science fiction magazine of Hungary, published between 1972 and 1995. The peak of 94,000 copies was very high (compared to the population of Hungary [pop. 10 million] while Analog magazine was printed in 120,000 copies in the United States [pop. well over 200 million]), when reached its peak period, it was one of the largest science-fiction magazine of the world, and the quality of individual volumes was high.

Top 30 Most-Anticipated Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels Coming in 2014

While 2013 was an unfortunately quiet year for The Ranting Dragon, it sure wasn't quiet for speculat.

Most Popular Authors – download their books FREE!

Here are our 20 most popular authors of fiction. In this case, "popular" is based on combined downloads of all their books. Only authors with 2 or more titles, available here free off course, were considered. Noted below is the genre for which they are most popular. However many write across a number of genres so by all means check them all out as they might have something that suits your tastes as well. Enjoy!

[Further reading]

Popular Science Fiction Authors December 16

Amazon. com Most Popular Authors: The most popular authors in Science Fiction & Fantasy About Author Rank Amazon Author Rank is based on the sales of all of an author's books on Amazon. com and is updated hourly. Explore these pages to find the best se

Top 10 Most Influential Science Fiction Writers There can be a major difference between the best authors of a genre, my favorite authors of a genre, and the most influential authors of a genre. While any top ten list like this will be somewhat contro

List of science fiction authors Note that this partial list contains some authors whose works of fantastic fiction would today be called science fiction, even if they predate, or did not work in that genre. There is also a considerable overlap with t

The Best Science-Fiction Authors | List of the Greatest Sci-Fi Writers The Greatest Playwrights in History List of the best playwrights ever that span all time periods and issues in the plays that they wrote. Well known playwrights such as William Sh

Famous Science Fiction Authors Famous Science Fiction/Fantasy Authors Page 1: The List of Famous Authors Related pages: Criteria used to determine fame - Lists of the best, favorite, best-selling, etc. SF/F authors and writing Other SF/F Authors of V

Amazon. com Most Popular Authors: The most popular authors in Science Fiction About Author Rank Amazon Author Rank is based on the sales of all of an author's books on Amazon. com and is updated hourly. Explore these pages to find the best selling auth

Book Reviews, Sites, Romance, Fantasy, Fiction | Kirkus Reviews "Kirkus' review of The Mill River Recluse played an important role in encouraging readers to take a chance on a first novel by an unknown author." - Darcie Chan, independent author

Publish non-fiction books for free using Kindle Direct Publishing.

Create and sell beautiful Kindle books to millions of readers worldwide.

Free File Conversion: Upload your manuscript and convert it into a Kindle eBook for free.

Track Worldwide Sales: Track sales as they happen and use our real-time insights to grow your audience.

Marketing Tools: Benefit from Amazon's powerful marketing tools and global distribution. Enroll in KDP Select to get more promotional benefits.

Start publishing your non-fiction book today.

Join the thousands of non-fiction book authors on KDP. Here are some of their stories:

"I took a chance on staying independent because my story is so near and dear to my heart. Selling all of the rights to it would be like selling my own child and I could never do that to my child."

Sarah Burleton, author of Why Me?

It seems like it took my entire life to write the recounting of my abusive childhood in "Why Me?" Every time I tried to write it down I didn't know how to start, and more importantly, I didn't know how the world would react. Would they mock me and say that I got what I deserved? Or would I be criticized for putting my "dirty laundry" out for the world to see? But, at the urging of my husband, who believed that getting my story out onto paper could help me heal, I decided to write it without even thinking about publishing it. So I finally wrote my story. I wrote it all.

I wrote about how when I shut my eyes I could still see Mom's eyes, how I could still smell her breath in my face, how much time I spent in our barn and how Mom made me brush my teeth with Comet. I wrote about what I still felt, what still gave me nightmares and what was still making me sad in my adult life.

The writing process was extremely therapeutic. I realized that I had been feeling guilty my entire adult life for nothing. I had done nothing wrong to deserve what I got from Mom. It made me wonder how many children and adults were also suffering or walking around with the same guilt I had harbored for years. I decided that I wanted to try to get my book published to help other abuse victims.

However, I was discouraged when I started looking for traditional publishers to see the hoops you had to jump through just to get someone to look at your manuscript. Most of the publishers I found wouldn't even read a manuscript without agent representation, so I began to give up on the idea of ever publishing my book. Then one day through a random online search, I stumbled upon Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing program and found the world of self-publishing. I uploaded my book in September 2010 and was approached by a major publisher on December 1st of 2011 for potential print distribution. I was shocked and honored to be contacted by one of the "giants" in the publishing industry, however I turned them down! I wasn't looking for mass-market appeal; I was looking for a way to get my book into the hands of people who NEEDED my story.

Since then "Why Me" reached #8 on the New York Times best seller list in January of 2012. I'll never forget pulling up that webpage and seeing my little book, "Why Me?", listed among the giants in the publishing industry.

I took a chance on staying independent because my story is so near and dear to my heart. Selling all of the rights to it would be like selling my own child and I could never do that to my child.

"In my opinion, an author can't go wrong publishing through Amazon KDP."

Dreama Denver, author of Gilligan's Dreams: The Other Side of the Island

Though I always loved writing and believed there was a book inside me just waiting to be written, that book didn't become a reality until I was well into adulthood. "Gilligan's Dreams", the story of my 30 year marriage to "Gilligan's Island" star Bob Denver, was a result of living through the highs and lows of life; it was the result of meeting life's challenges head on and surviving; but more than anything, my book was the result of losing the love of my life after 30 years of marriage, believing in every part of me that there was no way I could possibly go on without him, only to find I was made of much stronger stuff than I realized. Not only could I survive my loss, but I could honor my husband's memory by living my life to the fullest, by using our experiences to inspire others and by doing everything within my power to make this world a better place; at least my little part of it. So, I was in my fifties before I felt I had something vital to say and a voice with which to say it.

On the surface, becoming a writer sounds like a fairly easy thing to do, doesn't it? First, have a story to tell, whether fictional or autobiographical, put pen to paper, or in this electronic age, fingers to keyboard, and go for it. I mean, seriously, how hard could it be to tell my story? After all, it was MY story, a story no one else was privy to, a story no one else could tell. Those were my thoughts, but the reality was very different. I had always heard that, in the case of memoirs, the author had to relive his/her experiences, so I was well aware, or so I thought, that I would have to go back to places that would fill me with joy as well as places that would fill me with despair. What I didn't truly understand was the extent to which I'd have to relive the good and not-so-good times in my life. Getting really quiet with yourself in order to go back to a specific time in your life is one thing, but to delve deep enough to taste it, smell it, hear it and feel it was a struggle that sent me to my knees, literally, on more than one occasion.

The key word here is INDEPENDENT. With a very personal story to tell, I wanted to be in charge of how it was presented to the public. Laying your soul bare for public consumption is daunting, scary, overwhelming. The thought of a publisher editing my words or deciding which parts of my story were relevant or irrelevant didn’t appeal to me on any level, so I sought the guidance of one of my dearest friends, a man I consider a mentor and whose advice I trust, New York Times bestselling author Homer Hickam. His recommendation was Amazon KDP. I ran with it and have never looked back. My book is mine, exactly the way I wrote it, exactly the way I wanted Bob's fans to read it. In my opinion, independent publishing is the only way to go!

I love everything about Amazon KDP. I've never asked a question that wasn't answered promptly and cheerfully. Emails are returned in a timely manner. Editing, publishing, updating and adding photos are all accomplished at my convenience with the click of a mouse. Being able to check on the number of books sold, royalties, readers' reviews anytime, day or night, again, with the click of a mouse is such a convenience. Publishing on demand is another wonderful feature of Amazon. Whether you order one book or a thousand books, your order arrives on the specified date, if not sooner. In my opinion, an author can't go wrong publishing through Amazon KDP.

"Self-publishing, for me, is freedom and discovery."

Stephan Talty, author of Operation Cowboy: The Secret American Mission to Save the World's Most Beautiful Horses in the Last Days of World War II

I'd wanted to be a writer since I was in fourth grade at St. John the Evangelist School in Buffalo. It was another fifteen years before I published my first piece - in a small magazine - while working at Doubleday Books, my first job out of college. (Jackie O worked down the hall, which impressed my parents to no end.) But what I wanted to do was write what I loved most: narrative nonfiction books.

I did a lot of things before I had that chance: I worked in a fish and chips shop. I was a proofreader at a large and wealthy New York law firm, scrutinizing the last wishes of Park Avenue socialites. I was a fast and largely dependable bike messenger, a horrible waiter and a few other things.

Eventually, I did start writing nonfiction books, but I found there were ideas I discovered that wouldn't fit into a traditional format: moments or characters or incidents from history that were fascinating and important in themselves but couldn't sustain a 300-page hardcover. There was simply nowhere for these ideas to land.

What Kindle did for me was to enable me to write these stories. It allowed me to find readers for them, readers who loved and responded to strangely illuminating events from our collective past that might have gone undiscovered otherwise. And, most importantly, I could choose the narratives I wanted, the ones I thought were waiting to be told.

Self-publishing, for me, is freedom and discovery.

Http://gatesofvienna. net/

Not everything over there is fully functional yet, and the internal links still point to this blog, and will for the indefinite future. So all the old material will be left here for archival purposes, with comments turned off.

Gotta get down to it

Blogger is cuttin’ us down

Shoulda been done long ago

Saturday, January 19, 2013

Seduced by Palestinian Propaganda

The following op-ed by Hanne Nabintu Herland concerns the Norwegian government’s persistent soft spot for the Palestinians. It was originally published in Aftenposten, Norway’s largest newspaper, on January 15th, 2013, and has been translated by the author.

Naïve Checkbook Diplomacy

By Hanne Nabintu Herland

Torgeir Larsen, a junior minister for the Norwegian Labor Party, admits in Norway’s largest newspaper Aftenposten on December 28, 2012, that Norwegian authorities closed their eyes to the realities of the Middle East. Too often they thought they were in the service of stability, but later found out that was not the case.

Regardless, this acknowledgement of Norwegian naïveté must lead to tangible changes in foreign policy in order to be of real value.

The junior minister asked me what I meant by my leading article on December the 20th (“In bed with the enemy”) in which I stated that Norwegian checkbook diplomacy is de facto supportive of terrorist organizations that display significant intolerance towards Christians, Jews, gays or other minorities who are not considered “sufficiently Islamic”.

Let’s take a look at the statistics: Norway is one of the smallest countries in the world, and one of the largest contributors to the Palestinian Authority (PA) and others, with annual donations of over 700 Million NOK. Especially since the current left-wing Labor government took office in 2005, the donations have exploded. What are these sums spent on?

Recently the remuneration for suicide bombers was tripled. The Hamas terrorist who killed 30 Israelis in 2002 by now receives 20,000 NOK a month, according to The Times of Israel last September the 9th. Those who have carried out the worst attacks against innocent civilians receive the highest pay.

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center figures from 2005 show that Palestinians have conducted 25,770 terrorist attacks, 147 suicide attacks leading to 1,100 dead Israelis and 7,500 wounded between 2000 and 2005. Fatah conducted 214 acts of terrorism in 2003-2004 alone, according to 2005 Terrorism Review.

Friday, January 18, 2013

Gates of Vienna News Feed 1/18/2013

Many more foreign hostages than originally reported were taken by the Al Qaeda terrorists at the Amenas gas plant in Algeria. The Algerian government says that 100 out of 132 were freed, and some sources say that 30 or more hostages were killed. The British government offered the Algerians manpower, equipment, and expert assistance to expedite the resolution of the crisis, but was refused. American, British, and French nationals are thought to be among the dead.

In other news, the latest figures from Angola indicate that at least 250,000 Chinese nationals have migrated to the country. The Angolan government says that work permits were issued for the Chinese to assist with development projects.

To see the headlines and the articles, open the full news post.

Thanks to Andy Bostom, C. Cantoni, DS, EG, Insubria, JD, KGS, Mary Abdelmassih, Paul Green, Steen, Vlad Tepes, and all the other tipsters who sent these in.

Notice to tipsters: Please don’t submit extensive excerpts from articles that have been posted behind a subscription firewall, or are otherwise under copyright protection.

Commenters are advised to leave their comments at this post (rather than with the news articles) so that they are more easily accessible.

Caveat: Articles in the news feed are posted “as is”. Gates of Vienna cannot vouch for the authenticity or accuracy of the contents of any individual item posted here. We check each entry to make sure it is relatively interesting, not patently offensive, and at least superficially plausible. The link to the original is included with each item’s title. Further research and verification are left to the reader.

Babel on the Danube

As a follow-up to Tuesday’s post about the majority-minority public schools in Oslo, the following brief account reports the latest statistics on the cultural enrichment of schools in Austria. Vienna is the most fully enriched location, and seems to be in roughly the same situation as Oslo.

Many thanks to Hermes for the translation from Unzensuriert. at:

Austria — The number of German-speaking primary school students has declined dramatically

The number of pupils with a first language other than German has doubled from 1995 to 2011. This is what the recently-issued “National Report on Education” shows. During this time, the percentage of “monolingual German” children at primary schools dropped from 88% to 76%.

The doubling in the number of multilingual students is evident in virtually all provinces in Austria. In Carinthia, Lower Austria, Salzburg, Tyrol and Vorarlberg, the rise is a little lower, in Upper Austria is a bit higher, and in Burgenland it remained on average. The Styrian province is the only outlier, where the number of children with a different native language has tripled from about 5,000 to 16,000.

Barely any students with German as mother tongue in Vienna

The nationwide statistics conceals the dramatic developments in Vienna, because German is hardly spoken in the primary schools of the federal capital. The district in Vienna where this is most blatantly visible is Margareten, where the proportion of immigrant children has risen to 89 % — that is, 924 out of 1038 children have as their mother tongue something other than German. The districts Rudolf Fünfhaus and Ottakring have a proportion of 80%, Brigittenau 79% and Meidling at least 70%.

For a complete listing of previous enrichment news, see The Cultural Enrichment Archives.

Here We Go Again

Note: The following post accompanies Takuan Seiyo’s latest piece. Both are being kept “sticky” until tonight. Scroll down for other posts that have appeared since Wednesday.

Certain posts at Gates of Vienna, among them those by Takuan Seiyo, tend to attract the attention and comments of people who are preoccupied with the Jews. They frequently refer to “Holohoax” in World War Two, often supplementing their scornful references with obscenities or derogatory epithets.

I generally delete such comments without publishing them. One of them came in this morning, the second or third such screed submitted on Takuan Seiyo’s latest post. Before I deleted it, I sent it to Takuan, just to show him what was coming in. He suggested that I go ahead and post it, followed by his response.

So here’s the comment by “Anonymous” [typos in the original]:

Some interesting points, a lot of waffle and some errors. Your stated view that the WW2 ‘Holocaust’ resulted in the old 6 million dead Jews is well past its sell-by date. Top class, modern historians now regard that figure as grotesquely disproportionate. The Red Cross AND the German Government counted less than 150,000 for ALL deaths in ALL camps other than those behind Russian lines. It’s now commonly called the HOLOHOAX. It is one of the most successful internationsal businesses of all time.

A response from Takuan Seiyo:

You have the temerity to post this kind of Nazi apologist garbage in a comments thread of an article by a writer whose gentile grandparents had been murdered in a concentration camp and whose gentile mother spent two years in a labor-extermination camp, was a state witness in the post-war trial of its commandant, and relayed her wartime experiences to this writer directly. Moreover, a writer who was born and grew up one hour by car from Auschwitz and three kilometers from the plant where the firm Hoch und Tiefbau AG had built the crematoria for that camp. In which, alone, 2.5 million people were murdered, 1 million of them Jews. And that’s according to the testimony its commandant Rudolf Hoess, based on data from SS-Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann.

Moreover, you desecrate the memory of Witold Pilecki plus other Polish officer escapees from Auschwitz who produced written reports, e. g. Jerzy Tabeau and Kazimierz Piechowski — all of them of impeccable “white” credentials way beyond what you and other White Nat lunatics may ever aspire to. I am omitting here reports by Jewish escapees, for example the Vrba-Wetzler report, as well as the fate of the Jewish part of my family during the war, so as to skirt the whole specious Joooos-tainted-it aspect of your comment.

It’s true that legitimate modern-day attempts to calculate the number of the Holocausts’ victims produce a range of numbers. The lowest for Auschwitz, for instance (by the Polish historian Franciszek Piper), cites 1.1 million victims, in contrast to the 2.5 million estimate — interesting, however, that even in that much-reduced number the Jewish victims component remains the same 1 million as in the bigger total-victim figures. The highest figure cited for Auschwitz is 4 million.

The Bee and the Lamb, Part 9 (Continued)

Note: Takuan’s post (which was originally published last night) is to remain at the top for a while, so I made it “sticky”. However, much has happened since it went up, including the Blogger outage. Scroll down for a report on that.

See also: Two forthrightly anti-Semitic Islamic leaders in Norway, Judicial coddling in Germany, and Part 3 of the Imran Firasat interview.

More new posts will be added below this one. Oh, and don’t mess around with JIM.

The essay below is the conclusion of the ninth part in a series by Takuan Seiyo. See the list at the bottom of this post for links to the previous installments.

Left: Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette, 1876

Right: George Grosz, Metropolis, 1916/17

The Bee and the Lamb

Part 9 (continued)

By Takuan Seiyo

A Whole New Road to Serfdom

That Which is Not Seen

For over 60 years, White mea-culpists have had a firm grip in all fields of cultural mind imprinting: education high and low; paper media, then electronic, then digital media; all forms of entertainment, the plastic arts and music high and low, and religious instruction and worship too. Their main endeavor has been to enforce their compulsory (e. g. K-12) and discretionary (e. g. television) self-flaying on account of long-ago Slavery, Colonialism, Imperialism, Male Supremacism, Racism, Antisemitism, and so on.

It’s the evils of the Iberian Inquisition — which were evil — but not the evils of the Japanese equivalent in which, in the 40 years up to 1597, 50,000 Christians were publicly crucified, burned or beheaded. Nor the evils of the worldwide Islamic Inquisition which — not in the 16th century but now, in the 21st, condemns Muslim apostates to barbaric execution. It’s America’s destruction of the snail darter but not Mussulmanism’s destruction of the Bamyan Buddhas or its proposed destruction of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, let alone its obliteration of all the pre-Rome cradles of Christianity but for remaining ruins in the Middle East and dust of the desert in North Africa.

It’s the evils of feudalism and industrial workers’ exploitation in Europe and America, but not the strict Confucian evils of Northeast Asia. There, a member of the ruling class in China had, essentially, a free hand with anyone of the lower classes, a Japanese samurai could test his sword by cutting down an insolent peasant, and farmers were so squeezed by their fief holders that they habitually sold their daughters to bordellos for the few coins it provided for next season’s seed.

Feminism, Socialism and anti-Antisemitism should have arisen in Saudi Arabia or Yemen, Algeria or Peshawar, for good reasons. Instead, aggressive White androphobes of all genders which I can no longer count are decimating the philogynous and egalitarian West. Equality psychos are tearing down the most egalitarian society that ever existed (except for initial communist experiments, before they turned bloody). American Jews, at the apex of the greatest fortune and philosemitic tolerance their long diaspora has ever bestowed on their kind, are busy supporting all the ideologies and policies that demolish their safe harbor and build up their Muslim, Black and Third World enemies. They will come to rue their tacit assumption that better the antisemite you don’t know than the few hundred imputed and real ones catalogued at ADL.

One would be hard put to find a nation not based on the invasion of another people’s territory and their mass slaughter. Yet poisoned American madmen proclaim “No Thanks for Thanksgiving” as though the Indians themselves did not fight endless genocidal wars from Peru to Canada, with torture, ritual murder or slavery for the captives and, at times, cannibalism too.

Leftoid masochists and the Christian meek call for returning Hawaii to the Hawaiians and capitulating before a massive Mexican reconquista of one-third of America. The self-defined “Feminist-Tauist-NeoPagan-Post-Structuralist-Deconstructionist-Socialist” useful idiot Gillian Schutte begins her New Year 2013 Dear White People by “wholeheartedly apologizing for what my ancestors did to the people of South Africa and inviting you to do the same.”

Yet the Magyars don’t seem to feel much guilt over the Illyrians, Pannonians, Sarmatians and Celts whose land and lives they took in the 9th century, to form Hungary. The rightful Etruscan landowners are not bearing angry placards in front of the Vatican. The Japanese are not planning to relinquish Hokkaido to its original owners, the Ainu. The tall, white and fair-haired Chachapoyas of the Andean forest have, alas, no remnants left to sue the Incas for genocide in a Peruvian court of law. The Aztecs, whether in Jalisco or Los Angeles, don’t agonize over having taken what would become Mexico City from its original Culhuacan owners, with lots of grisly details. Yet for 38 years Neil Young has been reminding adoring audiences about “Cortez the Killer”, discreetly omitting Tlacaelel the killer and the killer people whom Cortez killed.

Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (1996) is a book by Daniel Goldhagen presenting the thesis that the German nation as such was composed of willing executioners of the Jews because of a unique “eliminationist antisemitism” in the German people, with long historical roots. However, even that great moral abyss of Western civilization — the Holocausts — stands out more in its industrialized and organizational features than it does either in the quality of its hatefulness or its relative or even absolute volumes. And Holocausts they were, for in addition to the nearly 6 million Jews, the Germans also murdered over 21 million civilian Slavs, and that’s counting Russia, Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus and Czechoslovakia alone.

In absolute numbers, the total number of World War II non-German civilian victims of Nazi Germany is smaller than the 50 million victims of the Bolsheviks in Russia, or Mao’s 70 million in China, or the Mughal-Muslim genocide of Hindus — the latter have their own Holocaust Day on August 14.

In relative numbers, in just one year, 1994, the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda, killed off a total of one million, in a population of 7 million. 75% of the Tutsi population was erased. Is it more humane to go by a stroke of a blunt machete than by a whiff of Zyklon B?

The Khmer Rouge murdered at least 2 million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979: one quarter of the population, by a conservative count. Is it more humane to die by wallops from a Cambodian pickaxe handle than by a bullet from a German Mauser?

Inscription on the back (in German): “Ukraine 1942, Jewish Aktion, Ivangorod.”

There is a special horror attached to the Third Reich, because those were 20 th century Europeans, Christians, and in many ways the smartest, most civilized people on Earth. But the Holocausts do not prove that Whites are worse than other people, just that they are no better. The history of the Third Reich also proves that with the right formula of economic blowup, misery and humiliation, sparked by charismatic evil, no people are immune to such horror, at no time.

Get Your Book out With These Self-Publishing Services

You’ve done your self-publishing research and read the self-publishing success stories—and now you’d like to know more about your options.

Here’s a handy overview of some of the most popular self-publishing services. Each has its pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, and proprietary features.

High-Quality Designed & Illustrated Self-Published Books

Blurb offers print-on-demand services and seems especially suitable for highly visual, "bookstore quality" books. As a testament to Blurb's popularity for visual artists, it was the service of choice for photojournalist Craig F. Walker of The Denver Post - he used Blurb to print his Pulitzer-Prize winning collection of photos of Ian Fisher, a young soldier sent to Iraq. Blurb also has a collaboration with Adobe Systems, featuring built-in Blurb bookmaking functionality within Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. This feature makes the process of book creation turnkey for those photographers and visual artists already using and/or conversant with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

Got Its Start In An Indie Music Company

BookBaby seems friendly and accessible and offers up a number of free marketing resources, along with a friendly blog that dispenses regular advice.

CreateSpace

Amazon. com’s Paperback Self-Publishing Service

Through CreateSpace, self-publishing authors can set up a basic book with no initial costs and get seamless access to its parent company, Amazon. com's, powerful book distribution and merchandising channel. CreateSpace claims to offer "some of the highest royalties in the industry," as well as an easy ebook conversion through its Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) electronic publishing program (see below).

IUniverse Guided Self-Publishing from an Author Solutions company

IUniverse uses the term "guided self-publishing" to describe its robust range of DIY publishing services, which are laid out much the same way as in a traditional publisher—at a la carte and package prices. If you want to see your book available both in print and in ebook formats, represented in stores and maybe even in the media--and are willing to pay for the privilege--consider iUniverse.

Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)

Self-Publishing eBooks with Amazon’s KDP

Kindle Direct Publishing offers ebook-only publishing and the advantages of Amazon. com’s online distribution power.

Kobo Writing Life

Kobo’s "Reading Life" Extends to Self-Published eBook Authors

The Japanese-based cross-platform e-reading service Kobo launched the Kobo Writing Life ebook publishing service in Beta in June 2012. Offering key reader insights and marketing tools gleaned from their capabilities, the Kobo Writing Life aims to be “Best in Class,” helping self-published authors to “engage with fans on a global scale” through their reading service, and puts all aspects of publishing (setting prices, advertising, marketing) “in the hands of the writers helping them to maximize sales.”

A Wide Array of Self-Publishing Print and eBook Options

Lulu. com is a very popular self-publishing service that offers both a print-on-demand book and ebook digital development capabilities and a wide array of publishing support options. The author picks the package and the price, and promotion is available through Lulu. com.

NOOK Press

Barnes & Noble’s eBook Self-Publishing Platform

NOOK Press, from the major book retailer Barnes & Noble, offers the distribution of barnesandnoble. com and some of the useful promotional features of being associated with a major brick-and-mortar store. With NOOK Press, there are no upfront costs and competitive royalty rates.

Smashwords

A True “Indie” eBook Self-Publishing Experience

With Smashwords, the author is cons >