Friday, February 19, 2010

Self-POD Forums?

A few years ago there were very few blogs that discussed self-publishing or self-published books. In a fairly short period of time this had changed. Now there are many blogs that vary in content, angle, tone and presentation. What still seems to be lacking, however, is a good all-purpose online self-publishing forum. I have belonged to several forums over the years but they all seems to either fade away, descend into acrimony or become wedded to a certain company or dogma.

For some time I was fairly happy at the Lulu forums but I find I just can't learn to love their new format. So, can anyone out there recommend a forum good for keeping up with the world of self-publishing? Or would you like to start one? (I sure as hell am not going to.) Failing that I might settle for a good yahoogroup or similar mechanism. All I ask is that the topic be self-publishing, at least a few of people participating should have some idea what they are talking about, and that I don't have to drink the KoolAid or bring pom poms.

8 comments:

Vixen Phillips said...

Depends what you're looking for. Forum/blog wise there's the self publishing review at http://www.selfpublishingreview.com, while on yahoo groups there's pod_publishers at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/pod_publishers/, mostly dedicated to the ins and outs of working with LSI, and the self-publishers group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Self-Publishing/

:D

Cheryl Anne Gardner said...

Joel over at The Book designer.com listed his favorite forums for self-publishing these days:

http://www.thebookdesigner.com/2010/02/top-5-discussion-forums-for-self-publishers/

Henry Baum said...

I'm obviously an advocate for Self-Publishing Review, but it's a sort of non-conventional forum set-up. Also take a look at http://selfpublishing.cc

Emily Veinglory: said...

Um, I like SPR and all, but it isn't a forum....

Emily Veinglory: said...

Thanks fot the links, i am checking them out :)

Henry Baum said...

Have you seen - http://www.selfpublishingreview.com/forums ?

Dusk Peterson said...

"but they all seems to either fade away"

*Cough, cough*, yes.

Like Vixen Phillips, I recommend POD Publishers and Self-Publishing at Yahoo Groups. They're heavily oriented toward Lightning Source discussions, but they also have lots of book design discussion that are also helpful to folks publishing through other services.

Emily Veinglory: said...

Henry, ah, now I see it. Thanks :)
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