the diamonds in the self-published rough
August 12, 2006 8:56 PM   Subscribe

POD-dy Mouth - a blog reviewing the best of print-on-demand (self-published) books: "finding needles, discarding hay". Also with commentary on the industry itself, and great snark (1, 2). Take her quiz: can you spot the POD excerpts from the traditionally published? (Answers here.)
posted by Melinika (9 comments total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
Great post!
posted by nunia at 9:09 PM on August 12, 2006


I knew there was a reason why I stayed up "late". Awesome post! Thanks!
posted by Stynxno at 9:11 PM on August 12, 2006


Ha! 60%!
Suck it, writers!

Side note: Man, there's some craptastic writing in that quiz; on first glace I woulda pegged all the excerpts as being amateur hour, with maybe one or two exceptions.
Kinda sad, really.

posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:15 PM on August 12, 2006


a good self-published book I can think of, or rather the only one, would be Brian Clevinger's (of 8 bit Theater fame) Nuklear Age. It has all the problems of a bad POD book, such as bad grammar, whimsical punctuation, too long, repetitive, blahblahblah.

But it's also highly entertaining, and would make for a great book if edited.
posted by shmegegge at 9:32 PM on August 12, 2006


This rocks, many thanks.
posted by paduasoy at 2:18 AM on August 13, 2006


POD refers to the printing process... it looks like the real topic is "self publishing". Sort of like having a coal and lignite blog when the real topic is barbecuing.
posted by rolypolyman at 7:50 AM on August 13, 2006


This is great; thanks for posting it. Her opening salvo is worth a read. It's a neat idea for a blog, and she's already made a splash in publishing:

In less than one week, three of the five authors of the POD-dy Picks profiled in the Entertainment Weekly piece have been offered representation--by excellent agents, too. Holy cow. And one of the five has been tapped for the movie rights for his book. Holy cow again.

Very cool. Thanks again, Melinika!
posted by mediareport at 8:50 AM on August 13, 2006


We have a room at work where unwanted promos and bound galleys go for anyone to take. The amount of POD/vanity press stuff is staggering. It tends to stay there for a long time too.
posted by PinkStainlessTail at 11:37 AM on August 13, 2006


It's a weird time for the arts now that DIY is so much easier. Anybody can publish a book or CD or film, right from their computer. In so many ways, this is extremely exciting. The main problem is that there is a whole lot more of it now, and they can't all be classics, unfortunately.

We've begun to see services pop up to sift through all this stuff for us, since the numbers are so overwhelming. Maybe soon there will be something more automated and "If you like this, here are more suggestions"-oriented for self-published books, like Pandora and Last.fm do for music. In the meantime, however, it's good to see authors getting noticed through something like this.
posted by First Post at 1:00 PM on August 13, 2006


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