Notable IndieReader Discovery Award Winners

Independent publishing is clearly showing no signs of slowing, as indicated by Bowker’s recent announcement that a whopping 211,269 titles were self-published in 2011, up from a mere 133,036 in 2010. The news came during the uPublishU (formerly DIY) seminar that kicked off this year’s BEA season on June 3. The one-day self-publishing bonanza also saw the announcement of the winners of friend-of-Kirkus IndieReader’s first Discovery Awards.

As a former editor of Kirkus Indie, I had the pleasure of serving as a judge for the contest, and the fact that the books to which ...

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Michael Ian Black on Sex, Marriage, Death

You may know Michael Ian Black best from cult comedy hits such as The State, Stella, Viva Variety, Wet Hot American Summer and Michael & Michael Have Issues; his work on VH1’s I Love The…series; or NBC’s Ed. But he’s also an author, having penned several children’s books, including Chicken Cheeks (which received a star), as well as a collection of comedic essays, My Custom Van.

His new book, You’re Not Doing It Right, focuses on his relationship with his wife and their growing family while also delving into Black’s own childhood. Here, he ...

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Karen Cantwell's Success with 'Take the Monkeys and Run'

Karen Cantwell tried to take her manuscript Monkeys in My Tree on the traditional route to publishication, querying agents and publishers, and eventually entering it into Amazon’s 2009 Breakthrough Novel Award Contest. When she reached the semifinals but didn’t land a publishing contract, she took the feedback she had received, did some rewriting, including changing the title to Take the Monkeys and Run, and restarted the querying process. Despite some interest, traditional publishing was a no-go. So Cantwell went back to Amazon, self-published through Kindle and has now sold nearly 28,000 e-books since June 15, 2010. Here ...

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Indie Wonder Karen McQuestion's Encore

Karen McQuestion is been one of the biggest names in the current crop of successful independent authors, selling tens of thousands of e-books, having a self-published novel optioned for a film and being featured in the Wall Street Journal and on ABC News.

More recently, Amazon, with whom she originally self-published via the Kindle, has published some of her works through AmazonEncore, the online retailer’s foray into traditional publishing. The result? Rubbing elbows with Stieg Larsson and Jonathan Franzen.

Read more of the Best Indie Books of 2011.

Have you seen a bump in sales since having your books ...

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Genre Fiction Keeps Indies Kickin'

Genre fiction, e-books and self-publishing comprise the holy trinity for indie authors—just ask Amanda Hocking or John Locke, who have each sold over a million e-books of their self-published paranormal and thriller titles respectively. The portability and ease of e-readers cry out for the page-turning power of pulp, and the lower price point of digital books gives self-pubbers a better chance at luring audiences into unfamiliar waters.

Are you a self-published author? Learn more about getting your book discovered at Kirkus Indie.

So the recent arrival of Book Country, the online community dedicated to genre fiction that Penguin launched ...

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From the Indie Desk: Getting Hitched Made Easy

Maybe it’s the DIY-er in me (Kirkus Indie editor, self-published author, duct-tape aficionado), but as my wedding day approached this past July, I grew increasingly anxious about the marriage-industrial complex, that gaggle of artisanal mercenaries you need for the rings, tux, dress, cake, flowers, photos, music and more necessary to pull off this supposedly intimate, emotional merging of two souls.

Do you have a book you'd like feedback on? Check out Kirkus Indie.

I’m no masochist, so it’s not like we were really going to do everything ourselves (and my fiancée handled the lion’s ...

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The Occupy Wall Street Library

One of the great things about having our editorial offices in New York is being a part of a vibrant, socially and culturally active city. On the way to the office today, we dropped by the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests out of historical curiosity and were intrigued to find that between the mattresses and the drum circle, the encampment also had a library...

Read reviews of more titles from the Occupy Wall Street library.

...which was broken down to sections of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and more...

We browsed the aisles (well, aisle) and noticed a few familiar faces, including ...

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Fast Times in Jim Lehrer's 'Tension City'

Jim Lehrer is one of the most trusted names in journalism. Besides helping to found the long running NewsHour on PBS with colleague Robert McNeil in the mid-'70s and winning numerous awards for journalistic excellence, he’s also been called upon time and again to moderate presidential debates, starting with 1988’s contest between George H.W. Bush and Michael Dukakis and running through the 2008 election season.

In Tension City (the name taken from a comment the elder Bush made in reference to his distaste for debates), Lehrer gives an insider’s look at the history and nuances ...

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This is Demetri Martin

Demetri Martin is a wordsmith, as fans of the comedian’s work on The Daily Show and Late Night with Conan O’Brien, as well as his album These Are Jokes and Comedy Central series Important Things with Demetri Martin, will tell you. Now he’s given his linguistic curiosities room to run in his first book, aptly titled This is a Book. Martin created new material specifically for the project, with a few adaptations and elaborations of some of his standup jokes. Here he talks to us about figuring out how to write a book, the importance of daydreaming ...

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Monty Python's Michael Palin talks 'Halfway to Hollywood'

Best-known as a member of the British comedy group Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Michael Palin has also written and acted in numerous films and TV shows, hosted a slew of globetrotting travel programs and is the current president of the Royal Geographic Society. This man of many talents also combined the willpower he used to quit smoking with his boyhood passion for making lists (of footballers, of trains he’d seen and of movies he’d watched—“I used to put a comment at the end, and the comments ranged from ‘brilliant’ to ‘fabulous.’ There was not a single ...

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Shy Michael Showalter

Michael Showalter—one of the comedians behind the TV shows The State, Stella and Michael & Michael Have Issues, not to mention the cult film Wet Hot American Summer—didn't want to talk to us. I guess our review of his newly released Mr. Funny Pants didn't go over well. All we did was call it "review-resistant humor—probably just for the fans."

And you know what?

I'm a fan.

WANT MORE FUNNY BOOKS? Check out our reviews of My Custom Van, Sleepwalk With Me and My Horizontal Life.

But he still didn't talk to us.

Having ...

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2010 Best Books: Charlie Chan, by Yunte Huang

“On the one hand, [Charlie Chan] embodies the racist legacy of American culture, which is racial ventriloquism,” says Yunte Huang. “On the other hand, embedded in this racial ventriloquism is also some kind of amazing, creative genius.” Huang, who came to the United States in ’91 with a bachelor’s degree in English from Peking University, first encountered Earl Derr Biggers’ “honorable detective” at an estate sale where he picked up two volumes of a Charlie Chan collection for a dollar a piece. He was earning his doctorate from SUNY Buffalo’s Poetics Program at the time and was drawn ...

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Kirkus Q&A - H.W. Brands

In his latest book, American Colossus: The Triumph of Capitalism, 1865-1900, H.W. Brands revisits the 19th century, a period he calls “the real seedtime of modern America.” Here, the University of Texas history professor and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist discusses modern capitalism, money and tweeting haikus with Kirkus.

How did this project come about?

The chief characteristic of modern America is that it is a capitalist democracy. I had written about the development of democracy when I wrote about Andrew Jackson (Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, 2005). It’s during the second half [of the 19th century] that ...

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