Nick Spalding, author of the experimental written-all-in-one-sitting novel Life…With No Breaks (readers on Amazon seem to either love it or hate it), announced yesterday that he’s launched a new indie author blog called Spalding’s Racket:

I’ve created [it] to promote books written by independent authors.

It’s a place for you to find out about new books you might like to read.

I’m making sure that only professionally laid out books make it on the blog. It’s not a review site per se, but I won’t be posting just anything up and will comment as and where I can.

For readers, you can think of it as a sort of “this author recommends” source to help you discover new indie authors. For authors, you can submit your book to Spalding for consideration.

It’s a very young blog–less than a week old and just three recommendations as of this post–and so far the focus has been on sci-fi and fantasy. Still, there’s no telling what Spalding will post in the coming months, and it might be worth adding to your RSS feed to see what develops.

spaldings-racket.blogspot.com [found via Amazon forums]

Sci-fi writer M. David Blake wants to help solve that problem, so he and MobileRead are holding a virtual ebook signing this week. Between now and Wednesday, July 14th, you can email him directly and he’ll send you a free personalized copy of his short story “We Don’t Plummet Out of the Sky Anymore” in both ePub and mobi formats. (Mobi is Kindle-ready.)

So how does virtual ebook signing work? A lot like traditional book signing, it turns out, at least in the beginning of the process. On MobileRead Blake explains that for each incoming request, he signs and numbers a blank page of paper, scans it in, converts it into a “unique, numbered flyleaf,” inserts it into the manuscript, and generates new copies to send to the reader.

“MobileRead is hosting an eBook Signing Event!” [MobileRead]

Self-publishing isn’t a new concept, but with every new development in e-publishing it becomes a more viable option for some writers. Here’s a guy who’s bypassing both vanity-presses and mainstream publishers by getting readers to pitch in and pay him directly for a book before he’s even written published it. Call it a reader-funded advance.

Robin Sloan is a blogger who previously published a short story, Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store, on the Kindle (you can buy it here for 99 cents). I stumbled across him on Kickstarter, a website where people can post ideas for projects and ask others around the world to sponsor them.

Frequently, though not always, those who donate will receive something in return. That’s how Sloan set up his project; if enough people donated to meet a minimum threshold, he’d write the novel and distribute it to all participants. If they donated more than the minimum, they’d get extras like a printed and autographed copy or an acknowledgment in the final version.

So what’s the novel about? Here’s Sloan’s quick description:

Imagine a Sherlock Holmes for the 21st century. All the really good cases are on the internet. And Holmes is a woman, and Watson is an A.I., and San Francisco… oh, poor San Francisco…

Maybe Sloan set his sights too low, or maybe he’s just got really supportive fans, but he’s blown way past his initial fundraising goal twice over now and is still collecting funds. In the meantime, he’s finished his book and has farmed it out to select readers for a little community-based editing, and today he reported that he’s finished editing it and will release it in less than 30 hours, on November 1st, 2009. Anyone who donates at least $1 before then will receive a PDF copy of the book, which you can convert to a Kindle friendly format either by emailing it to Amazon or by using a free desktop program like Calibre. Or you can wait for it to potentially show up on the Kindle store, but it’s likely going to cost more than a dollar.

I donated the buck. Since I don’t know Sloan’s writing style at all, I figured I’d play it safe. That’s partly what’s brilliant about his “pay what you want” plan, because it lets people like me pay the minimum to sample his work and support his writing with minimal risk, while his fans can pay much more than that to show that they support his work and that they want him to write more.

You can find out more about the project, and the book, on Sloan’s page on Kickstarter.

Perhaps even more interesting, though, is that for the first time, customers who don’t own a Kindle can purchase Kindle ebooks. This throws open the doors of the Kindle bookstore to millions more customers. What doesn’t change, of course, is the fact that the titles remain DRM-shackled. But for the savvy user who knows how to remove the DRM, you suddenly have access to what’s still the cheapest ebook store on the planet. For now, at any rate.

(Update: it looks like as of this weekend, Amazon has pulled down the serial number from your “Manage My Kindle” page, which you need in order to remove the DRM. However, it also looks like some clever readers have already figured out another way to locate it.)

You may have noticed that Amazon is only extending the service to iPhone/iPod Touch users right now, which I think indicates that its real reason to release the app isn’t to benefit customers but to squash iPhone competitors like Stanza, which sucked up a lot of publicity as a “Kindle killer” late last year. In fact, no other mobile platform has been released (although Bezos says this is just the first of several). Tellingly, a PC or java-for-mobile-devices version wasn’t released first, which would likely have been of benefit to a greater number of customers–but wouldn’t have the same effectiveness at drawing publicity, or at winning the PR battle for ebooks on the Apple platform.

“First Look: Amazon Launches Kindle iPhone App” [Washington Post]
“Is Amazon’s Kindle iPhone app crippled or companion? CFO says companion” [ZDNet]
“Comparing Kindle 2 with Kindle’s iPhone app” [Crave]

Here’s a larger version of Poe, looking sufficiently melancholy. Probably thinking of what rhymes with sepulchre or something like that.

A reader asked me about a Poe screensaver, so I decided to make one. My god, he looks gloomy. That’s Poe for ya.