You’re still here? OK, let me tell you why you should go read this book.
First of all, it lays bare some of the ugly truths about self-publishing. It is not a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a lot of hard work. In the beginning, you won’t sell much of anything at all. Friends and family will look at you funny and talk in concerned whispers behind your back. Bills will pile up. You’ll fly in faith of the awful-sounding Yog’s Law. But for some us, it’s the best thing ever.
Their title pretty much sums up the recipe for success. Write. Keep writing. Never stop. Publish that writing. Get it in shape. Make it awesome. Put on a cover that does not look like it was made by your 3-year-old master de crayon. And then do it again, again, again, and once more… again.
The talk a little about productivity techniques, about how writing faster does not mean writing crud, and how a lot of time, it’s just about putting your butt in the chair and writing instead of being out and about talking about how someday soon, you’re going to write.
They also talk about doing the publishing side of. It’s not a step-by-step guide to filling out the forms on Amazon or Kobo. Rather, they talk about the things to look for, the things to watch out for, and how to think about your publishing goals. Ultimately, they encourage you to establish a direct connection to your readers to help you survive any disruption for any particular vendor.
And on the repeat side? It’s more than just a commandment to go at it again. They talk about why it’s important to build up a large collection of books to sell and how to best leverage that growing inventory into increased sales. They give ideas of how to cast a wide net and funnel those readers into successive purchases of your extra books, as well as how those extra books can help you those readers find you in the first place.
Mostly, the book is about strategies that should work for the next five, ten, heck, even twenty years. These are not the latest tricks for gaming the Amazon ranking algorithms. These are plans for the long haul of building a career.
I only have two quibbles, both relatively minor. They push Scrivener as though it’s a must have. It isn’t. It makes something easier. It makes other things harder – at least, for me. Find the tool that works best for you. Second, they are mostly geared towards writing shorter novellas linked into series, i.e. each “book” is about 20-30,000 words long. I find I can’t write that short. That does not invalidate any of their strategies, however. It just means it takes longer to implement them.
So yes, if you’re thinking about self-publishing, read this book.
This is the start of a new urban fantasy series that is based on perhaps the greatest fanfic idea in history: mages whose fundamental magic is to pull physical items out of books. Need a ray gun? A magical potion? Excalibur, the Sword of Kings? Just pop down to your local bookstore, flip to the right page, and pull it out.
This is something of a prequel to The Engines of God where we see Priscilla Hutchins’ early days after getting pilots license for taking the big FTL interstellars out into the void. A lot of her early days are the frustration of not being able to get a steady job as a pilot, especially after she blew off one such job over an ethical issue. She still gets a little work here and there, but mostly she’s parked at a desk. 
This was the final book in the WWW trilogy, showing the emergence of an intelligence within the framework of the internet, named Webmind. The first two books dealt with its creation and then its early forays into the public light. This last one deals with how it and humanity come to terms for peaceful coexistence.
This is the culmination of the Codex Alera series, and it goes out with a bang. Tavi is coming back to Alera leading a most unusual army, only to find that his fellow Alerans are up against the wall with the merciless Vord crushing their greatest strongholds and killing their strongest furycrafting lords. At least by this point, Tavi is finally coming into his own furycrafting strength, but even he is no match for the might of the Vord. Then again, Tavi has always been smarter than he was strong, and he makes good use of that in this final war.
This is another book in the Old Man’s War universe, and it takes place during the same time period as The Last Colony. In fact, it covers many of the same events as The Last Colony, but it does it from a different POV, specifically Zoe’s.
This is the third in Rowland’s White Trash Zombie series, and it has kept up the brain-munching pace of the earlier books. Things with her kind-of boyfriend are still in the one-shamble-forward, two-shambles-back stage. Her alcoholic dad is struggling to reform. And zombie mafia and evil corporations are still using her as a pawn in their shadow war. Did I just say zombie mafia? Why yes… yes I did.
This is the second in the Alex Verus series, an urban fantasy about a mage living in London. What makes this series particularly interesting is that you won’t see Alex slinging fireballs or lightning bolts. While there are plenty of those around, Alex isn’t that kind of mage. Instead, he’s a diviner, someone who has the ability to see into the many possible futures lying ahead of him. It’s great help in a maze, but not so obviously useful in a firefight. 
This was an odd time-travel story. The only thing that travelled back in time, really, was information, but it did so in an impressive way. Giant statues and monoliths began popping up in southeast Asia to commemorate some warlord’s victory… twenty-three years into the future. They result in political instability in the region as well as study in how such things are possible. This ends up being the ultimate in self-fulfilling prophecy: scientists figure out how to make these happen and the affected regions start falling apart, making them ripe targets for any warlord who wants to snatch up the mantle and declare himself to be the anonymous Kuin. 
This was one of Heinlein’s juvenile books from the 1950s. It’s the tale of a young slave, Thorby, rise from the very bottom of society – a beggar’s slave – to the pinnacle of corporate wealth and power. I confess my motivation for reading this was that someone compared a bit of my own work to it, so I thought I would go check it out. I hadn’t read any Heinlein in perhaps 20 years, so I figured it was time to look again.