by Tom Ashford

Welcome to the SPF Weekly Write-Up, where each Wednesday we collect together the self-publishing news of the week so you don’t have to.

A quiet one this week: the Kindle now supports Traditional Chinese, and a traditionally published book gets its facts very badly wrong.

The Kindle Now Supports Traditional Chinese

No doubt in an attempt to open up its devices to one of the largest markets on the planet, Amazon have added Traditional Chinese as a language for its Kindle ereaders.

To mark this change, 20,000 books in Traditional Chinese have been added to the Kindle store. Some are original, and some are translations of popular books included George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. And the new language doesn’t only benefit readers, either – authors can now self-publish in the language too.

You can read more about the new language support here.

Even Traditionally Published Authors Get it Wrong

Next time somebody claims that indie books aren’t as polished or well-edited as those released by traditional publishers, remind them of the unfortunate tale of Naomi Wolf’s ‘Outrages’.

In her book, Wolf claimed that a great number of young men in Victorian Britain had been executed (“death recorded”) long after the last supposed U.K. execution and, to an extent, hinged her entire book on this revelatory fact.

Only it turns out that “death recorded” means that the person on trial was pardoned instead. Neither the author or her publisher realised this fairly important error until somebody brought it up during a live radio interview. Awkward.

The moral of the story: do your homework, and never assume that a traditionally published book is more professionally researched or put together than any other.

You can read more about the story here.

Tom Ashford

Tom Ashford is a professional copywriter, author of numerous dark fantasy and sci-fi novels, and the Head of Content at the Self Publishing Formula Blog. His books include the Blackwater trilogy and the Checking Out series.

He lives in London with his wife, in an apartment that doesn’t allow pets. Find out more about Tom here.