Welcome to AskALLi, the self-publishing advice broadcast from the Alliance of Independent Authors. This week it's our monthly IndieVoices' self-publishing salon with interviews conducted by ALLi Managing Editor Howard Lovy and updates from News Editor Dan Holloway.

This Month's IndieVoices

You or your kids are going back to school now, but as we all know, the excitement comes with anxiety. Financial anxiety. Among the many costs of a college education, one thing that many parents fail to account for is the high cost of textbooks. My guest today is David Harris, editor in chief of OpenStax, based at Rice University, which has a solution to the problem. 

David and I discuss how more colleges and universities are using free, open-license textbooks. At OpenStax, they all go through a peer-review process. Students enjoy them because they're free and instructors like the way they can be tailored to individual lessons. Free, open-license textbooks are changing the way we think about educational publishing.

News editor Dan Holloway, who just retained his crown as the European speed reading champion, talks about the piracy problem in book publishing, and the different ways to crowdsource your podcast. 

Find more author advice, tips and tools at our Self-publishing Author Advice Center: https://selfpublishingadvice.org, with a huge archive of nearly 2,000 blog posts, and a handy search box to find key info on the topic you need.

And, if you haven’t already, we invite you to join our organization and become a self-publishing ally. You can do that at http://allianceindependentauthors.org.

Now, go write and publish!

About the Hosts

Howard Lovy has been a journalist for more than 30 years, and has spent the last five years amplifying the voices of independent publishers and authors. He works with authors as a "book doctor" to prepare their work to be published. Howard is also a freelance business and technology writer, and is launching a new Jewish-themed podcast on Patreon. Find Howard on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Dan Holloway is a novelist, poet and spoken word artist. He is the MC of the performance arts show The New Libertines Earlier this year he competed at the National Poetry Slam final at the Royal Albert Hall. His latest collection, The Transparency of Sutures, is available on Kindle