Traditonal or self publishing? As publishing options change and more and more authors find success self publishing, what is the best option for authors?

Catherine Ryan Howard and Mick Rooney argue for Self Publishing; Ruth Long  and Eoin Purcell argue for Traditional Publishing in a debate chaired by journalist Hazel Gaynor.

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Speakers Biographies:

Catherine Ryan Howard

Catherine Ryan Howard is the coffee-guzzling twenty-something behind the popular blog, Catherine, Caffeinated. In March 2010 she self-published her travel memoir, Mousetrapped: A Year and A Bit in Orlando, Florida, using the Print-On-Demand service CreateSpace, Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing and Smashwords. Using free promotional tools like blogging, Twitter and Facebook, she managed to make Mousetrapped an Amazon bestseller and sell 4,000 copies of it in a year. Her success story has been featured in The Sunday Times, Sunday Independent and Irish Times newspapers, and Catherine has been interviewed on BBC Radio Ulster, Newstalk and RTÉ Radio's Marian Finucane Show. To date she has sold more than 11,000 self-published books—without spending any money on marketing or advertising. She lives in Cork, Ireland, where she divides her time between her desk and the sofa. She wants to be a NASA astronaut when she grows up. (She's 28.)

Mick Rooney

Mick Rooney is an author who runs the online Independent Publishing Magazine.

Independent Publishing Magazine launched in late 2007 with the purpose of providing essential information, resources and reviews of author solutions services. In the beginning our exclusive focus was self-publishing and POD (Print-on-demand) technology. However, over the past two years, with the increasing and rapid changes in the publishing industry, we found ourselves writing more often about self-publishing and author solutions services within the book and publishing industry.

Ruth Long

R.F. Long always had a thing for fantasy, romance and ancient mysteries. The combination was bound to cause trouble. In university she studied English Literature, History of Religions and Celtic Civilisation, which just compounded the problem.

Her Holtlands Novella The Wolf’s Sister: a Tale of the Holtlands , its sequel The Wolf’s Mate (which are also collected in the print volume Songs of the Wolf) and her novels The Scroll Thief: a Tale of Ithian and the paranormal romance novel  Soul Fire are now available from Samhain Publishing.

She is represented by Suzie Townsend of Nancy Coffey Literary Management.

Her YA dark fantasy The Treachery of Beautiful Things is coming 16th August 2012 from Dial Books for Young Readers.

Eoin Purcell

Eoin Purcell is Commissioning Editor at New Island, having previously been Commissioning Editor at Mercier Press and Nonsuch Ireland. He is also Editor at Irish Publishing News.

Chair

Hazel Gaynor

Hazel Gaynor is a freelance journalist, writing regular feature articles for The Irish Independent and Irish Examiner. She also writes  for several magazines and websites in Ireland and the UK.  Her award-winning parenting and lifestyle blog ‘Hot Cross Mum’ has been featured on national radio and TV and was self-published as an ebook ‘Hot Cross Mum: Bitesize Slices of Motherhood’ in March 2010. Hazel is a contributor and featured guest blogger forwriting.ie and also writes a book review blog forhellomagazine.com, interviewing authors such as Jojo Moyes, Zoe Miller, Katie Fforde, Melissa Hill, Monica McInerney and others. Originally from North Yorkshire, England, Hazel now lives with her husband and two young children in County Kildare. Hazel is represented by Sheila Crowley of Curtis Brown, London