Introducing Indie Selections on Palace Marketplace
Library lovers and self-published authors have a lot in common—they share a passion for books and reading and a desire to democratize access. For many years we at DPLA have heard interest from librarians in acquiring self-published titles. But because the corpus of self-published titles is so vast, deciding what to include in a library collection can feel like an overwhelming task to busy library selectors. When DPLA added our Indie Catalog, with nearly 500,000 self-published titles, to Palace Marketplace last year, we set out to alleviate this burden on libraries by creating Indie Selections, our own selections of self-published titles, carefully curated by our Curation Corps of librarians.
Curation Corps member Miriam Tuliao, a publishing professional and adjunct library science instructor at Queens College, has been leading the creation of these selections for Palace Marketplace. Previously Miriam spent more than a decade leading branch collection development for The New York Public Library. She is joined in this work by fellow Curation Corps members Jill Egan,an experienced school librarian, and Sarah Kuperman, who has more than 15 years of selection experience experience and is currently Electronic Resources Librarian at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Maryland. Together they have been reading and reviewing hundreds of the most popular self-published titles and carefully selecting those they think would be good choices for libraries.
Some of the Curation Corps members’ favorites include, Tyora Moody’s A Spicy Predicament ($9.99) and Elodie Hart’s A Deadly Competition ($5.99), which they describe as “surefire picks for fans of lighthearted cozies and gentle crime fiction.” They also recommend Douglas Smith’s action-packed The Hollow Boys ($13.99) and the rest of his The Dream Rider Saga and Intisar Khanani’s captivating Sunbolt ($19.99) are two YA fantasy series standouts.
You can browse more than 150 selections from our Indie Catalog on the Palace Marketplace, including adult fiction, science fiction and fantasy, romance, mysteries, and children’s and YA fiction titles. All of these titles are available on the perpetual one-at-a-time license model and all are very reasonably priced–some are free and the vast majority are less than $10.
As always, you can find out more about The Palace Project here and browse Palace Marketplace here. If you’d like to talk more about how The Palace Project can help you maximize access for patrons, feel free to contact me.
DPLA’s ebook work is supported by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.