Author Collectives Signal a New Chapter for Self-publishing

A new public service is emerging online: authors and readers who are sifting through the morass of self-published books out there to find the quality titles amid the dross. I was alerted to the development of what are being called "electronic author cooperatives" by ghostwriter and novelist Andrew Crofts, who writes about them on his blog.

Crofts highlights a couple: the one he's a part of, Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?, which hosts posts from 28 different writers, and Awesome Indies, which promises "quality books by independently published authors".