An article in The Wall Street Journal tells about best selling business author Seth Godin who has decided to cut his ties to his commercial publisher and go electronic and/or print-on-demand. He says he’ll hire a professional editor and formatter, and sell his books directly to his hundreds of thousands of blog readers and book fans.
Posts Tagged ‘ebooks’
Best Selling Business Author Dumps Publishing Business Model
Thursday, August 26th, 2010Old published books– Going digital…
Thursday, August 19th, 2010I am still splashing around in the web water, not always quite sure why I do what I do, but the one thing that has become clear to me is that whatever I write, web-based or hard copy, it has to be digital.
My latest book (just published: a short story collection called Out of the Mountains ) had electronic galleys that came to me by email. I was supposed to print them out and mark them, but some publishers I’m told are asking the authors to do mark-up electronically as well.
But here’s the point: I have at least three books from the early nineteen eighties when I was first publishing that are out of print from the original publishers and were never digital in the first place. A couple of them can be ordered now through the wonders of one-book-at-a-time technology (the hard copy was scanned in as .pdf files), but as I begin to prepare some of my books for e-readers, I wanted to get them scanned in as word processer files so I can make changes and digitalize for e-readers.
I’ve now done one with a pleasant-to-work-with company in Missouri called Golden Images, LLC. If you try them write to Stan Drew, who may be the whole show, but is in any case very responsive to email. The price is less that .50 a page, much less for .pdf files, but I think most of us with old books want the word processor files. Even with Stan’s good work, I am having to go through the book (Higher Ground) looking for anomalies (apostrophes that became Greek sigmas, etc.) but that’s fine because I wanted to see how the book felt anyhow– this was a book that I wanted at one point to make changes in, but couldn’t face retyping. So I’ll take my time and have fun.
More later about the differences in a typewritten book and a word processed book.
David’s Kindle
Saturday, July 17th, 2010We’re at the lake with Andy’s brother David, and David has a Kindle. It’s a first generation Kindle, and David says he uses it primarily for reading fiction– pleasure reading. He says he doesn’t use it for anything that he would take notes on. I fooled around with it for twenty minutes, as I have in the past, but this time more serious about turning it on, reading some pages of Booth Tarkington’s Magnificent Ambersons, turning pages, testing larger font sizes (can I read without my glasses?– yes, but such short pages who wants to?), tried it outside on the hammock, and yes, sun and shade, very readable. He says images and maps, photos of, say, the subject of a biography– all of that is pretty useless, as is the miniature keyboard at the bottom.
And! He has an app for his computer that reads books for Kindle, and he bought a copy of Trespassers (Hamilton Stone Editions) from Smashwords and loaded it, and there it was, my first ebook sale, sort of. Well, well, well.
Libraries
Thursday, July 8th, 2010I always loved them, as buildings, as spaces: the dark side of the single standing shelf in the one room woman’s club library in Shinnston, WV, where the grown up books were. Where I met Dostoyevsky.
The awesome lion-guarded 42nd Street Library in New York far more like the Metropolitan Museum than the library where I first took out books. But in some weird way libraries never became my preferred source of books: the books I loved most were in people’s houses (my mother’s set of Charlotte and Emily Bronte with the Rockwell Kent woodcut illustrations; a book of cartoons in my aunt’s house in Scott County Tennessee that were like a twisted version of New York to me– drunk flappers and street urchins, pigeon breasted matrons). I liked to own books. I bought all the Black Stallion books, $2.00 each of birthday and holiday money over several years.
Why did I never bond with libraries? It wasn’t about ownership as much as about intimacy, perhaps. I know people who read constantly from libraries, sometimes visiting several branches in a day to get enough books to tide them over their vacation. And I DID sign out books, stacks of books, but they weren’t mine. I had to return them. There was a vague anxiety about getting them back in a timely fashion, unsoiled, with no dog ears.
Partly, I think I don’t like the social aspect of running into people I know. Reading is deeply private to me. When I read, I leave my body here, and go elsewhere. I trade books on Paperback Swap; I buy cheap used books via Bibliofind and the other places for used books. I look through my husband’s mysteries and thrillers if I’m really at a loss. I hope soon, finally! to have an electronic reader, access to all books, all knowledge, all entertainment, all experience.
Wall Street Journal Notices E-Books..
Thursday, June 3rd, 2010Here’s a summary of what’s happening in e-books from the Wall Street Journal– discusses Lulu and Smashwords along with others. This article contrasts big presses that do e-books with self-publishing, skipping what interests me more, which is small presses like Hamilton Stone Editions.
A Perfect Novel for the E-Reader?
Tuesday, May 25th, 2010Well, I just read a book that seemed like perfect e-reader fare: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson. This is super popular, and I liked it, will probably read the follow-up novels, but I’m not quite sure what the great brouhaha is all about. It is, au fond a thriller/mystery with an unusual (to me) setting, Sweden, and one really good character, the dragon tattoo girl. It was entertaining, but no better written than a lot of thrillers, and you could sense him sort of feeling his way in the beginning.
Bottom line is that I liked it and thought it would be perfect e-reader reading– the book copy we have is already a book club edition with cheap paper, fragile and brittle, developing tiny tears. Who needs this kind of physical object? Better to have the flow of the story electronically?
Ebook on BarnesandNoble.com
Thursday, May 13th, 2010Well, my experiment with ebooks is moving forward: the Hamilton Stone Editions edition of my novel Trespassers about the Columbia University 1968 sit-ins is now available as an ebook on Barnesandnoble.com (just click there and search for “Trespassers by Meredith Sue Willis”). My book, and Carole Rosenthal’s It Doesn’t Have to Be Me, have both been available on Smashwords.com for a while, but this is the first appearance on another site, which Smashwords has been promising.
I am still looking into ereaders. Does anyone out there have one? What do you recommend? I’m thinking seriously about the soon-to-be-released Kobo, which is a hundred dollars cheaper than Nook and Kindle. The disadvantage, if it is one, is you generally have to download books via your computer. This means you can’t be sitting in an airport and download the latest best seller out of the ether I mean 3G network. But since I’m picturing myself rereading Trollope’s Palliser novels on a device, I don’t really care so much if I can’t get Dan Brown’s latest contraption two minutes after it’s released.
Meanwhile, we’re still watching Phoebe Allen’s webcam with her two ugly little naked blue-black balls of baby bird with yellow beaks, not hummingbird beak shaped at all, and a few yellowish pinfeathers on their blue-black body balls. Phoebe looks happy as a clam when she sits on them.
Hamilton Stone Editions’ New E-Books
Saturday, May 8th, 2010The cooperative literary press I work with, Hamilton Stone Editions, has begun putting up versions of our books as ebooks– even though most of the authors do not yet use the devices! Note I say “do not yet,” as I hope before the year is out to try it out. The problem is choosing which device, as the costs are high enough that it seems like a serious expense to me.
To prepare the books has been a hassle: we have to take digital versions of books (no surprise there) and strip out most of the formatting, because each ereader’s software does different weird things, and about the only things that translate are italics and capital letters.
If you get a chance, take a look at our first two books: Carole Rosenthal’s It Doesn’t Have to Be Me, and the final book of my Blair Morgan triology, Trespassers. You do not, by the way, have to have an ereader to read these: one version is a regular old .pdf that anyone with a late model computer can read, if you can stand prose on a computer screen. The advantage of the dedicated ereaders (for thos who don’t know) is that the actual reading experience is far more like book reading than staring at a tv screen.
I would be thrilled and delighted if you’d take a look at smashwords and tell me what you think!