To which I commented  Monopolies are generally evil, and I hold no brief for Amazon.com– although why Amazon’s evil makes Barnes & Noble and Big Publishing into good guys is beyond me.  B&N with their end-of-the-aisle bribe stacks and books with a shorter shelf life than yoghurt.  Puh-leeze.

I personally have published with big publishers, small ones, university presses, and an independent co-operative press.  While I am, at least for the moment, still a member of the Authors Guild, I do not find them representing my interests.  AG works for  Scott Turow and  others who make a lot of money selling books.  I’m glad Mr. Turow and his ilk have a guild to represent them, but don’t let the Authors Guild fool you into thinking it does anything for people who don’t sell a lot of books.

So we’re living in interesting times.  Lean back and enjoy the ride.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/technology/amazon-rewrites-the-rules-of-book-publishing.html?ref=technology

In the Amazon business model, there’s no advance, and often no agent, although some agents are beginning to participate as publishers.  I have to say that my sympathy for the big commercial publishers  (not that Amazon isn’t or won’t be one soon) is very limited.  They dropped me unceremoniously 25 years ago– well, not entirely true, that was Scribner’s.  My last big publisher was HarperCollins for the Marco kid books, and that was only fifteen years ago– anyhow, the bottom line is, Conventional publishers dropped me and a lot of my friends– mid-list and literary writers of high repute and great accomplishment– and we’ve been scrambling ever since.  I’ve used small presses, nonprofit presses, university presses, cooperative presses:  I’ve published with all of these, as well as with Scribner’s and HarperCollins, and had Sc & HC been more nurturing of me when I was not a best seller for them, I might be less ready to embrace the Great Change going on now with ebooks and self publishing.  There are myriad problems including, at the very least, who are the gatekeepers, but also vast opportunities.  And for me, a lot of fun too.  The opportunities include simply being able to make books available to people who who might want to read them– miniscule numbers beside what bestseller oriented publishers except, but human beings, readers, communication.  I have been having a great time with my various ventures.

Basically, it’s one more sign of how it’s all in flux, if you ask me.

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.

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!

It would appear that I am ending the same way, as a full service book maker.  Yes, I have a book coming out from a university press in a couple of months, published in the conventional way, and yes, my book on writing novels is about to be published by a smaller press, and yes, I intend to continue to get attention (and cash) from large commercial presses.

But this digital age is allowing me to have a wonderful time making books again.  I am formatting some of our Hamilton Stone Editions books for e-readers; I keep web sites with information and reviews for Hamilton Stone and for myself.  I am learning how to do a (hard copy) book cover using templates provided by printers, and how to make a book block that is readable and attractive.

One of the most wonderful things about childhood has always been that healthy human young are generalists: they dance and sing and throw balls and cook and run and pick flowers and pretend and make art and act and tell stories.  Growing up is, from one angle, all about specializing.  By the teen years,  some of us are athletes, some are Brains, some are artsy, some are musical, some already making money.

So I feel that this digital world is  enlarging my scope again.