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 ‘technology’
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.
Our Brains on Multi-Task
Monday, June 7th, 2010According to today’s New York Times, our brains are being reformatted (our vocabularies too) by our devices, gadgets and, especially, our propensity for multi-tasking: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?ref=todayspaper . For the record, I read this on large sheets of dead tree material at my kitchen table over coffee and Crispix.
The Beauty of Non-Specialization
Monday, April 12th, 2010I write occasionally about how I began life as a book maker: how I loved to cut little pages and staple them together, color the covers, invent trademarks, and even, if I didn’t lose interest, writing an actual story to fill the pages.
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.
Smashed!
Sunday, March 28th, 2010I’ve got a book uploaded to Smashwords.com! It cost me some time, but no cash. Take a look at Trespassers– and tell me what you think! We’re going to put up more books from Hamilton Stone if this seems worth the trouble.
Smashing a book
Saturday, March 27th, 2010I’m working on an experiment with a Hamilton Stone Editions version of one of my books. Using a site called Smashwords , I’m rather painstakingly turning a word processed manuscript (already published in hard copy) into a format that Smashwords will then run through some software called The Meatgrinder, and spew out the other end several versions readable by Kindle, the Nook, and more. Everything from EPUB to .pdf.
There is no charge upfront, and the service is not exclusive, as best I can read their information. The publisher/writer gets back a little if anyone buys/downloads a book. On the other hand, you don’t own the files in the specially formatted versions.
So the experiment is, does this work? Is it worth the labor (my favorite phrase: Is the Game Worth the Candle?), and will anyone conceivably buy the books?
If anyone has any experience with Smashwords, please let me know! Most of their books appear to be self-published single book deals, lots of science fiction and other genre, but more and more small publishers seem to be using it. This is, in my mind, a stop gap, something to do while things sort themselves out.
But I want our books available to read once I buy an e-reader!
Niffenegger won’t go electronic!
Friday, March 12th, 2010I just read Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time-Traveler’s Wife , a really good love story with a two hanky ending. Of course, it’s also speculative fiction, and clever, and all that, but mainly, it’s love, with the tiniest hint of pedophilia that no one could object to. Niffenegger herself is an artist and art teacher, and on her web site there are FAQ’s that include a question about why her books aren’t available as e-books, and she explains that as someone who creates books as physical objects as an artist as well as writing them, she on principle insists that her books remain objects. As an artist, she makes a good point. For me, it has never been the books, although I’ve always loved illustrations, but rather the trip: you go in that place and go far, far away. So I’m anything but doctrinaire about the object, having always preferred paperbacks, for example, to hardcovers.