Sold my car today. The ad is gone now, but it generated lots of interest, and some people said they’d buy it just because of the ad. Hey, folks! Buy my books if you want better stories! Behold Granny:
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Money
In defense of ugly jackets
(Or, if I were Hillary Clinton’s speechwriter.)
Do you see this jacket? It’s an Armani jacket. [beat]
What do you think it retails for? $5,000? $7,000? That’s what Donald Trump pays for his designer suits. [beat] [audience boos]
$10,000? No. It retails for $12,495.00. [beat] [audience boos]
But I paid $12.50 for it. Why? Because it’s ugly. I went to Goodwill and I had so much to choose from, an abundance of jackets, but I chose this one. Why? Because it was the most attractive one there. [beat] [audience laughs]
Would you wear this jacket outside the house? No. Nobody with good taste would. It’s warm, I’ll give you that. And roomy. Look how roomy it is. It’s well made. It is an Armani, after all. But it’s ugly. Not only wouldn’t you wear this outside the house, you wouldn’t wear it to a job interview.
Yet that’s what most of you, our working women today, have to choose from: ugly, uglier, and ugliest. [beat] [audience laughs]
The value of knowledge
And this is where slogging through Number One’s crazymaking was worth this gem: “You paid for your training in sweat, money, tears, and sometimes blood. Why are you giving it away?”
As some folks know, my day job is formatting ebooks and designing print books, and otherwise helping authors get where they want to go in the world of self-publishing. I consult with nonprofits, corporations, and churches to manage their in-house publishing divisions.
Crashing my own kitchen
I have assimilated. Sorta.
I have/had a Dell laptop I’ve had for 5 years. That thing has been a workhorse, but it had been having a couple of problems I either found a workaround for or put up with. It was on and cooking 12-18 hours a day every day. It had been reformatted twice, hauled around on vacation and to the library to work on it.
I go through keyboards like crazy because eventually the letters wear off and the fingernail grooves get too deep. That’s not why I get rid of them. I wear them out until they stop working. But I have an external monitor and wireless keyboard and mice. The most vulnerable parts of the machine were protected.
So my laptop’s been well taken care of, the keys are still relatively pristine, as is the screen. I was running XP Pro with Office 2000 (you can see my reasons why here).
But 5 years is a long time and beyond its expected lifespan. Dude was getting worried it would die in the middle of a huge deadline. We decided to get a new laptop. Now, I trust Dude with these decisions and he’s an ASUS fanboy, so I now have a shiny new ASUS.
Intel Core i5-2430M CPU @ 2.4GHz
6.00G RAM
64-bit
Win7 Professional
We’ve had it since April, actually. Dude’s been using it. I customize a computer to beyond an inch of its life and I really didn’t relish the fact that I would have:
1. a completely new operating system
2. incompatibility of my preferred work tools
3. unfamiliar new work tools
4. moving data
5. customizing those new work tools
I also had a Western Digital external hard drive we bought in 2004-2005 that held all my archives. Since it WAS the backup, I hadn’t felt the need to HAVE backup on it. Oh woe was me. Little did I know that it was on its last legs and this move killed it. I may or may not have unplugged it from the computer before it was supposed to have been.
Dude spent three days with a very kind Samaritan retrieving the data. There are other issues with the data now, but it’s there. I have it. This guy is a peach for helping us and here is his information: James Litten Watch the video. Seriously, people, give this guy business. He deserves it. I cannot stress this enough.
So I’m almost totally moved in. I cannot stand the fact that this OS’s changes seem to encompass how it looks. As far as I can see, the only reason it exists is to make the roundy corners on dialog boxes transparent and wavy. Whatever else it does, I don’t know. Please feel free to enlighten me below.
The first thing I do when I move into a computer is change the theme to resemble, as closely as possible, Win95. The new start menu was completely unintelligible and/or takes more clicks than it needs to. I started pinning things to my task bar immediately. But I still couldn’t deal with the interface. So I found this tool: Classic Shell XP (because XP was good about letting you have the 95 look). I still have the little wavy in the toolbar, but okay.
HOWEVER, my hatred for moving was borne out by the fact that while Office 2000 and Acrobat 7.0 Standard WILL run on Win7, their functionality is rendered nearly useless for my purposes. Every time I closed Word 2000, it said it had crashed. Acrobat 7.0 can’t be installed as a printer driver at all. This is purposeful on Adobe’s part and I’m coming to despise Adobe almost as much as I despise Apple.
Then I found XP Mode/XP Virtual Machine, which…crashed when I tried to install Acrobat 7.0 as the printer driver. I was despondent, thinking I’d have to buy an upgrade. Why? Why is this necessary, Adobe? What functionality have you added that I actually need? None.
I went on eBay, where I always get my software a couple of versions back and for CHEEP! I found this listing. Then I Googled what this is selling for everywhere, so clearly this listing was the JACKPOT! Now, I’ve been on eBay since dirt and have had about two bad buying experiences and it’s because I know how to read the listings. What’s wrong with that one? Rant in the comments below. (Now I see there are new listings.)
So I’m back to the sinking feeling I’d have to buy Acrobat X. I had some difficult (for me—shut up, this is traumatic!) decisions to make.
In the meantime, I needed two antispyware and antimalware utilities, which CNET conveniently had. Both gave me viruses and/or adware and/or spyware. CNET, you are worse than useless. You are perpetuating computer disease and whatever trust you have built up over the years is gone. I want everyone to know you are destroying computer health with these bullshit downloads.
Dude had a copy of Office 2010 he got from his work for a minimal charge, so I sucked it up and installed it after I read that it had a function to “save as PDF.” Another reason was because I had to do a quote PDQ and needed a PDF that wasn’t created with some cheap-ass generic PDF maker. Getting my normal.dot into this fucker was a nightmare. I still don’t know where the normal.dotm is stored, but I was FINALLY able to find where to point it to my preferred folder for templates.
That’s another thing. I’m very specific about where I want what stored. I have C: for the OS and program files. I have D: solely for data. Something I consider data is my Word and Excel templates. So I put those in D: and boy did Word 2010 make me work to find the way to set that. It imported all my macros and styles, but it still didn’t import my toolbars from normal.dot, but that’s because Microsoft has totally borked the purpose of toolbars. Don’t these people actually use the products they design? So now I’m faced with the task of rebuilding my toolbars and preferences and getting used to it. Cry for me, Argentina.
Well, I found out that Word 2010 really DOES “save as” PDF. HALLELUJAH. I may have done a victory jig. (Pix or it didn’t happen.) Until…I tried to print to a different page size. It seems that 8.5×11 is the default with no way to edit the page size to 6×9, for example. And I still don’t know if those PDFs are acceptable for Lightning Source. I also don’t know what effect using Word 2010 will have on the Smashwords documents I create. I guess I’ll find out next week when I upload the next installment of Dunham.
My next problem was Flash. Isn’t it always. The Shockwave Flash plugin for Firefox was crashing like crazy. I had to disable the damned thing and trust me, after having been denied access to Flash on my iPad, I was not willing to do so on my PC. Apparently this is a common problem, as evidenced by posts and no solutions. How the fuck do you not have a solution after two years?
Really, it seems many of my problems are caused by the change to a 64-bit system from a 32-bit system.
This has been going on since last Tuesday. What used to take me around 8 hours has taken me almost a week of dedicated effort. (No, I don’t use a moving wizard because I like to customize as I go.)
What I still have to do is:
1. transfer the data from my dead hard drive (currently on Dude’s computer)
2. customize Word and Excel 2010, and…
3. wait for and install Adobe Acrobat X that I ended up buying.
UPDATE 7:14PM CDT: It appears that Firefox and Google want to protect me from myself, but because I hadn’t updated Firefox in FOREVER, I was unaware of this bullshit, and now that I’m running the latest version of Firefox, I’ve got brand new annoyances to deal with.
NetGalley
For whatever reason, NetGalley has decided to start putting tighter restrictions implemented publishers’ tightening of restrictions on who gets free eARCs (electronic Advanced Reader Copies).
So what.
Here’s the thing: NetGalley charges what is, to me, a micropress, an astronomical amount of money to give away books. That’s right: I would be paying to give my product to people in exchange for…very little in the way of a quantifiable return.
NetGalley is not in business to lose money. It’s in business to make money by providing a publishers’ colony. However publishers decide to define their ROI (return on investment) is how NetGalley’s going to be bringing in the money.
Follow the money.
When all other explanations fail, just follow the money.
I’ve been published!!!
Like, by somebody else. (Inorite?)
So Freya’s Bower (one of the veteran epublishers in the landscape) has this annual anthology called Dreams and Desires, where the proceeds from it go to a charity. This year’s charity is A Window Between Worlds, a non-profit organization that provides art supplies and training for art as a healing tool free of charge to battered women’s shelters across the United States.
Marci Baun, Freya’s Bower’s Perpetrator In Chief, asked me to contribute a story to the anthology, and because it’s a) for a good cause and b) for the #1 cause on my personal list of good causes, I said SURE! The result? Short story “Twenty-Dollar Rag.”
For fans of the Dunham series, the hero in this one is the weird kid from Stay (who wears kilts and sleeps in trees), Vachel Whittaker, all grown up and possibly more normal than the rest of the Dunham men. Lo, there is no religion or politics in it.
Here’s the blurb for Dreams and Desires:
True love, freedom, self-worth, security… Dreams and desires of the ordinary woman, or man. From a thirty-something, single woman who wants a baby to a jeweler who finds love with the least expected man to a widow who wants to finish her degree and find love to a young, futuristic woman who’s still searching for herself to an 18th century saloon girl whose lost hope but still dreams of love to a man who has escaped his abusive lover but has lost himself. This collection of nine stories celebrates the attainment of all one can dream or desire. Which one do you secretly yearn for?
And here’s the blurb for “Twenty-Dollar Rag”:
One night. One man. One dress.
Regina Westlake sees nothing wrong with her clubbing lifestyle until the gorgeous guy cleaning her pool refuses to play her games. When he’s hired to be her arm candy for a formal event, he makes his disdain for her clear by re-dressing her in something far more appropriate than what she had worn to the party.
Shattered, she takes his contempt, his dress, the memory of his kiss—and rebuilds her life from the ground up. She never expects to see him again, but when she does…
Buy the collection, have a few hours of entertainment and help somebody out at the same time. Win-win!
Dreams and Desires ($5.99)
“Twenty-Dollar Rag” (12,000 words) ($2.99)
This is handselling now.
This morning I butted into a Twitter conversation between @jackiebarbosa, @elyssapapa, and @growlycub about Romance heros/heroines who are struggling financially at the end of the book, but they shall live on love:
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/MoriahJovan/status/13276067800293377″]
Which led back around to the title of the book which started the conversation I butted in on:
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/jackiebarbosa/status/13279970579185664″]
and
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/victoriajanssen/status/13286262161018880″]
Which led to:
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/MoriahJovan/status/13280763256508417″]
and:
[blackbirdpie url=”http://twitter.com/#!/PortiaDaCosta/status/13281803079000064″]
This entire conversation happened in the course of an hour in casual conversation on Twitter, and money was spent. (More money would’ve been spent if the publisher had the sense to allow people out of the US to buy it, but that’s a conversation for another day.) (Also, it was $5.99 on the Kindle, which is my cutoff point for ebook prices, so there was another advantage.) As far as I know, I’m the only one who bothered to tweet that she bought it, but that’s not to say nobody else bought it.
The “need” was created.
The “need” was satisfied.
Immediately. Easy and with no friction.
There are a lot of lessons to be learned from this. Insert your favorite lesson here.
Do not go gentle
My Dragon Lady died yesterday.
Ta ta for now, Rosella. See you in a bit.
My Waterloo
You may have noticed I haven’t been here much lately. There are a few reasons for that, but I’ll spare you. Following is a series of picture galleries chronicling the project that A) forced me to admit that Bob Vila lied and B) released me from three years of guilt I didn’t know had weighed so heavily upon me. Out of my humiliation came peace and a life-changing epiphany.
I did not do this myself!!! I gutted most of it myself and couldn’t go on. Dude knew who to call to finish the job. It was a Mike, although it wasn’t (*sob*) Mike Holmes. Roll over the pics with your mouse and it’ll tell you the story.
OCTOBER 2005
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APRIL 2007
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SUMMER 2007
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MAY 4, 2010
The beginning of the end.
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MAY 10, 2010
End of week 1.
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MAY 15, 2010
End of week 2.
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MAY 22, 2010
End of week 3.
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MAY 29, 2010
End of week 4.
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JUNE 2, 2010
Almost there…
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JUNE 3, 2010
And…victory. At last.
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Next month…our front porch.
The mysterious ways of the universe
I’m in the middle of writing Magdalene, book 3 in my series.
If you’re passingly familiar with Christian myth, it should be quite clear where I’m going with this.
But let me tell you a little about my main characters.
Mitch Hollander, PhD, metallurgical engineering; founder and CEO of Hollander Steelworks, headquartered in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. He is also a widowed Mormon bishop who served half an 18-month mission in Paris, France. He likes fast cars and ZZ Top.
Cassie St. James, MBA; Vice President-Restructuring Division, Blackwood Securities. In a previous life, she was a high-dollar hooker. She is divorced, lives in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, has four adult children (all of whom live with her), engages in strategic revenge, and possesses a latent penchant for silliness.
So I was on the search for a special little gift that Mitch could give Cassie that meant something but was not expensive. After all, what do you give a woman who can buy anything she wants?
Naturally, I turned to books because I have a vested interest in people buying books (product placement!). I decided that Mitch might have a special book that he may have acquired on his mission and is probably in French. Naturally, I googled, and then headed over to Wikipedia where I stumbled upon a list of French novels. I doggedly worked my way through them one by one, read the synopses, then picked one based on a vague similarity of the plot to Cassie’s past.
I wrote it into my book as if I’d read the thing (but hadn’t), then decided I probably should read it. And it freaked me out. Big time.
The book? Angélique, the Marquise of Angels by Anne & Serge Golon, first published in 1958.
Unbeknownst to me, this was a huge hit in Europe and apparently a big hit here. I’d never heard of it, never stumbled across it in the intellectual drunkenness of my youth (that actually amazes me).
The book is heroine-centric, so it’s all about Angélique. The parallel I found between Angélique and Cassie was that they both had arranged marriages. The similarity stopped there.
Angélique didn’t know her contracted husband, feared him at first, then grew to love him.
Cassie knew the man she was to marry, adored him from afar and was eager to marry him, and then quickly realized that her marriage was a sham.
Cassie is familiar with the story via film, so she has no problem making this parallel and had, in fact, written a paper on it during her undergrad years.
What doesn’t show up in the plot summary is a description of the hero’s “unusual way of life.” Joffray (the hero) is described as “scientist, musician, philosopher.” I didn’t think much of it. Mitch is a scientist with his own lab, true, but he’s also a CEO and I’ve always thought of him in those terms. He’s not a musician. He’s not a philosopher. At heart, he’s a blue-collar steel worker who loves steel enough to reinvent himself and the industry; steel is his life’s work.
Turns out that Joffray’s science is metallurgy. That was freaky.
Turns out that Joffray is hung out to dry, religiously speaking, for reasons that have nothing to do with religion and everything to do with power, politics, and money. That was even freakier.
As I got deeper and deeper into the book, I felt like I’d entered the Twilight Zone.
Then I got to the end. Angélique plunges out into the cold night, penniless and powerless, to exact revenge. That is so Cassie. I nearly expired from the freakiness the universe had perpetrated upon my person.
I couldn’t have picked a better novel if I’d written it myself.
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PS: Yes, I know Mary Magdalene wasn’t a prostitute.
PPS: In the mid-1980s, missions were, in fact, only 18 months long for men.
I got your suggestions right here.
The Pareto Principle.
Also known as the 80/20 rule, wherein 80% of sales are generated by 20% of the customers. When applied to the way publishing gambles on blockbusters to subsidize its titles that lose money, it might be more or less 20% of the authors make 80% of the sales.
Publishers look for and sign new authors in a neverending search for the next blockbuster book that will sustain the 20%. Very often a new author will be taken on in favor of renewing a current author’s second or third book if the sales don’t meet expectations (which could mean that it did, in fact, make money, but not enough to satisfy the bean counters).
Last month, I was involved in a rigorous discussion on Dear Author, wherein author Courtney Milan likened publishing’s ability to support this model to pooling risk or, more precisely, flood insurance. I found the flood insurance specificity to be flawed and said why, but really I found the whole “risk pooling” argument flawed, but couldn’t articulate it, so I remained agnostic on the subject for the moment.
Now, after having stewed on it for a while, the better (read: more polite) analogy would be research and development—except without so much the development part.
Recently, president of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Jonathan Galassi, wrote an extraordinarily unorganized, incohesive rant op ed piece in the New York Times concerning whose rights are whose once the publishing house has put its resources into a manuscript to make it a salable product. Quite frankly, other than the amusing fact that he (an editor) wrote an essay not worthy of a high school freshman learning the basics of English composition, I don’t give a shit about what he thinks the publishers’ value-added rights are.
It was his exemplar of an author long dead, into whom marketing resources were invested to make him that success, that struck me as disingenuous. And a non sequitur. Or ignernt. Dude. You do realize that very few new authors are given these kinds of resources, right? Publishers throw new authors at the wall to see who sticks. There is no “development” counterpart to “research.”
Given that, I’ve moved on from a publisher’s resource allocation to be “risk pooling,” to “research and development,” to “shotgun approach.”
Hang with me—I know I’m only about the 1,537th person to say this, but I do have a point.
So yesterday on Teleread, Rich Adin from An American Editor opined that the way to save publishing is to kill the paperback. When the usual suspects (me) broke out with the usual reaction (Are you out of your fucking mind?), he shot back with, “Well, do you have any better ideas?”
Never mind I have no interest one way or another whether publishing remains profitable, and it’s not my job to put little slips in the suggestion box that will be ignored, and people (readers) have been screaming their fool heads off about what they want which would keep publishing profitable and publishing’s just not paying attention, I will tell you how to keep publishing profitable:
Do less research.
Put a little more development into your research.
Quit getting caught up in auction fever.
Embrace the e-book and treat it as deferentially as you do your other formats and respect those people willing to pay for it. Court them. Cultivate them. They have money to spend on books. Really.
The point is to make every title profitable, or as close to it as you can get.
But I don’t really think you care.
Dear bandwidth looters:
You have probably realized by now that the link on the iTouch image from The Forbidden Apple post is broken. I did that. On purpose.
I don’t care if you take the images from this site, but take the time to save them to your own box and upload it to your server yerowndamnself.
You’re costing me bandwidth, with no return on my investment.
Fucking looters.
eBookWise
Want an ebook reader but can’t stomach the prices either for the devices, the data plans, or the ebooks?
See, we all know the biggest objection to all the other devices on the market: Too expensive for a one-trick pony that you’re not even sure you like the trick anyway.
There are the lesser-known problems (until you encounter them): Kindle (could get your library taken away from you, and what if you really don’t like reading on an eInk device?). Nook (apparently shittastic all the way around—if the device can’t read EPUB, it’s an epic fail, trust me). Sony (I’ve heard various and sundry objections to this, so I’ll let you do the googling).
Then there are the people who are waiting on technology to work itself out before they pop for any device, and some of these people are waiting on the iTablet or MSCourier. They still might like to have an ebook reader, but can’t stomach the cost:limitation ratio of any current devices, so they’ll wait until technology catches up to their needs.
Now, it is true that LOTS and LOTS and LOTS of people read ebooks on their BlackBerry et al and iPhone/iTouch. It’s my opinion most people don’t want a one-trick pony device. They want a multifunction device. Why? Because *I* want a multifunction device and EVERYBODY is like me, right?
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But…since I’m a cheap bitch and don’t want to fork over for the dataplan for a smartphone, I have a one-trick pony device, and you know what? I love my one-trick pony device. Mike Cane mocks me for it, but the more devices I see rumored, debuted, trashed, complained about, the more I fall in love with my little workhorse. Worse! He sees ebooks (currently) as little more than tarted-up text files (which is true).So you know what’s so lovely about my little workhorse? It’s $90. That’s right. Know what you give up for that $90? You have to spend a little time learning A) which formats to buy for it and B) perform a few software gymnastics to get it on the device. I mean, for little more than a tarted-up text file, it’s absolutely the most perfect device ever, especially for the price.
Want a starter ebook reader that is ergonomically divine? Backlit so you can snuggle under the covers in the dark and read while staying all warm and toasty? That you can eat and read at the same time? That has a bunch of the same bells and whistles all the expensive devices do, like highlighting, notetaking, mp3 capability (audiobooks), search, long battery life, and the ability to put your own documents on it.
Get the eBookWise.
Really.
I don’t care how sophisticated it’s not. It’s a dream.
I have no connection to this company other than I love its product. I very rarely get so excited about a product and if I do, I very rarely maintain that excitement because eventually its flaws will make me pissy. I’ve had my eBookWise going on 2 years now and I love it more now than I ever did.
I swear, until such a time as A) the iTablet/MSCourier actually appears and B) ebooks cease to be little more than tarted-up text files, I see absolutely no reason to pop for anything else. I’m not anti early adopter. I’m anti early adopter of very expensive but ultimately deficient products in the very thing they are created to do.
And yes, I still have and love my Asus Eee PC, but um…it kinda sorta got appropriated by Hero, which is perfectly okay.
UPDATE: Mike Cane’s mockery continues.
He sent me to this picture:
The eBookWise is the one on the far right. It is a blimp, isn’t it? That is exactly why my hands love me for using it instead of anything else (including print). It’s also why it can stand up on the table, propped against a drinking glass, to enable me to read while I’m eating.
A Lone Artist: Wendy Drolma
I don’t know this woman from Eve. What I do know is that everything about her online presence screams master craftsman and überprofessional.
Got a scene? A masquerade party? A Labyrinth con? A Venetian extravaganza? Mardi Gras? Need some sleep? Want something exquisite to hang on your wall? This is only a sampling. Visit her gallery to get the full effect.
Then buy something from her. This kind of exquisite craftsmanship needs to be rewarded.
(I may make this a regular feature.)
Asus re-redux
I haven’t read any more on the Asus since my last post about it. However, it recently paid for itself when I had a computer emergency. For three days that little thing was an absolute workhorse. It was a little slow and klunky, but it did the job and it kept me earning money. I NEVER expected to need it for that.
So for around $250, I have an emergency work computer, an e-book reader on which I can read ANY DAMN FORMAT I WANT, listen to music, surf the net, keep my data, and write.
And I should buy a Kindle/Sony/Nook/JetBook . . . why?
LDS publishers, again, eBooks. Please!
I went over to Cedar Fort’s blog to look at stuff. Right off the bat, there are two books I wanted to read (okay, so maybe Shannon Hale didn’t traumatize me as much as I thought).
Altared Plans by Rebecca Cornish Talley
and
Deadly Treasure by Jillayne Clements (look at that gorgeous cover!)
Not in digital formats? (Not even Kindle.)
No sale.
Sorry.
Question: Do you LDS publishers realize how many members read their scriptures on their PDAs, SmartPhones, and iPhones? No? The Church gets it. Why don’t you? Maybe you need to venture forth east of the safety of the Rocky Mountains and attend a few wards to find out.
You have no idea how many sales you’re missing out on.
You lost two just with me.
At least, at the very least, get them into Kindle.
August reading list
Saturday night was the “Oscars” for romance, which is called RITA (no idea what that stands for, if anything). I saw something interesting in the results that made me form a hypothesis, and I want to test my hypothesis, so I’ll be reading the following books in August, which are the nominees for the “Novel with Strong Romantic Elements” category:
Last Dance At Jitterbug Lounge by Pamela Morsi
The House on Tradd Street by Karen White
The Paper Marriage by Susan Kay Law
The Shape of Mercy by Susan Meissner (must ILL this one)
The Winter Sea by Susanna Kearsley
Tribute by Nora Roberts
Where Serpents Sleep by C.S. Harris
Aside: I was going to buy all these in ebook, but I had put the first three in my basket at BooksOnBoard and they were all just too damned expensive. So helloooooo Mid-Continent Public Library. I’ll read paper for free before I’ll plunk down $13+ for an ebook. Bite me, publishers. This is how you encourage pirates to steal your authors’ work and take money away from them. Please note deliberate sentence construction.
Also, I am on schedule (actually ahead of) for my July reading list.
The Bewbies(TM) appear in the Apple store.
Finally!
After six months, unceasing wailing, and a solid refusal to censor myself, The Proviso was finally approved for sale as an application in the Apple iTunes store.
(Now I don’t feel hypocritical by naming iPhone names in Stay, because, you know, Eric would be on top of all manner of gadgetry.)
PSA for LDS publishers
Y’all probably don’t read my blog. I curse muchly and there is “sex” in my banner, not to mention a bare nekkid lady.
Before you read any further (if you are still reading or the least bit interested), please go to these websites and study them. Ignore the content; I want you to see what they’re doing. Then come back. I’ll wait.
My Bookstore and More (mostly Samhain Publishing‘s titles, but look under the “manufacturers” tab and see the other e-book publishers).
Back? Cool. Now, please go here:
A more complete list of e-book readers.
Did you understand what I wanted you to see? Awesome!
As a consumer of e-books, I would like to offer you a friendly suggestion, which is to embrace the digital distribution of your titles. The e-book publishers I linked are making money hand over fist. The devices I linked are the way people read e-books. This will grow.
You probably don’t understand the seduction of having an entire library in your palm, and that’s okay. There are lots and lots of people who say they won’t give up print for anything, and then they get to live with an e-book reader for maybe two or three days, and they’re hooked.
There’s also something very seductive about being able to log onto an e-bookstore and download a bunch of books onto your device immediately. No driving. It’s all about impulse. I can talk myself out of an Amazon purchase because it involves shipping time. It leaves the shopping cart and goes into the wish list, never to be seen again. I don’t even want to go to a bookstore anymore.
I’ve now encountered three small LDS presses and individuals somewhere in the LDS publishing arena dismiss e-books as so much of a passing fad, a waste of time or, worse, think that “e-book” is synonymous with “PDF.” I simply have to shake my head at their short-sightedness.
Be on the cutting edge of the digital age of books. Take a cue from the church’s rabid embrace of the interwebz and streaming audio and its ability to reach its members nearly effortlessly.
But beyond that, the take-home message here is this: E-bookstores are dangerous to the health of my checkbook.
Want to know the real reason I don’t buy anything from Deseret Book, Zarahemla, Signature Books et al? No e-books. I want to read your books; really I do, but I’m not going back to paper unless you give me something terribly compelling. I buy e-books on impulse. Impulse. Hear that? IMPULSE.
Please give me a reason to throw my money at you in the middle of the night when one of your titles catches my eye. Pretty please?