epublishing

So what’s stopping you?

Moriah

I’ve referenced agent Lori Perkins before because she’s not constantly talking about how to write a better query or cheerleading constantly. YOU!CAN!DO!IT! YES!YOU!CAN! as if the odds of being picked up by an agent and, in turn, a publishing house aren’t astronomical. (And for a pittance, even.)

Anyhoo, today’s LoriPost What Does This Economic Downturn Mean For Writers? is even more sobering for those of you still laboring in the shadow of the faint hope of The Call:

These publishing companies work so far in advance, that when they decide to slow down acquisitions, they can literally just stop buying for 6 or 9 months. And that’s what I predict will happen here.

And yet the news with epublishing is exciting, the industry vibrant and growing, niche markets blossoming as readers find what they want to read that isn’t the SSDD the gatekeepers must buy to maintain their bottom line.

Perhaps it’s time for more writers to shake the dust of [sneer] self-publishing (otherwise more properly known as independent publishing) off their feet and make like the shoppers at Home Depot: Do it yourself. Yeah, it’ll take some time, quite a bit of money if you do it right (e.g. and *ahem* avoid the more egregious vanity/subsidy presses, pay an editor, hire a graphic designer), a complete 180-degree shift in your thinking and attitude, and a helluva lot of hard work (details! O, the details!) but you’re in control.

Freedom, man.

My mother once asked me, “Why are you basing your goals on decisions someone else has to make?”

Bits and bytes

Moriah

This and that, in no particular order. Mostly stuff I forgot in the ePub post or didn’t know while I was writing it or changed as soon as I hit the “publish” button.cybook-specs.jpg

BOOKEEN CYBOOK. I briefly mentioned this in the ePub post, but forgot to say that this is one that’s caught my attention more than a few times. It’s just that it gets overshadowed by the Biggies and I forget about it. eInk (therefore, no backlight–but you knew that), supports PDFs (don’t know about reflow), plays mp3s. Also supports Mobipocket, HTML, TXT, and PalmDoc. It runs $379, which is a bit rich for my blood.

BEBOOK. There’s a new little kid in town. According to MobileRead forums, this puppy’s got 30k machines in circulation (which I have no idea what that really means). At $349, you can add it to the eInk contenders.

BOOKS ON BOARD and DIESEL EBOOKS. I know I talk about Fictionwise a lot, but more and more I find myself going to booksonboard.com and diesel-ebooks.com just because their formats are easier to follow and I can find stuff more easily. Fictionwise is a nightmare for my poor ADD. So, hey, Fictionwise. Do something about your web design, because you’re about to lose a customer.

ESPRESSO IN-STORE POD. Behold: espresso.png

Coming to an Australian bookstore near you. Am I the only one who can visualize this beast in the middle of Wal-Mart and Target, Sams Club and Costco? I mean, this isn’t new news; the concept has been around for a while, but the machines are expensive.

Still, I’d think Barnes & Noble and Borders would find this to be worthy of early adoption, if only to reduce their stores’ square footage and associated costs. Why are you still sitting in that small box? Your cheese moved.

[Okay, okay, to be fair, PersonaNonData reports that they’re steadily rolling out in the US.]

As ebookie as I am, I’m excited about this thing Time called an “ATM for books.” Paper is still my first love, to stroke and fondle, to smell and behold. Uhm, paper prØn?

STANZA. I’ve been hearing a lot lately about this ebook reading software which runs (built expressly for? I don’t know) the ePub format. After preliminary perusal, we at B10 find this pertinent to us in that it offers ways to convert text to the ePub format and an iPhone/iTouch app to read ebooks on those devices. According to the website, it is also:

…the first program that has a built-in export feature especially for the Amazon Kindle. Your PDFs, Word documents, and other eBooks can all be exported to the Kindle’s native format and copied over to the device using a USB cable.

However, before we get our hopes up, Apple may blackball Stanza the way it’s blackballed Podcaster. Still, Stanza 1.4 (newest version) is now up in the iApps store.

So along with Stanza, the current state of publishing, the slow (in my opinion) early adoption of the Espresso by outlets such as Barnes & Noble and Borders, please simply add in the requisite anti-DRM rant–

Just how long until commercial publishers start using Stanza to sell and distribute their wares as nonDRMed ePub? And how will the terms compare to those of Amazon and others? (From the Teleread article linked above.)

This is where you start wondering where the Greedy Bastards went. Ban? Ignore? Flee? No! Embrace! Embracement = mo’ money. Where’s Gordon Gekko when you need him?

Publishing potpourri for 100, Alex

Moriah

Jasmine or honeysuckle, if you’re offering. Lavender and gardenia make my nose itch.

THE JEWEL OF MEDINA
by Sherry Jones

A resident of the Ivory Tower, who apparently called dibs on A’isha (child bride of Muhammed) as her personal and exclusive domain of study and forgot to send the memo, raised a ruckus about a book she didn’t like and managed to get Random House to pull it after the author had been paid her $100k advance and the presses were rolling. I say it’s an academic hatchet job.

Read more →

By gosh and by golly

Moriah

Harlequin. I *lurrrrve* you.

Got an email from Ms. Malle Vallik today on the subject of my ebook shopping woes. She will be addressing my concerns for the Harlequin digital team and wanted me to know that.

And you know what? With that one little email, all my lingering irritation vanished.

Harlequin is not hurt by the fact that I am now also in love with Kristan Higgins.

My credit card is trembling at this very moment. With anticipation or fear, I don’t know, but it’s going to get abused.

And you know what else? With that one little email, Harlequin got a customer for life, delivery issues be damned.

Genre romance as trailblazer (as usual)

Moriah

In my wanderings around the ’net, one thing has become perfectly clear to me: However harried and hassled, looked down upon, sneered at, spit toward, and generally disrespected as a valid art form, genre romance (just after science fiction and Cory Doctorow) seems to be at the leading edge of the ebook revolution.

<donning pimp hat>
Read more →

Go West!

Moriah

Self-publishing isn’t a new thing. Some of the world’s classics were self-published, although I’m not so arrogant as to think I rank up there with the likes of Mark Twain, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Willa Cather, e.e. cummings, and Alexander Dumas.

However, it’s new to me. When I was trying to get published back in the ’90s, self-publishing (then only vanity publishing, really) was not only expensive, but the kiss of death. Now…not so much. With concepts such as ebooks, print-on-demand, and the internet itself, the technology is there to do it quickly, relatively cheaply, and to one’s satisfaction (i.e., artistic control). Filmmakers have been doing this for years as have musicians.

I’ll not go into all the reasons I decided to do this myself, but this post by agent Lori Perkins validated my decision to do so.

I’m all about DIY, free markets, and workaround solutions. No, I won’t have a print run of 175,000. Hell, I won’t even have a print run, period. But I think I have a good product that will never see the light of day unless I take the initiative. My hat’s off to those who’ve gone the traditional route. Either I suck as a writer or I’m too far out in the stratosphere.

And I don’t suck as a writer.