The “Self Publishing Company”...

Aug 6, 2012 by

The “Self Publishing Company”

There was a time when no ghost or editor in their right mind would tell you use a vanity press. But the world, she is a-changin’. Originally called vanity press, then subsidy press, and now “self publishing companies”, they’re all still the same: you pay them money, they publish your book. This is in stark contrast to a traditional publisher like Penuin or Harper-Collins, who pays you for the rights to publish your book. Many, many people have been scammed by vanity presses over the years, and yet these days, some people actually have good experiences. This is not a topic I’ll really be able to cover in a single article. So here’s the basics. If you self publish in the traditional way, you find a printer, you find a binder, you buy an...

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When NOT to Write a Book

Jul 16, 2012 by

When NOT to Write a Book

Ahah, got your attention, eh? Yes, I am actually going to tell you when it is a severe waste of time and money to write a book. It’s actually very simple, so this will be a short post. You should not write a book when you have nothing to say. That’s it. You’d think it’d be common sense, but alas, it is not. Far too many people come to me with the thought that they “should” write a book, and need to write a book, when in fact, they have very little to share. This is not to say they have uninteresting lives, or aren’t knowledgeable, or in some cases actually quite brilliant in their respective fields, but without something new, different and interesting to say, you do not have a...

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Meet The Annas: A Musical Novel...

Jul 6, 2012 by

Meet The Annas: A Musical Novel

Today’s free Nook book brings up an interesting question: What do we expect from e-books today? When I saw the title, my mind instantly assumed there was some kind of media associated with the book, and I found myself a bit disappointed when I read the description and it turned out to be a simple title twist. I was excited about the idea of a musical novel, without even having known what to expect. So what would that have meant? Would it have been like a musical, with random pages playing songs instead of showing text? Would it have been like a pop-up book, with music or video you could play when reaching the end of each page, or the start of each chapter? Would there simply have been a musical interlude in the middle of...

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E-Book Conversions, vol 2

Jun 28, 2012 by

E-Book Conversions, vol 2

As it turns out, I can’t just convert a book to epub format and be done. No, no, no, that’d be too easy. And if I use InDesign the cover art won’t work correctly with the Nook or iPad bookshelves, though the Kindle seems to read it just fine and the cover shows up, but the pagination doesn’t work correctly and everything’s skip-lined like I’d forwarded an email eighty times and it was still 1998. This really is more of a rant than an article. The fact is, this is my own fault. If I’d been smart, I’d have simply hired someone to do this. We did in fact discuss that idea, and we rejected it for the simple reasons that we wanted to keep our hands on the project from start to finish....

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Kindle?

Jun 14, 2012 by

Kindle?

I love Amazon.com. I really do. I’m a Prime member, and I probably buy a lot more there than I should. With Prime free shipping and my hatred of leaving my desk because I know when I come back I’ll have completely lost my place and will have no idea what I was doing when I left, I do quite a bit of Amazon shopping. I like their DRM-Free MP3s, I like their streaming service, I like their cloud storage, I use their wish list plugin for my browser kind of constantly. But I will never own a Kindle. The thing about Amazon’s Kindle system is that you never actually own your books. You don’t download them, you can’t really back them up – I’ve heard rumors that they’ve basically/mostly fixed that problem, but it’s...

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