Gnod’s literature section, Gnooks, includes a free service it calls a Literature Map: simply type in the name of an author who interests you, and Gnod will stop running human extinction scenarios long enough to return a nifty floating cloud of names. The closer two names are to each other, the more similar the authors are, and their proximity to your initial author indicates how closely they match his or her style.

Above is my test for sci-fi author Charles Stross. In my experience, Doctorow’s voice is nothing like Stross’, but I’m not a computer so I’m probably wrong.

Here’s one for Cynthia Ozick, who you may have noticed by now is one of my go-to names when I want to test something with a semi-obscure but highly respected living author:

And here’s another one for Charlie Huston:

Okay, so they’re not going to win any awards for visual design, but robots don’t need eyes. None of us will after the singularity, but that’s a downer of a note to end this post on, so let me close with the word “balloons.”

Update: If you want a more intimate recommendation—meaning just one author’s name instead of a cloud—you can try Gnod’s Suggestions page, where you enter the names of three authors and (hopefully) get back a fourth.

[via Publishers Weekly]

That, in a nutshell, is one of the reasons why Sidney Williams recently teamed up with Crossroad Press to republish his older novels as well as new works.

Williams published his first book in 1989 through Pinnacle, and in the years since he’s written horror, young adult novels, and graphic novels like “The Dusk Society”, as well as an audio adaptation of “War of the Worlds”.

But like many midlist and genre authors his titles have all but disappeared from brick and mortar bookstores, even though there’s still an audience for them.

While the early novels involve werewolves, vampires, and—in the case of “Gnelfs”—malevolent children’s cartoon characters, his latest book, “Midnight Eyes”, is a more realistic suspense thriller about a Louisiana serial killer, a dangerously ambitious newspaper editor, and a sheriff who must ask his estranged son (and former FBI agent) for help if he wants to prevent more deaths.

I asked Williams about his decision to publish through Crossroad Press, and his own experience with ebooks so far.

Booksprung: In your bio and in other interviews, you’ve said that you were a journalist for eleven years, and among other things you covered crime. Was that the genesis for “Midnight Eyes”?

How did you decide to publish digitally, and why did you choose to go with Crossroad Press?

What’s your writing process like, and has it changed much over the years?

What was the first ebook you read?

How was that experience?

Do you have any “guilty pleasures” that you find are easier to read in ebook form?

The cover art for your earlier paperbacks from Pinnacle are definitely of an era, but there’s no denying they were striking and attention-grabbing. What do you think about the role of cover art in digital publishing?

I like cover art a lot. I miss record albums because you had such beautiful big artistic opportunities for covers. I am kind of fanatical about my mp3s. I try to get all the cover art right on my iPod, or my iPhone now, and I still like covers, I like seeing them on Amazon or Barnes & Noble, wherever.

As far as covers with Crossroad, its been fun to have a second edition of my books out and kind of see new directions with them.

It’s challenging to get cover art. David Dodd did “Blood Hunter” and I thought he did a great job. I can remember being on the phone with—you know you didn’t get a lot of input on covers in the old days, and I remember being on the phone with my editor talking about what the cover should be. My original idea was of a moss-covered arm or claw reaching across the cover, but instead we got a swamp scene and a young girl looking through the trees on the original cover. I thought David Dodd did a great job of capturing the setting for the story without giving much away.

Neil Jackson did the new “Gnelfs” cover, and I really like that. The original “Gnelfs” cover is very 80s/90s, and I thought Jackson kind of captured the mood and the flavor of the story without giving too much away or spoiling letting your imagination form the monsters in that one.

You know when you download a book, it usually defaults to the first chapter, and I go in on my Kindle and reset it so that the cover is the first page until I start reading it, because I like even the monochromatic covers.

You have an unlimited budget and a crack team of designers and engineers. What does your ideal ebook device look like?

What are your thoughts on ebook lending and resell rights? How do you think those two issues should be handled in a way that’s fair to all parties involved?

Do you have any preference for print or digital books?

And finally, who are your favorite authors?

Sidney Williams is currently working on a literary thriller as well as a fantasy novel, and he’s re-editing his vampire novel “Night Brothers” for the forthcoming ebook edition.

“Midnight Eyes” is available on the Kindle Store and in multiple formats from Crossroad Press.

Visit Sidney Williams at sidisalive.com

(Photo: treyevan)

Now the marketplace is far more competitive, and prices have gone down for both hardware and reading material. Probably every consumer in North America with a TV or Internet access has now heard of the Kindle or Nook. In other words, I probably don’t need to encourage you to give an ebook a try this week.

So is “Read an E-Book Week” still useful? Sure! It’s a good time for readers to look for special promotions from indie authors and publishers, for example. The site has a list of participating publishers, authors and retailers who are sponsoring the event in some way.

The retailers and publishers aren’t making it easy enough to find this week’s special deals, but if you know you like a certain company, try its Twitter feed or Facebook page. (I noticed Samhain Publishing, for example, is promoting a free novel via Twitter today.)

The authors section is a little clearer about what’s on sale or free this week. Here are three examples, but be sure to check that official list for more.

• Harvey Tate is offering his novel “Death Takes a Number” for $2 with coupon code DTAN345rae
• Sci-fi author Jeffrey A. Carver is offering “Neptune’s Crossing” and “Battlestar Galactica” for free on his website
• Marsha Canham is offering her swashbuckling historical romance “Swept Away” for free on her website (see upper right corner)

The “Read an E-Book Week” website is also giving away free Kobo readers and a free Nook this week, if you’re feeling lucky.

Update: I forgot to mention that I also have a freebie available this week. It’s an 11,000 word novelette — I dislike that term, but it’s what you’re called when you’re too long for a short story but too short for a novella — about the Rapture. But not fun-times Rapture; it’s a horror story, and I can’t emphasize enough that it’s not pro-Rapture or even biblically accurate on any level, so consider yourself warned.

(Photo: Pen Waggener)

Take for example a book on American politics, not because that kind of book is fun to read, but because such a book always has two characteristics: a strong point of view that practically begs for counter arguments, and debatable errors either in actual facts or in the interpretation of them.

With Public Notes, now a noted public figure of an opposing political bent can read and annotate a Kindle edition of a new book by someone on the other side of the argument, and the reading public can tune into that person’s highlights and notes from within the original text.

It’s a virtual annotated edition, and one that only exists temporarily. The author of the notes can remove them or disable public access to them at any time, or a reader can choose not to follow their annotations the same way I don’t follow certain celebs on Twitter.

Earlier this week I was laughing to myself about how much fun it would be to add funny or satirical notes to someone’s book, but the big problem was that almost nobody would want to read my notes.

But if Glenn Beck were to annotate Rachel Maddow’s book, and Rachel Maddow were to annotate his, I bet you’d have a considerable amount of interest from consumers. You’d probably sell more of each book to readers who would normally avoid your book.

For now, this seems more compelling to me with nonfiction categories like politics, memoirs and media/journalism criticism. But I can imagine too that public annotations from authors could be used by publishers as a sort of “blurb on steroids” — the key difference being that annotations are actually added content, and therefore added value, that only Kindle editions can currently offer. [Edit: For example, imagine seeing a tweet that says John Hodgman has added hilarious annotations to Jay-Z's "Decoded" -- for a select few, this meta-entertainment would justify the purchase of the Kindle edition over another edition.]

And then there’s the possible bad news: will publishers and authors freak out over this? Do they understand its potential? Will the Authors Guild, or some executive, or a famous author accuse Amazon of producing new works, and therefore infringing on copyright? My guess is yes, and like text-to-speech the feature may get hobbled before it can really take off.

But since I think this can sell more books in the end, I’m hoping that everyone involved on the publishing side of the business embraces it wholeheartedly. And, while I’m blue-skying this stuff, that Amazon hasn’t managed to somehow patent it.

Update: This post was picked up by Teleread, and in the discussion over there the author Michael W. Perry lists some other ways public notes could be interestingly used:

• to provide academic annotations for popular fiction (in his example, dates throughout the Lord of the Rings books);
• to provide author asides and explanations, e.g. in mystery novels;
• to create stopgap corrections or explanations between editions, so that authors are able to engage in an ongoing dialogue of sorts with their readers.

He also notes that ideally, high value public notes could be turned into a bonus feature that you’d pay for, so that in turn the author is compensated.

(Photo: romana klee)

The Kindle, he writes in a forthcoming article for Locus magazine, “wins” over print in two areas. First, it’s easier to read than a printed book if you need larger sized text, because it can make any book a large-print edition without requiring any real knowledge of how the device works; this is both a crucial feature and usability requirement for the current 40-and-over set. Second, its “buy once, read anywhere” approach makes reading big books a pleasure instead of a task. (Gaiman writes that he still prefers paperbacks for smaller, pocketable books.)

That first achievement–ease of use–sounds like common sense, but it’s actually pretty hard for companies to pull off these days, which is why you should always try out an ereader in person before you buy it. In my opinion there are only a handful of truly easy-to-use consumer electronics in the world: the iPhone, the Tivo (with the original menu, not the unusable HD interface), the Keurig brewer, the Flip videocamera, and the Kindle. Although Amazon’s web interface for the Kindle is nothing to brag about, it’s possible to avoid it almost entirely and still get full use out of your Kindle.

This simplicity really hit home for me last week, when I took advantage of Borders’ “please give us some revenue” sale and bought the Kobo Wi-Fi for $100. I bought it for my mom, because I figured even though she’d miss out on cheap Kindle books, she’d be able to access library ebooks on a Kobo. But I wanted to give it a test run first to make sure it would be easy to use. I immediately fell in love with the hardware, but I kept running into problems with the usability. First, I hated how it was pre-set to connect only to the Borders ebook store and not to the general Kobobooks.com website (actually I hated that there were two shopping destinations at all–Kobo should just be Kobo). I also didn’t like how you had to navigate down through multiple screens just to toggle wireless access, when that’s the very first menu item on the Kindle. I hated that you have to install a desktop app if you want to wirelessly sync the Kobo with your library. And then there was the Adobe Digital Editions program requirement for authorizing library check-outs.

In the end, I couldn’t bring myself to send my mother an ereader that was looking suspiciously like it would require many hours of technical support. I took it back and spent the extra $40 for a Wi-Fi Kindle. She’ll never have to connect it to her aging iBook or think of it as a PC peripheral for as long as she uses it. She can buy a new book while she’s at work, or I can email her a file, and it will appear on her Kindle automatically when she gets home. Hooray for simplicity.*

The second achievement Gaiman describes–the ability to access a book across multiple devices–isn’t unique to Kindle, and I think it’s more of a general benefit of reading ebooks, at least if you’re a Nook, Kindle, Kobo or Google eBooks customer. In fact, it’s one of the innate benefits of storing your books in the “cloud”–they’re easy to access from multiple devices, no matter where you go.

But in theory, at least, cloud storage has a heavy potential cost you should be aware of, which is that it forces consumers to give up control over their purchases.

Publishers would love to see the cloud become the only way to sell ebook licenses to readers, because they could finally get rid of unprofitable consumer behavior like passing books along to friends or shifting formats–the kinds of privileges that consumers demand when they feel like they “own” something, but that are easier to kill off when a customer grows comfortable with simply paying for access to the cloud. Cloud access also makes it easier for publishers to enforce their interpretations of fair use, and to block any applications of technology that they haven’t yet monetized.

For that reason, even though I share Gaiman’s pleasure at being able to pick up my reading where I left off as I move among devices, I always download and save backup copies of my ebooks. That way I will have at least a fighting chance of preserving access to them in the future, no matter what the publisher or retailer decides.

The bad news is, the type of consumer who takes care to make backup copies of ebook purchases probably isn’t the same one who needs an easy-to-use device, so I fear the cloud approach will win out in the years to come. The good news is that the topic is moot right now, because today all the major ereader stores let you download copies of your purchases. But as long as we still have a choice, I suggest that you patronize retailers and publishers who offer file downloads as well as cloud storage.

This isn’t just a pro-Kindle post. I would have happily bought my mom a Nook Color instead of a Kindle had it been in my budget. I wouldn’t have bought an original Nook, though, because I find its interface too clunky. (Return to the post.)

(Neil Gaiman photo: Jutta @ flickr; cloud image: akakumo)

In addition to those five books, Adler is giving Amazon a 2-year exclusive on an anthology of short stories by the winners of his annual writing contest. The most recent anthology is on sale now (although it looks like the winning stories are available for free on Adler’s website). If you’ve got $15, you can submit a story for consideration in the next one, which Warren says will also be available exclusively on Amazon for two years.

WarrenAdler.com

[via eBookNewser]
(Photo: TheGiantVermin)

With over 300 writers interviewed so far, it’s impossible to convey in a short blog post the breadth of talent in this collection. Here are twenty names I’ll pick more or less at random from the full list:

You can browse by decade or search the archive alphabetically. This might also be a good time to take advantage of Instapaper’s Kindle service to get select interviews over to your device.

“Interviews” [The Paris Review via NYTimes]

Nick Spalding, author of the experimental written-all-in-one-sitting novel Life…With No Breaks (readers on Amazon seem to either love it or hate it), announced yesterday that he’s launched a new indie author blog called Spalding’s Racket:

I’ve created [it] to promote books written by independent authors.

It’s a place for you to find out about new books you might like to read.

I’m making sure that only professionally laid out books make it on the blog. It’s not a review site per se, but I won’t be posting just anything up and will comment as and where I can.

For readers, you can think of it as a sort of “this author recommends” source to help you discover new indie authors. For authors, you can submit your book to Spalding for consideration.

It’s a very young blog–less than a week old and just three recommendations as of this post–and so far the focus has been on sci-fi and fantasy. Still, there’s no telling what Spalding will post in the coming months, and it might be worth adding to your RSS feed to see what develops.

spaldings-racket.blogspot.com [found via Amazon forums]

Donna Fasano’s first novel was published by Harlequin Silhouette in 1990, and it was chosen by the Romance Writers of America as a finalist for its Golden Hearts Award. In the twenty years that followed, Fasano–sometimes using the pen name Donna Clayton–published over 30 novels via the traditional publishing route, won the HOLT Medallion three times, and sold over 3.5 million copies worldwide.

In December 2009, however, she tried something different: she self-published her new book The Merry-Go-Round, which had at one time been in the hands of a large publisher (more on that below), through Amazon’s Kindle Store. Now it’s also available through Smashwords, BN.com, Apple’s iBookstore, and KoboBooks, and a print version could be hitting Amazon’s virtual shelves as early as this month.

I spoke with Fasano about her experience with self-publishing, where suddenly the author has to do everything from prepress to customer service, and whether she plans to do it again.

Why did you self-publish The Merry-Go-Round?

Donna Fasano

[In the mid-2000s] I sold Where’s Stanley? to Harlequin Next, and my editor liked it so she bought two more women’s fiction novels. It took me some time to write those two novels, and The Merry-Go-Round was one of those. The other manuscript was called Hindsight.

By the time I finished those two manuscripts, the Harlequin Next line had folded, so they returned the rights to me. But this took about a year’s worth of time because they purchased a lot of inventory, and they were trying to slot some of the books and put them in other places [within Harlequin's lines].

For many authors, like myself, the books didn’t quite fit anywhere else, so they returned them to us. I was trying to decide what to do with the book and didn’t like the idea of it sitting gathering dust, so I decided to try Kindle.

What did your agent think of this move?

He read The Merry-Go-Round and Hindsight and he said they were too… they were written for Harlequin, they’re women’s romance fiction novels, and Harlequin is very specific in things like word count. When women pick up a Harlequin, they know what they’re getting. So he felt that he wouldn’t be able to sell them anywhere else, unless I did a lot of work to them. And I liked them just the way they were.

So I didn’t ask my agent. I just did it. I mean, he freed me up, he said he didn’t know where to send these, so he was okay with me doing whatever I wanted to do with them.

So how did you choose Amazon and what was that experience like?

I knew absolutely nothing. I probably Googled “upload my manuscript as a Kindle book” to try to find some information somewhere, and that’s where I learned about Amazon’s DTP [Digital Text Platform].

It took quite a bit of time because I had to read two different formatting guides. I had to do everything. You know, formatting, cover, blurbs, everything, which is very different for me. A writer usually just writes the manuscript and sends it in, and then starts thinking about the next book.

Then I learned about Kindle Boards. [Kindle Boards is an online community of Kindle readers and writers. -Ed.] I went there and the writers there are just wonderful, just so helpful and supportive, and that’s where I learned about Smashwords, and that through Smashwords I could offer my book for sale in other venues.

When did you do this?

I believe I uploaded my book to Amazon in December ’09, and I did absolutely nothing for several months just because I didn’t know what to do.

It was after that, probably in January or February that I found Kindle Boards, and slowly but surely I have been improving the marketing of the book. I’ve changed the cover twice and worked on the product description a couple of times, and I’ve done interviews for blog writers. I feel so out of my element because I don’t do this part, I’ve never done this part. It’s been very exciting but very different and difficult.

This explains the different covers I’ve seen depending on the store.

Yes. The very first cover is the orange one, and that was my very first cover that I made and I was very proud of it. (Laughing). But the book was not selling, and a Kindle Board author–Karen McQuestion, who just had her book optioned for a movie–said, and I’m paraphrasing, “I don’t want to be insulting but I’m wondering if your cover is hurting your sales.” She explained that at first glance it looked like a children’s book. So I licensed a couple of pictures and put another cover together, and it was much better but I don’t think it was professional looking. So the cover with the large carousel horse and the couple in the oval–that’s the newest one. And it’s brand new.

The evolution of a cover, December 2009 to July 2010.

Have you been able to measure how the different covers have impacted sales?

Well it’s difficult to tell, but I can tell you that once I took the orange cover off and put the second cover on, my sales tripled. However, it’s difficult to say that it’s just the cover because I also was contacting all these blogs and offering reader copies for reviews and I just started to do things, I started to do marketing.

How did you handle tasks like copyediting, layout and design? Were those things already pretty far along because of the past deal with Harlequin Next?

Actually, Harlequin hadn’t edited it, so I read it and had a writer friend read it.

[As for formatting,] Smashwords has a formatting guide and Amazon has a formatting guide, and also there’s a Kindle Board author named Edward C. Patterson who has a formatting guide, and I read that too.

A reader sent me an email saying she found seven or eight typos in there, so I fixed those typos and then re-uploaded it. So it’s an ongoing process.

Are you going to offer it as a printed book at any point?

Yes. I just uploaded The Merry-Go-Round to CreateSpace. In fact, the proof copy is in the mail to me.

So it should be available in a month or two?

Oh, it won’t take that long at all. I was absolutely shocked. I just uploaded that book this week and the print copy is already coming. I just have to go in and click a button if the proof is okay, and then they’ll put it up for sale. So it may be within days.

Looking back, it seems you’ve been in a crazy, compressed learning phase for the past six months.

Yes I have!

How would you describe it?

It was fun. It was exciting. (Laughing.) I am very lucky to be married to a man who earns enough money so that I am able to do this, because the money’s not anything like the money that I made at Harlequin.

But have you seen ebook sales trending up each month?

Very much so, yes.

Does this mean you’re prepping Hindsight for self-publishing as well?

Yes!

In fact, I’ve gone further than that in that I have contacted Harlequin and got the rights reverted to my first eleven books. [Usually, after a book remains out of print for a certain length of time, the rights revert back to the author. -Ed.] But I don’t have electronic files of those books so I’m scanning them in and turning them into Word documents. I’ve never done anything like that before either, so I’m learning all kinds of new things.

I’m going to do everything. (Laughing.) I’m going to do it all!

Having experienced all this, do you think you’d go back to a traditional publisher in the future if the opportunity was right?

I haven’t thought about it. (Thinks.) If I could sell both, I would. I’m not in a place right now where I’m creating new stories. But I could see myself [in the future] submitting my work to a publisher. I love publishers, and having somebody else do your marketing for you is great! And proofreading, and editing–all of that.

How did you settle on a price for it?

I started out at $1.99. J. A. Konrath on his blog said that was a good price. There are some indie authors who sell their work for 99 cents, but because I have twenty years’ experience and I know I can deliver I felt it was worth a little more than that.

So I started at $1.99, then Amazon changed their royalty payment schedule, so I increased my price to $2.99. [On June 30th, Amazon announced an opt-in royalty program that provides much higher royalties on Kindle books, but requires a minimum price of $2.99. -Ed.]

I’d love to jump 10 years into the future and ask a writer whether running the business side of things has a negative effect on creative output. Is it too early for you to gauge that right now?

It probably is too early, but I can tell you that I spend a lot of time [on non-writing activities]. The readers on the Amazon discussion forums and on the Kindle Boards, they don’t want me to just go in and say, “Hey, buy my book!” They want me to come in and chat and get to know them.

And can you do that?

I’ve been doing that, but if I didn’t currently have [extra time], I wouldn’t have very much time to write. I could spend all day online, because there’s Goodreads, and LibraryThing, and Kindle Boards, and MobileRead. You know, everywhere you go, there are readers!

Finally, do you own a Kindle? If so, what’s your experience with it been like?

Oh, yes! And I have about 50 books in my TBR pile.

I love my Kindle because it enables me to carry all my books around–all the time. I’m a big reader and I have always carried a paperback everywhere.

I love books! I love the feel of a book in my hands. I love the tactility of turning the pages. Books just feel warm and inviting and comforting. That might sound strange, but books were an escape for me when I was a kid.

At first, I didn’t think I was going to be able to get used to the metal of the Kindle. But I found a way around that–a leather cover. (Laughing.)

I believe there will always be a place for print books. But I also believe that, in these techno-savvy times, the e-book is here to stay… and it is destined to grow. I’m very happy to be a part of this new… hmmm, not sure what to call it. Age?

The Merry-Go-Round by Donna Fasano [Amazon Kindle Store]

Donna Clayton Amazon Page [Donna Fasano's pen name]

(Carousel illustration sources: celesteh and mira66)