Booksprung » interviews

Erotica publisher Ellora’s Cave plans to launch its own ereader device

Chris Walters — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:35:26 +0000

I recently interviewed Susan Edwards, the COO of Ellora’s Cave, about news that the publisher is about to launch its own ereader device. Dubbed the ECave C71, the ereader is a Chinese-made LCD model that will be branded by the publisher and sold directly to customers. Like the genres of romance, sci-fi and fantasy, erotica tends to attract a dedicated customer who buys new books frequently, and while EC sells titles on other ebookstores, its real business is in direct ebook sales to those customers. By offering its own device, it can potentially bypass stores like Kindle and Nook and keep the profits to itself.

The full story along with device specs is over on Teleread, but here’s my interview:

What was the inspiration for this?

Susan Edwards: Although our books are or will shortly be available through all the major ebook vendors, we do still have a lot of loyal customers who buy almost solely from our website. We wanted to provide them with a non-proprietary reader that they could use for all their ebooks, but that would also make it easy to continue to buy directly from us, where they still get the best price and can take advantage of all of our sales and purchase incentives.

Plus, we do a lot of conventions, trade shows, contests, p.r. and giveaways. We had been purchasing proprietary e-readers for those purposes and thought, why not have our own e-reader? It’s great advertising and it, again, makes it easy for people to come to our site and buy directly from us.

This model, which we’re calling the eCave C71, is a very limited edition test run that we are rolling out at our RomantiCon convention. We will give many of them away as prizes, and so will be able to work closely with a limited population of users to make sure the device does everything they want it to before deciding on future models and functions.

Can you provide some details on the device? It looks like the Prology Latitute T-701.

SE: It’s very similar to that one. It wasn’t manufactured by them, but has very similar specs and does use the same operating system.

This first model does not come with a cover, though it fits the sleeves available for the Nook and the Kindle 3. Right now, we’re testing the water with the device to gauge interest. If we decide to go larger scale, we will probably have a selection of our own covers to choose from.

You mentioned a “vibrating key” functionality. What!?

SE: It’s a tactile feedback function, like the clicking sound you get when you tap keys. We chose the vibration rather than the usual click mostly just for fun. We are, after all, primarily an erotic romance publisher, and we like to have fun with that, so we often inject a note of fun around the sexuality of our content.

Have you set a price?

SE: We are still working on determining an exact price point. We would definitely like to sell it for less than other e-readers, with some built-in purchasing incentives: something like a combination of free e-books preloaded on the device and a discount on the purchase of additional e-books. We are looking at different models in a range of prices for the future.

How does EC plan on handling warranty and service issues?

SE: We have a great customer service department, so most of the support issues will be handled via that existing department. Any problems we can’t solve through that avenue, we will work directly with the manufacturer on and we will replace any faulty devices. That’s part of the reason we are starting out small, to make sure we are getting dependable devices from reliable manufacturers who stand behind their products.

The similar Prology and Digma models seems to offer a lot of extra functionality, like a radio, photo viewer, voice recorder app, calculator, and so on. Will those things be in the EC model, or is it going to be customized to work solely as an ebook reader?

SE: The ECave C71 features photo, music and video functionality. It truly is a multi-media device at a fraction of the cost of most tablet PCs. It does not feature wireless connectivity but can be accessed via the usb cable provided or by loading various media onto a separate MicroSD card.

Do you see this as a way to exert some control over your market segment when it comes to ebooks, which is currently dominated by huge companies like Amazon, Apple and B&N?

SE: Many of our customers have been buying, downloading and reading our books on their computers and other digital devices for years. We have always worked to keep up with their preferences by providing our books in whatever format they prefer so that we can retain them as customers. This is really just an extension of that practice, and it very definitely does help us to retain direct access to our market segment.

For the past five weeks, I’ve been running things over at Teleread while their editor took some time off. While posting there, I came across several items that I think are also of interest to readers of this blog. This is one of them.

How Sidney Williams escaped midlist oblivion

Chris Walters — Tue, 21 Jun 2011 17:11:54 +0000

This past March on the Goodreads page for “Gnelfs”, one of Sidney Williams’ early horror novels, a woman wrote that it was her favorite book back in high school. She also wrote that she’d recently gone to Powell’s to buy a new copy, only to discover that it wasn’t available.

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”?

Sidney Williams:

I covered the police beat, and was in and out of the police stations and sheriff departments of central Louisiana and went out to a lot of crime scenes. I was exposed to both the newspaper side of things and the law enforcement perspective.

[In "Midnight Eyes"], there’s a lot about how news is covered. There’s an ethical reporter, and a less than ethical editor, so you have the ways that news can damage a law enforcement investigation. And then there’s the police work. There are several true cases probably that had seeds of ideas, but it’s not based on any one case or anything.

I actually wrote this several years after I had stopped being a reporter and doing any police coverage. I was working as a librarian, so I had really easy access to all kinds of reference materials. I read homicide textbooks and serial killer treatises and just all kinds of things that were easy to get because I could place the interlibrary loan orders myself. [It was] kind of a perfect storm, you know, of my history observing these things and then plenty of reference material, and ideas just kind of gelled.

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

What happened was, I think David Niall Wilson had started Crossroad Press and was looking for authors who were at the point of getting their rights back. He sent me an email, and I kind of conversed regularly with him on Twitter.

He’s a friend of friends. Wayne Allen Sallee from Chicago is a really good friend of mine, and Elizabeth Massie is a friend of Wayne’s and of mine, and there are several people—there’s a strong concentration of writers, particularly horror writers, in Chicago. I never went to one but Beth used to have a little noncon, so a lot of friends of mine used to go there, and David would go to that. I never met David and we never really crossed paths other than online, but when he was getting Crossroad cranked up he contacted me.

I had thought about doing some ebook stuff but just hadn’t really gotten off my ass and done it. I emailed my second editor at Pinnacle, who told me who to contact to get my rights back. Essentially what they send are letters that tell you that these books are released to you. It was really more formal than I thought it would be: “When Darkness Falls” was, I think, called “Sidney Williams’ novel number five” with them, so I got back a letter that said “Sidney Williams’ novel number five is released to you.”

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

I wrote on a Commodore 64 in those days. That was the one where you put the big square floppy disk in and you loaded the word processing program and you wrote, and then you saved what you wrote, you flipped the disk over and loaded the spellcheck. I probably still have the disk around somewhere. It was a trade paperback book that the program came in, with a sleeve in the back that for the disk.

I used a daisy wheel printer so it took forever to print anything. I turned the manuscripts in on paper, and they were sent back to me on paper with the editorial marks.

It’s almost completely digital now. I work almost exclusively on a computer. Once in a while something gets printed out, but there’s very little paper involved these days.

What was the first ebook you read?

“The Beetle” by Richard Marsh, which is late 1800s or early 1900s. I had come across it somewhere on the web, read about it and found it on Project Gutenberg and read it on my iPod. And some John Silence stories by Algernon Blackwood.

There was a program called iPodLibrary—this would have been 2004-2005—that you could use to take an electronic document and convert it into a format that would work in the Notes feature on a third generation iPod—you know, the spinwheel version. And so I had several books from Project Gutenberg that I converted that way and read.

How was that experience?

I didn’t mind it! You know, it was monochromatic, not unlike how a Kindle looks now, just smaller. But it was kind of exciting, doing something different, I guess, so there was a little bit of novelty. I read several things that way and then I kind of put it aside.

I read another book called “The Green Mummy” by Fergus Hume, a Victorian novel. It was fun. But it didn’t save your place well, so you had to keep track of which chunk of it you had read and where to pick up again.

The main appeal was you were getting things off the web that were free but that you didn’t want to sit at a computer or sit at a desk and read.

That’s reminding me that when I worked at the library, I read part of Edgar Rice Burrough’s “The Monster Men”. I would have it on screen at the reference desk, and when it was quiet I would read a little of it. I finished that book on paper, not on screen. But even back in the mid-90s probably I was interested in all of the things that were on Project Gutenberg, you know, that you might not be able to get a paper copy of readily. Some of those Edgar Rice Burroughs works were as early as 1915, so it was fun to at least get access to some of them.

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

[laughing] There are certainly probably some romance novels on my Kindle. And you know there are so many free ones [out there] that are of the erotica realm or the bondage realm—I read probably half of one of those. I got my Kindle in September, and in December I visited Inkmesh and saw something that was holiday themed. I probably read about half of it. There was nothing wrong with the book, but, so many books, so little time.

But there are countless directions that guilty pleasures can go. Coming out of grad school and the MFA program, you could say probably any popular fiction from the grad school standpoint would be embarrassing.

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?

My first thought is that I’d like to have a TARDIS app. It would be cool if you had that, where it would make your mobile device bigger on the inside than the outside, and also it would let you travel back and forth through time and space. [laughing] And you could keep a sandwich inside. That’s the shoot the moon option, I guess.

On a more serious note, if I had an unlimited budget, I would pour it into consolidating everything into one device, which we’re moving toward with iPads and color Nooks and color Kindles on the horizon. The usage patterns are seeming to indicate that tablets are where we’re really going to go and we’re going to get more and more lower cost tablet options. So just really developing something that’s the Swiss Army Knife of devices is where I would pour the R&D.

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?

People have always loaned books to friends. I think if your pal reads a book and loves it and wants to turn you on to that author, that’s fine whether it’s paper or digital. Often I’ve loaned books to friends who’ve become bigger fans of a writer than I am. They’ve gone on to buy more books by the author. That’s great. You just can’t love an author and post his book to a server for 133,000 of your best friends to enjoy.

It’s important to respect intellectual property rights. It’s important to have parameters and options like Overdrive than allow borrowing of books in reasonable fashion with some compensation to the author. Longer term solutions are needed on the technology front, solutions that allow reasonable sharing but not piracy. Ultimately you need checks in place as well either for people who truly don’t understand what they’re doing is wrong or for the super villains out there.

Do you have any preference for print or digital books?

I kind of flip back and forth. There’s a book called “Biblioholism”, and I think I said on a blog somewhere that’s the one book I don’t own. I have a lot of dead tree or paper books, and I flip back and forth between that and the Kindle.

What I’ve started doing is I keep a change jar where I save coins, and when I have a pretty full jar I will dump that into a Coinstar and get an Amazon certificate. That’s how I budget for ebooks now.

And I am trying to skew more toward, if there’s an ebook version I go ahead and get it for the Kindle, instead of getting a paper book that will take up space.

And finally, who are your favorite authors?

I love Raymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald on the mystery front. In terms of literary fiction, I like Raymond Carver and Haruki Murikami, especially “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”. I also like William Faulkner. I also love Ray Bradbury, Philp K. Dick and Jorge Luis Borges, really a must-read. I’m a real eclectic. I like many, many things. That’s where ebooks come in handy.

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)

Free Stephen King short story from The Atlantic

Chris Walters — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 16:47:00 +0000

It’s almost impossible to find a free Stephen King short story these days, so I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the entire text of a new work, “Herman Wouk Is Still Alive,” has been published by The Atlantic on their website as part of their May issue. In addition, King gives an interview about the writing process behind the story. I sometimes think King’s non-fiction pieces are more interesting than his fiction, at least when it comes to writing about writing, and the interview is no exception.

If you’re a King fan, or just want free fiction, this is a good opportunity to put one of those free “send to your Kindle” plug-ins to work. I opened the print version of King’s story so that it’s all on one page, then used Klip.me (formerly Send to Kindle). I had to add Klip.me’s email address to my Amazon trusted address list first (the service will walk you through this the first time you use it), and then it worked just fine, and now the story is on my Kindle. One great thing about Klip.me is that it lets you edit the text before sending it off to Amazon, so I was able to delete the sidebar stuff that interrupted the flow of the story. Nice!

“Herman Wouk Is Still Alive” by Stephen King (The Atlantic Magazine)

(Photo: eparales)

Today’s Bargain Book: “Live From New York” by Tom Shales

Booksprung Editor — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 21:07:18 +0000

“Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live” by Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller

In this oral history of Saturday Night Live, authors Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller interviewed dozens of the performers, writers, and producers from the first show in 1975 through the 2001-02 season. Rather than craft a narrative and force the subjects into it, Shales and Miller splice together the multiple interviews so that topics that come up repeatedly, like specific seasons, unexpected firings, and backstage power struggles, are described from multiple viewpoints. It’s a fascinating look at how television gets made, especially if you like anything about SNL.

Price: $2.99

Sample the book right now in your browser:

Please note that prices may have changed since posting. Always check the current price on Amazon before making a purchase.

Check out the Amazon Bargains archive for more books.

Vook offers free Guns N’ Roses enhanced ebook for two days

Chris Walters — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 19:27:06 +0000

From what I’ve read online, most people have mixed feelings at best for Vook, a company formed to create and sell “enhanced ebooks” that embed video, audio, and social media elements in the text. I’m still on the fence; the closest I’ve come to test-driving an enhanced ebook was when I downloaded one of Amazon’s first multimedia Kindle titles, a book on cake recipes, and in that situation the tutorial videos were actually quite useful.

I can’t imagine ever wanting to be interrupted by video in a fiction book, but I’ve often thought it would be fun to have an ebook come with its own soundtrack to listen to while you read it. And it just makes common sense (to me at least) that a nonfiction title about a band would be better if you could see and hear the people involved.

Well, here’s a chance to decide whether that’s true without having to put down any cash, because for today and tomorrow Vook is giving away the GnR enhanced ebook “Reckless Road” for free. (Except on the Kindle, wtf Vook?)

I’ve downloaded it but haven’t checked it out, so I can’t add to the peanut gallery yet. But Vook describes it as 200 pages and 40 minutes of video interviews with members of the band and their associates, all centered around the making of one the most famous and popular rock albums of all time, “Appetite for Destruction.”

Unfortunately it looks like the only free versions are those for Apple’s iOS devices, in both iBooks and App formats. I’m hoping the Kindle version is just slow to be updated (that’s what happened with another publisher’s promo last month), but since the online version is also excluded right now, I’m doubtful.

“Reckless Road: Guns N’ Roses and the Making of Appetite For Destruction” [Vook via Teleread]

The Paris Review posts over 300 author interviews online

Chris Walters — Mon, 25 Oct 2010 22:07:22 +0000

If you enjoy learning how your favorite authors think, write, and argue, then you’ll love this amazing new resource now available for free online. The Paris Review has been interviewing the world’s most famous authors for over five decades, and last week its new editor posted all of them on its website.

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:

E. M. Forster
Dorothy Parker
Aldous Huxley
Jack Kerouac
Norman Mailer
John Updike
Kurt Vonnegut
John Fowles
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Doris Lessing

Cynthia Ozick
Philip Roth
Martin Amis
Italo Calvino
Ted Hughes
Alice Munro
August Wilson
Kazuo Ishiguro
Jonathan Lethem
Haruki Murakami

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]

Bezos predicts Kindle book sales will surpass paperbacks within a year

Chris Walters — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 04:15:30 +0000

USAToday sat down with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to talk to him about the Kindle and the accompanying bookstore. Bezos is suprisingly candid about several issues. Some highlights:

On the recent news that Kindle books are outselling hardcovers on Amazon:

“I predict we will surpass paperback sales sometime in the next nine to 12 months. Sometime after that, we’ll surpass the combination of paperback and hardcover. It stuns me. People forget that Kindle is only 33 months old.”

On why there’s no support for ePub:

“We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. [...] Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we’re moving very quickly to improve the state of the art. It’s very helpful not to have to wait for some third-party standard to catch up.”

On competition, particularly the iPad:

“There are going to be a lot of tablet computers — the Android ones are coming. Kindle works on BlackBerry, Android, iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, PC and Mac. Our approach is: Buy once, read everywhere. We want you to be able to read your Kindle book on any device, then we want separately to make the very best uncompromised e-reader.”

Read the full interview at USAToday.

(Photo: etech)

After 20 years of traditional publishing, Donna Fasano goes indie

Chris Walters — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 16:35:10 +0000

Update! – Sunday, July 11th
Donna Fasano is holding an Amazon gift card giveaway to readers who purchase The Merry-Go-Round this month from Amazon or Smashwords. Check out her Goodreads author blog for details.

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)

Five editors and authors discuss the role of the editor

Chris Walters — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:37:29 +0000

(Photo: Nic's events)

Last week, the BBC Radio 4 program Open Book focused on the role of the editor in publishing a work. Host Mariella Frostrup interviewed five editors or author-editor combos about what value an editor–whose job didn’t really formally exist until after World War II–provides.

You can listen to the half-hour show here; the first 10 minutes alone are worth it just to hear Diana Athill talk about the unique editing requirements of Updike, Naipul, and Rhys. But here’s a summary of key points from the full episode:

An editor can help shore up a writer’s weaknesses. Some writers may be masters of language, but need help shaping something into a finished work. Other writers may be great writers but lousy at taking care of other essential life tasks, so they would otherwise never write or publish without someone’s help.
An editor is a guaranteed, and perhaps the only, extremely attentive reader a writer will have. Diana Athill says, “What one learns when you’re working with an eidtor, is that actually very few peole get their books read extremely attentively by anybody. A writer is dying to have his or her work read with complete attention. And here is this editor person, and the one thing they have done is they have paid full attention to your work, which is very gratifying.”
An editor may act more like an agent or a music producer. Some editors will work closely with writers to help them determine career steps, going so far as to advise on what sort of book to write next. Others, like Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish, will manipulate the original manuscript so much that their role becomes something more collaborative, or even borderline Svengali-like, as with music producers.

Open Book for Thursday, 31 Dec 2009 [BBC] (Photo: Nic’s events)

How novelists write: the WSJ asks writers to share their methods

Chris Walters — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:07:11 +0000

The random word-formation method. (Photo: Laineys Repertoire)

Muji notebooks, fountain pens, 30″ Mac monitors, tape recorders, voice recognition software, colored ribbons, index cards, French lined paper, and cheap school exam books are some of the various tools you can use to write a novel, according to the Wall Street Journal.

This isn’t really about ebooks or “the future of publishing,” but it’s an entertaining look at how writing happens, and how people combine old and new technologies in unique ways to fuel the creative process.

Some of my favorites:

Nicholson Baker once grew out his beard, dressed as the character he wanted to write about, and filmed over 40 hours of himself in character delivering lectures.
Edwidge Danticat creates a sort of visual storyboard on a bulletin board using photos, magazine cutouts, and other images.
Danticat also reads the entire first draft aloud and records it, so that she can revise any sections that trip her up.
Junot Díaz read the Lord of the Rings trilogy six times in order to get in the mind of a character obsessed with fantasy fiction.
Laura Lippman creates elaborate, symmetrical, color-coded charts on bulletin boards using different colors of ribbon. She says people find them “mildy disturbing” due to her obsessiveness over them.
Orhan Pamuk writes on every other page of graph-paper notebooks, using the blank page for revisions made in “dialogue-like balloons”; he relies on a speed typist for transcription.
Richard Powers dictates to speech-recognition software while lying on his back in bed, sometimes for up to nine hours a day.

Read the full article at the Wall Street Journal (note: it will only be available for non-subscribers for 7 days).
(Photo: Laineys Repertoire)