Yesterday I spent four miserable hours trying to upload The Bretton Katt Alliance to the Kindle format. First it just plain wouldn't take, then it was full of bobbles that called for correction. Oy. Well, it finally told me it was done, and that the book should be available to readers 'in 12 to 72' hours. That's a long window. Amazon never did explain why it might take up to three days.
Hopefully, it's done, and people will be able to download it to their little gadgets. If not, it's back to the drawing board.
I still have mixed feelings about this. How well will it sell? Will Amazon pull anything with that less-than-above-board contract? Does this really mean anything for the future of books and publishing, or is it just another momentary fad?
Later this week I will be uploading the text of The Bretton Katt Alliance into the Kindle format. I know, a mere ten weeks ago I said I had no plans to do this. So, what changed my mind? A couple of things, mainly.
It's a market. In several on-line forums, readers have said that these days they're buying nothing but Kindle books (I hope that no security scare precipitates a seizure of all electronics from all passengers, etc). I don't know if they'll buy my book or not, but if it isn't on Kindle, they won't. I don't think I'm particularly greedy, but I do want people to read my book!
Curiosity. I would like to see how buyers respond to a Kindle edition. Just how big a market is this? Probably not as big as Amazon claims. It costs me nothing, after all. Okay, I admit: there's the desire not to be left behind. Like it or not, some format of the electronic book is here to stay. Writers must adapt. I'm not that much of a Luddite.
I still have some reservations. I still don't trust Amazon as far as I could throw an elephant. But for right now, going with the Kindle looks like the right thing to do. If it turns out to be a bad decision, well, we can only fall back and try something else. We get nowhere by settling into ruts, even comfortable ruts.
So, look for The Bretton Katt Alliance, coming to a Kindle near you (I hope) by this weekend.
In the past year or so, various parties in the publishing/internet/on-line-retailer industries have tried all of the following:
Google expressed a wish to change copyright law so that ‘out of print’ would be the same as ‘public domain’.
A Major Publisher (whose name I will not utter here) inserted a clause into their contract, stating that as long as they offered an ‘electronic version’ of a book, it wasn’t out of print-even though they were not actually printing copies and shipping them to bookstores, effectively hanging on to the rights forever.
At the end of March, Amazon began calling Print-on-Demand companies, telling them that they would print their books through Book Surge (Amazon’s own company) or else Amazon would turn off the ‘buy’ buttons for that company’s books. Several PODs did cave in, but many others haven’t. Most ‘buy’ buttons are still turned on.
Recently the SWFA ran an article on the difficulties of getting some publishers to pay authors what they’ve earned. Major publishers, not little fly-by-night outfits.
What is an honest writer to do?
STICK TOGETHER.
Every writers’ organization in the country, and some abroad, have jumped all over the Major Publisher and Amazon. (After a ton of protests, the Major Publisher dropped the new clause and apologized for the ‘misunderstanding’.) PEN, The Author’s Guild, SFWA, RWA-all of these groups keep constant watch. They know from long experience, and history, that if writers don’t look out for each other, no one else will.
This is especially important for self-published authors, like me. Although things have improved in the last decade, there’s still a stigma attached to self-published books-mostly by people who haven’t got the faintest idea of how the publishing industry works.
Perhaps at one time, any writer who wrote a good book would get snapped up by a major publisher. This was true, until about twenty years ago. Today, the publishing industry is run more and more like Hollywood; the focus is on brand names and established formulas, whether the work produced is any good or not. That business model (did I just use the phrase ‘business model’?) makes it nearly impossible for new writers to get their work noticed.
If the excellent POD novels I’ve read this year are any indication, the big houses have rejected or overlooked wonderful work. These people self-published because, like me, they believed in their stories and knew that readers would respond. The irony is, If I weren’t self-published myself, I probably would never have read them. But if I want readers to take a chance on my self-published work, I had better put my money where my mouth is. So I have discovered authors like C. S. Marks and D. M. Paul, Seth Kerin and G.L Douglas. I have others I’m going to get to through the year.
Reach out to your fellow writers, whether they’re self-published or not. Never stop believing in your work; if it’s good, people will tell you. The battle is easier if we fight together; alone, nobody gets very far.
Lately I’ve been thinking about making my books available in the Kindle format, and eventually buying one myself. After some research and soul-searching, I’m not so sure.
Yes, it would be handy to load several books onto one gadget, rather than lug around a backpack full. It would be cool to download newspapers and, ahem, blogs when you’re not actually at the computer. But I think that this, and any other electronic reader, are at best a supplement to the old-fashioned bound book; it’s not a replacement. I have several books that were printed more than forty years ago; my mother has some that were printed in the nineteenth century. I can take any of them off the shelf and read them; there are computer programs from a mere fifteen years ago that are obsolete.
Yesterday I made a list of ten of my favorite authors and checked the Kindle availability of their work. Here are the results:
Joy Chant-0
Arthur C. Clarke-7
Robertson Davies-0
Ursula K. LeGuin-short stories only
Doris Lessing-7
Naomi Novik-4
J.K. Rowling-0 (yes, that’s correct)
Dan Simmons-11
J.R.R. Tolkien-0
Sigrid Undset-1
Only Novik has her entire oeuvre available on Kindle.
After perusing the Kindle store, I concluded that this is geared mostly to people who read bestsellers rather than to true book fanatics; most of the books I checked on cost $9.99-more than a mass market paperback. Add this to the $350.00 cost of the Kindle itself and it looks like less than a bargain. Nor does the Kindle do graphics that well; so much for children’s picture books, art books, books on astronomy-anything that has lots of large color illustration
True bibliophiles don’t just read books, they have relationships with them. They understand that reading is a sensual activity, as well as a mental one. We love the feel of books in our hands, the touch of paper under our fingertips, the weight of a book propped on our raised knees when we sit up in bed to read. The sight of many different volumes lined up on a shelf. You will never replace that with a machine.
As for making my own books available, perhaps. No market should be written off. But I'm going to think long and hard about it.
