It’s quite frustrating because unlike some of my friends in other areas of Merida, our mail delivery is so bad that Amazon won’t ship to me down here any more. Two shipments went astray. Other people get books in the mail, but not us. So I was hoping I’d found a solution.

Barnes & Noble has an eBook reader called the Nook. I looked up the eBooks on B&N and they do offer Cemetery Dance, but not Story Like the Wind. I don’t think you can download B&N books to Amazon’s Kindle reader nor can you download Amazon’s eBooks to the Nook. I knew that when I purchased the reader, and thought Amazon would have the best selection of eBooks. I didn’t check thoroughly or I might have bought the Nook.

The eBook library available for the new Apple iPad is embarrassingly bad. It’s called iBooks and it’s a mess. I know it’s a new product and a new area for them, but perhaps they should hook up with B&N or some other retailer. The iPad is not really for book readers, or at least it isn’t right now.

I love getting the New York Times on my Kindle, although it takes some getting used to in the small format. It is a neat little machine, the text is wonderfully readable, and I have to say I prefer it to a paper book, because it’s easier to manage. It’s tiny and light, and I put it in my bag. The battery lasts ten hours. I have about 20 books on it right now (it holds 1,000, supposedly) so I can read whatever I’m in the mood for. It holds your place from the previous reading session.

When you find a section of text that you like, you can highlight it and save it in a special file elsewhere.

There are no page numbers, but it tells you the percent of the book you have read.

So I’m irritated with this new toy because I can’t get all the books I want, but I love reading on it.

I tried to upload my manuscript, but it got stuck and I’ve emailed them for help.

Formatting for print is different than formatting for eBooks. For an eBook, you strip out page breaks, tabs, headers, and page numbers, because the concept of a page is different on a reader than it is on a printed page. Depending on the size of your type, the device the eBook is being viewed on, or the resolution of your computer screen, the text comes out differently. You can’t control how much material is on a page.

Because Wordclay gives you a file of how your book will actually look page by page, you can make adjustments as you want. Starting with my eBook file, for instance, I added page breaks, a few more fonts (the rule with eBook formatting is Keep It Simple), and other niceties.

So to submit to Wordclay, I took my eBooks manuscript and put back all the formatting I’d been dying to have all along.

With print, the text adjusts itself to the size format you have selected. Wordclay provides a selection of three different page sizes. You can do page breaks at the end of chapters to make sure your chapter starts on a new page. Then, Wordclay will show you how your book will actually look in type. It’s kind of thrilling.

Wordclay’s web interface is not as intuitive as Smashwords. And the costs affiliated with the processes are not immediately obvious on the site. It turns out that what they do is produce a book-ready file for you for free, but then they charge quite a bit for getting an ISBN number, acting as your publisher, and if you want other services like marketing, etc. it is more. And I cannot figure out, after reviewing the site carefully, how much it would cost to actually produce a book. This is critical because it determines how much I would have to charge for the book.

I already have an ISBN number and have established a publisher identity for this and future books. Wordclay claims that the ISBN I got only applies to the manuscript, but that is something I’ll want to check out. Meanwhile, their fee for procuring one is $99. It only cost me $25 doing it myself. Of course I went through a lot of crap with the company that dispenses the numbers, but it was a learning experience. (See my previous article about Bowker.)

I have looked into some other self publishers and my best guess is that each book, with a two-color cover, would cost upwards of $12.00 unless I bought hundreds of them, which I can’t afford. If I have to pay $12 per book, I would have to charge at least $25 to make any money, by the time I am finished with the cut to Amazon or whatever. And very few people are going to pay $25 for a trade book by an unknown author.

An on-demand printer that I just love is Third Place Books in Seattle. (Lake Forest Park store). A surly genius named Vladmir runs a tight ship there. He has a miraculous machine, that once you feed it your files, churns out a finished, covered, bound book in a few minutes. The staff calls the machine Ginger.

Ginger also  prints out copies of public domain books on demand. You can order them from a catalog or inquire as to whether they can print a book for you.  See thirdplacepress.com

However, to print an author’s book, Ginger charges six cents per page per book, as I understand it. For my approximately 280-page book, printing  would cost $16.80, and that’s before we factor in the cover.

Of course there are dozens, if not hundreds of companies that call themselves publishers and help you get your book online as an eBook or printed as a book. The author pays for everything. They also provide editing and design services, and claim to market and promote your book.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I haven’t seen any self-published books in retail stores so far, so I don’t understand where their marketing leads. Perhaps they get books reviewed in odd online locations of their own creation.

Of course, the wonderful thing about being selected by an establishing print publishing company is that they pay all the expenses for whipping your book into shape, creating books, and using established lines of distribution to get the books into stores.

But it could be that eventually, the line between traditional publishers and the new kind of publishers, that charge the author, will dim, and some mid-ground will be available. Maybe someone will be smart enough to start a self-publishing firm that actually reviews and evaluates the manuscripts and selects some that they will publish at reduced cost to the author and more royalty for them. Kind of a joint cost sharing. This would still leave the author door open wide enough to admit the screaming mobs who are sure they’ve written The Ultimate Book, and also allow the better writers accessibility to print services at prices they can afford.

If this happens, it will mean that the self-publish companies will take a look at quality, perhaps absorb some of the editors laid off by the old school publishers, and start a new era of publishing, one that encourages writers instead of making them feel like rejected idiots.

My Self-Publishing Dilemma

Publishing my own book on eBooks is one thing, but publishing it in print is another. So many people have told me that they’d like to read my book, but they can’t stand reading on a screen, that I kind of want to have a tangible book to sell them.

My own vanity has prevented me from self-publishing in print. Somehow it was okay to publish an eBook because the regular publishers didn’t handle them anyway, and because it’s so new. But actually PAYING someone to produce my book has just felt weird.

I’ve always felt conflicted about self-publishing in hardcopy. Self-published books usually look self published. They have those sharp corners and the colors on the cover look stark and amateurishly produced. And when you get right down to it, self publishing in print is an admission that you can’t get published by a regular publisher.

Realistically however, the publishing industry seems to be in a pit. My agent tells me they are accepting very few unknown authors. The economy is hitting them and they have decided that their chances of selling books by known authors are better.

I can see that they are taking the safe route by spitting out lots of new books by the same old guys. I’ve stopped buying them, because the quality has deteriorated. They are holding these writers to schedules like getting a new book out every six months. The latest book by one of my favorites was so bad, I abandoned reading it.

Although only 2% of new book sales are eBooks at the moment, the number is climbing. I think it will take time for the reading public to shell out money for lots of Kindles or Nooks, but hey – I just bought a Kindle. And the fact that the publishers are spitting out a lot of junk trade books has depressed my buying fervor.

In the past, I went with published trade books because the books were of high quality. I know the publishers go (or went) through a rigid selection process and so I was guaranteed some degree of quality. I no longer feel that that’s true.

A lot of the major writers have become their own corporations, doling out their writing tasks to other people. It says so on the covers.You will see a book by Famous Author, but written by Other Author. I have picked up a few of these and none of them have been as good as books by the Famous Author.

I haven’t bought a mystery off the shelf for a long time. After spending eight bucks for junk about a dozen times, I gave up. My reading tastes have now turned toward classics and literature, which is probably better anyway.

So my question (to myself) is, if the publishers are letting me, as a reader, down, by churning out these crappy books, is it still a matter of pride for me to hold out for a “real” publisher, or not? I am veering toward self publishing in print.

Self publishing is a whole other can of worms for the buying public. While in the past, I depended on the publishers for quality control, the print self publishing and eBook worlds are free for alls. Anyone can publish. I have no way of knowing in advance that what I buy, or download, will be worth reading.

How do we make our choices of what books to buy? And to what degree has the current state of the publishing industry affected our buying habits? Has anyone but me switched from fast-moving trade mysteries to slower, more intelligent literature because my old favorites have become compromised?

As a reader, I no longer feel I can depend on publishers to be viable gateways to reasonable books. I’m on my own.

Perhaps the new way of things will involve a lot more self publishing and new paradigms will emerge to help readers sort out what’s worth buying. More consumer reviews, consumer review websites, there are many possibilities. It will be a great show.

If I write a good book and self publish it, how will anyone know, without buying it, that it’s good? I’m out there with people who have written books in a week, and readers have no way to tell who is what without making an investment.

Smashwords suggests making 50% of your book available as a free look. I think this is a good idea, but I couldn’t make myself give away more than 25% of it, because the whole premise would have been out there.

When you send in your manuscript, they run it through their software, which they have lovingly dubbed “Meatgrinder,” and it comes out with a list of what’s wrong with your formatting, so you can fix it.

When your manuscript is corrected and done, Meatgrinder puts it in the formats required for the various online stores and then they send it out.

It’s all free!! Incredible. So now, Deadly Awakening will be on Barnes & Noble and be available to people using Sony and other eBook readers.

I had several questions in the process of doing this, and sent in queries. I got responses from Mark Coker, the owner of the company. Coker seems to have a passionate dedication to publishing easily available eBooks and believes in their future.

The company also has an affiliate that can make hardcopies of your book for distribution by them on anyone else. It’s called Wordclay.

Since Kingsolver is an a acclaimed writer and doesn’t have to observe any of the usual guidelines, like starting out with a bang, the first chapters of the book are introspective background material. On the Kindle, I just yawned and turned it off. Besides, I found the process of reading on the Kindle disturbing as there were no pages to turn. I kept waving my right hand at the the margin of the machine, which was non-productive. I couldn’t quite get the hang of pressing the Next Page button.

Luckily, I had a hardcopy of the book, so I started reading it and within fifty pages, I was entranced. Once drawn in to the story, I tried the Kindle again, and this time it took. I was so caught up in the book itself that I didn’t care what I was reading it on. The print is so easy to see and follow and the page turning thing gets automatic very quickly, of course.

The reading process is not nearly as satisfying on my PC. I downloaded the book to my PC and found it hard to read. Something about the screen glaring, the size, the numbers of lines per page, random it seems, with different computers, and also I associate the computer with work and research. The Kindle is a very different experience. I suppose I could get used to reading fiction on the computer, but it has other disadvantages, like I can’t carry it around as easily.

Something else to get used to: The Kindle  doesn’t give page numbers,  but it gives another type of good locator and also tells you what percent of the book you have read.

After that first pleasant experience with the Kindle, I found I actually preferred it to the  physical book, a cumbersome hardcover edition. I took the Kindle with me, rather than the book, when I was going somewhere, and at home I curled up in my favorite reading chair with it and found it easier to handle than a book. I now, dare I say it, prefer reading on the Kindle and look forward to buying my own next week.

Yes, I have to give up the whole concept of having all those books who are my friends wink at me when I pass them on the bookshelf, but oh well…. I suppose if I truly adore a book, I can buy it anyway. But the reality is that I seldom re-read a book. I just love having them around me.

As for loving the feel of the book, the paper, etc., I think I can live without that. I can carry this little machine in my purse and have the comfort of knowing it can hold 1500 of my favorite novels, that I can pick and choose from anytime, and anywhere.

My book is 2012: Deadly Awakening. It’s on Amazon Kindle books (an eBook). Follow this link.

My friend Steve in Seattle has looked at it, and he says you can’t sell an eBook through Amazon Associates and get credit for it. I haven’t seen this anywhere, but it makes sense, because they won’t produce my book info for the link when I’m trying to post it.

Now I see that Wordpress, which is what I use for this blog, has its own plug-in for this, for linking to Amazon products. And if all else fails, I will just put in a link to the Amazon product page.

Sales are modest on my book, compared to let’s say, JA Jance, or Barbara Kingsolver (humor), but it has sold enough so that it’s probable that people other than my friends are buying it. In April, when a few other projects are done, I will work on marketing.

I did do another edit. It had some photos that were printing blank and of course I continue to find typos – things like incomplete quotation marks. So I fixed a lot of those and just re-loaded it on the Amazon DTP site. As before, it took a few days to hit the airwaves, but version 1.1 is now online.

By the way, I did it in Word, as requested by Amazon, and it took out formatting, such as first line indent.

I borrowed someone’s Kindle and read a couple of books on it. I see that they have no formatting either, aside from separating paragraphs. It does accept headers.

The other problem is with Amazon Associates. I’m trying to insert the software to produce a connection from my site to buy my book. When I come to the part of the process where you enter the book, I do so and it can’t find it. You can enter the book by ISBN number, so I did that but it doesn’t work either.

I have a feeling that both of these things, to quote a computer guru of mine, are Operator Error.

Postscript next day: I didn’t realize, or forgot, that when you upload your version on DTP, it takes a day or so for them to actually get it online. So today it works and the latest version of 2012: Deadly Awakening is now up on Amazon Ebooks!

I still have to solve the problem of how to allow people to buy the book through my site.

Beyond that, I’m wondering what’s involved with Barnes&Noble, Google, etc. Today I was looking at a site called Smashwords. If you upload your book to their site (for sale), they also send it to other major retailers. I’m not sure whether they’ll take my book, since it’s already online, but I’ll ask them.  Most of their books are in the 99 cents – $2.99 range. I have mine up for $5.95. They want a Word file without page numbers.

When you type my name into the search box, it says Do You Mean xxxx? which isn’t what I mean, and my name should be in their search database. It does find the book, however.

I can’t download Deadly Awakening (don’t ask) yet but I saw it at a friend’s house yesterday and the pages were certainly not what I had formatted. So there is a whole big deal to formatting. I don’t know how you prevent your pages from breaking differently on different computers, depending on the screen resolution, etc.  Maybe for that kind of quality and control you do need to read eBooks on the Kindle.

When they say, Download to the PC, they mean the PC. Their reader software does not work on the Mac.

Before you download the book, you need to download the reader software, which is no big deal. I don’t know what it does except prevent copying or forwarding.

I am buying a Kindle when I’m in the USA in March. I wish they would call it something else. Why is it called Kindle?

A few people have been kind enough to buy the book.

The book being out in public seems kind of remote from me right now. It is an odd sensation to have my name and my book on that website.I mean, there are people paying money for the words that I wrote. I am cringing, waiting for the comments. Especially the ones from people I don’t know. So far, I’ve only heard from people I know, who are all very nice.

Another friend tells me some of the photos have printed out black. ???????

I need to send the Amazon link to some websites that agreed to link my book. I can see this is going to be a full-time job for a while.

I’m troubled by the formatting and photo issues and it is possible that when I know more, I’ll send Amazon a new file. If anyone out there is reading Deadly Awakening on a Kindle, please let me know how it looks and whether all the pictures are there. Thanks.