Thursday’s Pre-Publication Post: E-books, Or When Seeing Your Work In Print Is Only Part of the Story
For a long time, the dream was relatively simple. And focused. It involved seeing my story collection, Quiet Americans, in print. As in: a book. With pages one could turn.
But, as you may have heard, there’s a new kid on the publishing block: the e-book. Actually, he’s not just one kid. He’s got multiple platforms.
If I haven’t been linking here on Practicing Writing to lots of articles about e-books–how to publish them, how to read them, how popular they’re becoming–maybe a little bit of that is due to my not-so-subconscious desire not to have to deal with them insofar as my own work is concerned.
You see, I already have a full-time job, and getting my story collection into print has quickly become almost equally consuming. Getting the collection ready for e-publication that is far more sophisticated than the simple downloadable pdfs used for my old market directories seems to be one layer of responsibility too many.
But it will happen. My publisher seems to be pretty comfortable with the Kindle platform, so that may well be the first vehicle we turn to for Quiet Americans once the print version is complete. (In fact, literally just yesterday, my publisher blogged about the recent royalty-related developments affecting books published via Amazon/Kindle.)
But how many of you rely on the Kindle? How many use other systems?
And for those of you with experience transforming your words from docs on your screen to paid-for content on others’: How did you do it? Let’s leave aside those of you working with big publishers who can easily handle the task for you. Have you used Smashwords? Have you required the services of a freelancer to format and prepare your text? What do you wish you’d known then that you can share now? I’d love to learn from your experiences.