Blogging at Author's Electric

Today I'm blogging over at Author's Electric on the dilemma of whether to E-publish a novel or go down the traditional route.

Christina Rossetti re-issued

Today I'm posting over on the Authors Electric blog site, about the re-issue of my Christina Rossetti biography as an E-book.

We have a huge storm here at the moment - just watching it from the sitting room.  We've spent two days at Peralta trying to pick as many olives as we could before the storm arrived - four of us picked 243 kilos!  Now have very bad back, but at least the olives are at the press.  Genoa, sadly, is afloat with a flash flood generated by this storm.  Italy does seem to be suffering from severe weather this year - meteorological as well as economic.

Amazon Link 

  

How to Get Your Book Blogged

Today I'm blogging about how to get your book reviewed on the Blogosphere, over at 'Authors Electric'. You can find us at authorselectric.blogspot.com

The Ups and the Downs of a Writer's Life

This is proving a weird week, with lots of ups and downs. Sunday saw the end of ‘il gran caldo’, with thunderstorms and 36 hours of much needed torrential rain. The landscape looks greener and the air is cooler, particularly at night.

On the work front, life seems to go according to this graph borrowed from Karen Ball on A.B.B.A.   After a really difficult period, suddenly everyone wants me! I’ve had two approaches with exciting non-fiction projects I can’t say much about yet, and an offer has been made to my agent for a Japanese edition of Katherine Mansfield. I googled her name in Japanese and this is what appeared.

Neil and I have also, after a lot of effort, internet bother and swearing in two different languages (Italian expletives now quite fluent) published a small collection of short stories on Amazon Kindle as a Kindle Single. THREE is a collection of 3 stories, one rather longer story (called Three) previously unpublished and two other stories published in anthologies and read on BBC Radio 4.

The hardest part of the exercise was getting it onto Smashwords.com, which makes E-books available to Sony e-readers, i-pads, Nooks, phone apps and several other formats. Their submission criteria and formatting are very tricky indeed, despite the downloadable handbook. Just one code or character in the wrong place and the whole thing goes crazy. But we managed to put Three up there and my other e-title A Passionate Sisterhood.

I’ve been blogging about the sheer hell of it over on what used to be the Kindle authors blog site. This has been forced, by Amazon, to change its name as an infringement of their copyright. You’d think they would welcome the publicity, but no. In addition their legal department has requested us to remove all mention of kindling or kindled in our past web posts for the same reason.  The Link will only work until Friday, and we have only a few days to decide how to rename ourselves.

Apparently no one, anywhere (not even in the paragraph above) can talk about kindling or being kindled except with reference to flames or small sticks of wood, without a writ appearing through the mail box. Despite both words being in the English dictionary and some powerful precedents - googled, googling -hoovered - hoovering - Have amazon never heard of the phrase ‘household name’? But, since they’re the only e-retailer offering 70% royalties on books, they have us by the proverbial short and curlies!

New Developments in Digital Publishing

There's a very interesting post on the Writers Beware blog at the moment about the sudden cut-throat competition that's arisen between agents and publishers about putting backlists out again either as Print On Demand or as E-books.  Most publishers have given up keeping any but their most famous authors in traditional print, and they've been very slow to realise the potential of POD and E-books.     Catherine Cookson's agent has set up her own publishing imprint to publish CC's backlist, by-passing Random House (who are of course furious!).
And, of course, there's nothing to stop an author doing the same once their book is out of print and they've got their rights back.  A lot of writers that I know are doing just that.  POD is very cheap and putting out an E-book either as a PDF or on Kindle is free.  Neil has already re-published one of my Virago paperbacks 'A Passionate Sisterhood' and is planning to publish my Christina Rossetti biography next year.
There is also a new digital publisher - Shortfire Press - who are E-publishing short stories,  submission guidelines here, and Amazon have started  Kindle Singles - where you can sell your own short stories individually for a small sum of money (99p seems usual).   I'm certainly going to be doing that. 
Writers need Readers and the Internet makes it possible to find them without the traditional gate-keepers of publisher and agent.  It's unsettling for authors, but makes for an exciting future.   Where is it all heading?  Listen to this radio interview with Seth Godin - it's both frightening and optimistic.  Things are changing and writers need to be prepared.

E-readers for Writers

I recently - after a lot of thought -  bought an e-reader to make travelling with books a lot easier. The Ryan Air luggage allowance doesn’t give you space for reading matter and I’m tired of sneaking through security with a paper-back crushed into every pocket, as well as wearing my entire wardrobe!


In the end I bought a Kindle (sorry!) because they’ve got the 3G capability anywhere in the world where there’s a satellite - it works here, where other internet technologies don’t and I’m hoping it will work in Cuba and Cambodia. They now come with the new ink screen technology that handles graphics and is very easy to read. It doesn’t hurt your eyes like a computer screen and is perfectly visible in sunlight. I’ve also discovered that I can use the reader to check my email, and download newspapers, magazines and blogs that I regularly follow.  I had distinct reservations about E-books, but I'm completely won over now.
What I didn’t realise was that the e-reader could be such a useful tool for a writer. I can load my Work In Progress onto it from my computer, as a text file, and then sit out in the sun and edit it. The Kindle allows me to highlight sections I want to change and to add notes of text I want to insert. Then, when I go indoors to my computer, it will show me the list of edits I’ve made so that I can alter the text on my hard-drive. I’ve never been able to work out of doors like this before. It has a built-in dictionary - and I could also download a Thesaurus to look up words instantly while I’m writing.

I can see a lot of possibilities here. The machine has an audio capability so that you can be read to if you feel lazy, and it handles the new ‘enhanced’ E-books. Apparently you can get editions of books that include music and pictures to accompany the text - a whole new reading experience. This technology is going to change things - I wonder how long it will be before we’re all writing with the E-reader in mind?

Making a Kindle Book - but Beware the E-Book Pirates!

I noticed two people with E-readers on the plane back to England, and another couple on the tube across London.   These little electronic gadgets are definitely on the rise.  I was also interested to see, at a recent publishers' sales conference, that E-book sales now make a significant spike on the graph.   Time for authors to be aware.
I don't have an E-reader, being a lover of The Book as a physical object, but I can see the advantages. I've never downloaded novel, but I've downloaded E-books onto my computer occasionally for research purposes and find it very useful as well as cheap.  No waiting weeks for a US book to arrive at my local library (at enormous cost) and no expensive treks to the British Library in London.  I use the Gutenberg Project a lot.  It provides out-of-copyright, historic, and classic texts free of charge.   One of my favourite downloads was a facsimile of the Voyages of William Dampier - the memoirs of  a 17th century adventurer, pirate and explorer, who went round the world three times and discovered Australia in 1688, long before James Cook. 

So, when Amazon suggested that I sell my recently back-into-print A Passionate Sisterhood as an E-book I thought it might be a good idea.  Unfortunately, though I have a really good pdf file supplied by the printer, converting the book into Kindle format proved very complicated.  Neil wrestled with the idiosyncracies of Mobi-pockets for days  - made extra challenging because the book has illustrations. 
But we finally made it and now just waiting for Amazon to list the title.  Whether we get any sales is another matter.  I also intend to make it available as a straight pdf download from my own site for people who don't want to Kindle.
Looking around for other sites offering downloads as a comparison, I was horrified to find that a site calling itself The World of Books,  (though the url cleverly has 'worid') which offers free downloads of supposedly 'public domain books', was offering the US edition of my own A Passionate Sisterhood in pdf form.  Obviously pirated, but from where?  Did someone sit up all weekend with a scanner?  As the book is still in copyright all over the world (and will be until at least 50 years after I die) this is a serious breach.  Some of Margaret Atwood's work was up there too, and one or two other still living and breathing authors.
So much easier to pirate an E-book than the physical object.  We authors are going to have to be very vigilant on the Net if we want to protect our own meagre sources of income.