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 

  

Kindle Authors UK

I realise I’ve been going on about the Kindle experience quite a lot over the last few months, but I am really excited about E-books and the freedom they offer authors to control their own output.  It’s the ultimate democracy of The Word.  (If you're not convinced then read a very good post by Dee Weaver on 'Strictly Writing'.)

A few days ago I discovered a really good site for anyone who is interested  in the E-book market.  Kindle Authors UK are a new group of bloggers dedicated to Kindling their work and marketing it.  Most are established authors either wanting to make their backlists available, or to publish new work difficult to place in the current publishing climate.  This is how they describe themselves on the blog:

‘We are professional UK authors branching out independently for selected projects to bring you quality e-books at great prices. We hope you'll enjoy following our adventures and be inspired to try some of these titles we've published for Kindle, which include books out of print for many years.’

I’m really delighted that they’ve asked me to join.  Most are writing fiction or books for children and apparently I’m their first biographer.  

The blog is full of good information about the whole process of producing an E-book.  The authors who form the group will be blogging at regular intervals.  Katherine Roberts current post is called ‘How I didn’t sell a million e-books in 5 months’ - a response to a book by successful e-author John Locke who apparently did.

 The way it works is that each author has been given a date to post on the blog and mine is going to be the 5th of every month.   I’m going to be sharing my own experience of the e-market and hoping to learn a lot from the others about marketing work in cyber-space.

My new Kindle project is to go into Kindle Singles - individual short stories sold very cheaply at 90 cents each.  I don’t know how (or if)  they’ll sell but I’ll report back with the results.

On the personal front, I'm back in England for a couple of weeks - back to grey skies (whatever happened to the rumoured heat wave?) and pouring rain.  I got drowned walking down from the station to the Mill!  Italian sun and breakfast on the terrace watching peregrine falcons riding the thermals is just a rapidly fading memory.  Sigh.......

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.