C.J.Cherryh has her own ebook site

[adair]

C. J. Cherryh, Jane Fancher and Lynn Abbey have made their own ebook store to sell readers copies of their out-of-print books read for ebooks. Here's the link: http://www.closed-circle.net/

This project is just beginning, but there are books ready to buy and download, and more on the way. They are doing all the work themselves, setting up the site, getting text and illustrations ready, figuring out how to make their books readable on a variety of formats and providing links to some basic reading software. I just bought "Faery Moon" - a version of Cherryh's "Faery in Shadow" that has been re-written to make it what she originally wanted it to be. Each author has a free book to download; you can use one to see that one of the available formats works for you, or to try out the ebook concept if you've never read one.

I'm using Stanza on a MacBookPro. It's an adequate reader - text appears in three columns, and the cover art, created by Jane Fancher, shows well.

Given the mess in commercial publishing now I think authors may start looking at ebooks as a way to get things out to readers and make some money for themselves. The three at Closed Circle will continue to work with commercial publishers who will put their books in print on paper, but backlist books are just not available. If this goes well all three may write books just for the ebook format. I know Cherryh has several series that have ceased because of publisher issues. She talks about this from time to time on her blog 'Wave Without A Shore'. There's a link on Closed Circle.

Comments

[stormcloude]

Thank you for the info! I actually spent a lot of time hunting down used copies of Fancher's (out of print) first series many years ago, so I'm glad to see it is going to be available again!

[adair]

I think the whole Harmonies of the Net series is up now. Jane had a lot of trouble getting all various fonts she used to manage various forms of messaging she used in her text to work in all the digital formats. She reported that the mobi format seemed to handle it best. I've not looked at the downloads I've made (I bought her books when they first appeared, and held on to them) but so far I am reading on my laptop using Stanza. Some things seem to work better than others in Stanza.

Jane has a vampire novel ready to load as soon as she gets it ready. I'm not much of a vampire fan, but I'll make time for Jane's story.

If you know of a place to pass on information about Closed Circle I know all the authors would be grateful. They are planning some forms of marketing, but right now they are concentrating on getting books up, and in good format.

[stormcloude]

I have to admit that for a moment I got a little TOO excited thinking it was Elizabeth Lynn who was participating in the site with them. I had a little "aw, shucks!" moment when I realized it was someone else.

Unfortunatley mobi doesn't work for me, but it does look like they're including some formats I can use so I'm happy about that!