Ebooks

Poking through various publishing/ebook blogs, these are the posts of interest to me recently. Some of them have multiple links to other blogs, and those are often worth reading too. The first one, especially, is worth some talk. I'm also annoyed at the growing number of self-pub authors who are releasing first drafts with intent to edit after the reviews start coming in and telling them what readers didn't like.

Dear Author: When I bought your book, I didn't sign up to be your beta reader (grumbling about major edits after release, like adding new chapters)

Carolyn Jewel: Why Ebook Formatting Matters (with screencaps!)

Guest post @ Publishing a Book is an Adventure: Amazon and Book Review Ownership (Amazon claims management rights for reviews on their site. Not quite claiming copyright, but they don't allow authors to use those quotes; authors would have to get permission from the reviewer.)

The Passive Voice: You Say Documents; I say Source Files (formatting manuscripts for ebook production; quote of another person's post + commentary by PG.)

Indie Author News: How to Avoid Bad Book Reviews (Importance of researching one's selected reviewers)

Every month, book designer Joel Friedlander hosts an ebook cover contest on his blog. AFAIK, it's just a personal thing... "send me ebook covers; I will pick 1 winner per month in each of the Fiction and Nonfiction categories, and showcase some of the rest." However, since he has decades of experience in the industry and a terrific eye, people keep playing. I love these awards; he not only shows what's done very well, but what's *almost* great, but fails because of bad typography or too much clutter or other problems that plague ebook covers.

e-Book Cover Design Awards, April 2012

He keeps reiterating that "shrink the paper cover" is often a bad decision--that what works on an ebook and what works on paper are different. Ebook covers, since they need to look good at roughly icon size (or icon width, and can be a bit taller), just look cluttered if they have two sentences of text under the title, and swirling elaborate fonts often get lost.

I like the cover for "Blood and Guitars;" it's one of the few I've seen where the lack of obvious border works well.

Smashwords' blog has a linkspam post about How to Self-Publish an Ebook with Smashwords: 31 Authors Share Their Tips and Tricks

All of them that I've read so far have a strong nod to the Style Guide. While authors pretty much universally insist that following the style guide gets good results, they don't point out the nuisance level involved: in order to follow the guide *exactly,* you have to *strip all formatting from your book,* then use Word's Style functions to put it back. This gets faster with practice, but authors who are used to thinking of the edited-and-proofread version as "finished" are likely to be annoyed at the extra few hours (for a novel) of formatting time.

Also. No matter how excellently well you've followed the guide, the RTF version is likely to be lousy. Tolerable at best. (I assume the guide itself was formatted with the guide; its RTF version is unpleasant to read & needs a lot of reformatting to be suitable for print.) And the Meatgrinder only allows those features supported by the simplest format ... no tables, no drop caps, limited image placement options.

Still, though... 31 authors being enthusiastic about Smashwords. None of them, AFAIK, are on the Konrath path to wealth & internet power, but they're all *happy* about getting their ebooks at Smashwords. They're not saying, "Do this and become rich!" They're saying, "This was definitely worth doing, and it could be for you, too." Some of them are making money. Some are making connections. Some are just learning new skills, and happy with that.