MarkB piece in the Daily Telegraph, about e-publishing.

[MarkBastable]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/10032659/How-I-overcame-snobbery-to-self-publish-an-e-book.html


Please tweet and share and all that sort of thing.

[JuniperWoolf]

Will do. I'll admit I still don't like e-books, I have an irrational reluctance to buy technology. I'm the only person in any of my classes who doesn't have a cell phone, and don't the profs just love to ask, for some reason.

[Delta40]

good article Mark. Makes me more comfortable about e-publishing.

[prendrelemick]

We got the telegraph yesterday, the full page ads for Louis Vitton handbags and iphone 4s were a bit inapropriate for our household - but broadsheets are so much better for lighting the Rayburn than the Tabloids are.

Your article was good, informative, personal and light hearted. Having read a few of those self-published, Lesbian Space Vampires in Bikinis type novels on the Kindle ,( a suprisingly popular genre) I can see how important good editorship is. At least the publishing houses provide that, and some quality control. As a kindle user the biggest problem is the same one you discribe for the writer, it's the sheer volume of books available - how do you find the good stuff? How do you make your book stand out ? I never thought I'd miss the cover blurb or the "about the author" on the inside cover of a real book, but it turns out those, and the quality of the print and feel and smell of a book were subliminal factors that made discriminating between them possible. Now I feel all at sea, I'm choosing randomly - or giving up and sticking to the classics. The review system on Amazon is a help, I tend to go for 4 or 5 star books, but I rarley agree with the judgements posted.

Your rose petal - Grand Canyon imagery is too generous, there are rose petals in there I'm sure, but they are hidden under great piles of rubbish

[Paulclem]

Good article. Hasn't there been a change in attitude to e-readers? I remember arguing on here about them two or three years ago - must be three or more now I come to think of it. It was clear to me - because of what my kids were doing - that reading screens of some kind would be big. It has surprised me just how qickly it has got to this point.

I reckon, Mick, that book based social media will help with choices in the future. I have to confess that I still like blurbs and articles like yourself, but I'm also on a Good Reads site which is just about books and might be the model for the way forward. It will take time to populate and get the reviews and comments out there, but it might be the way.

I'll download your book next Mark. I liked Icebox.

[prendrelemick]

HA! Just downloaded Mark's book and my "Recommended for you" pop up has gone very dark and twisted.

[YesNo]

I mainly read from a computer or with an e-reader. If I'm reading a paper book, it comes from the library which is a short walk away. Basically, I don't want to have to store the physical copy after I've finished reading it, but I like the idea of being able to get it from the cloud should I ever want to look at it again. The same thing goes with movies.

What I don't like about some of the e-reader products is the way the formatting is done on the a device like the Kindle. For example, if there are linebreaks in the poetry, I expect to see them in the text. Perhaps my Kindle version is out of date. I hear the Apple products are better.

EDIT: I just checked the Amazon site and it looks like the newer Kindle Paperwhite would resolve my complaints about the one I have.