Scribd.com has recently risen in my esteem. After discovering one of my eBooks on their website some weeks ago–copied and placed thereon by a book pirate–the folks at Scribd had the offending PDF taken down before 10 hours had elapsed. Soon after that, my husband and I began posting “sample” chapter PDFs of our various [...]
In Northern California, the weather proved unusually mild this summer. Normally, we experience over 100-degree heat wave upon heat wave, inducing in me an almost hermit-like existence indoors. Instead, the cooler temperatures allowed for several trips outside, staying longer typing away on the trusty laptop. As the kids scampered about the landscaping with vacation-borne glee, [...]
My husband and I recently embarked on a journey fraught with elocution: turning our various ebooks into Podiobooks, or serialized audiobooks broken down into 30-40 minute ‘episodes.’ Apparently a growing number of daily commuters like their audiobooks in these shorter segments, rather than having to fast-forward through entire books files. Audio books have been slowly [...]
As Amazon’s slashed eBook pricing period drew to a close, Kindle/Kindle app consumers saw a decided increase in prices; the pricier titles included newly re-introduced Penguin books as well as a handful of other publishers’ titles, and immediately some folks cried “Foul!” Over a dozen articles were re-tweeted to me this past week, featuring mild [...]
One of my earliest columns quoted a review that Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal wrote about eReading devices, like the Kindle, especially pointing out that while he liked reading on his Kindle at home, he most often resorted to using his iPhone to read eBooks; he simply did not wish to carry two [...]
Just before Apple’s big announcement (record quarterly earnings), Amazon pulled a rabbit out if its eHat with a press release, apparently to remind the general public that it has survived the iPad onslaught by cutting their eBook prices and that of their Kindle. “The growth rate of Kindle device unit sales has tripled…”, and “… [...]
Extra, extra! Publishers Weekly released information yesterday regarding the May 2010 U. S. eBook sales statistics: “After sales growth slowed slightly in April, to 127%, e-book sales rose 162.8% in May, to $29.3 million, at the 13 publishers that report results to AAP’s monthly sales report. Sales for the first five months of the year [...]
The warm weather of June inspired me to select a number of cooking volumes to review, as well as a title geared towards helping homeowners give their outdoor living spaces a more ‘Mediterranean’ feel, thus setting the mood for summer gatherings about the grill. Already our barbeque has seen considerable use, both before and after [...]
From the impressive iPad-related eBook sales on its debut weekend (250,000 eBooks sold) to the more recent figures, it behooves eBook writers to jump a few hurdles in order to get their titles into the iMarket. As independent eBooks writers, my husband and I have spent many days sending emails and calling complete strangers endeavoring [...]
On June 16, the Association of American Publishers released the April 2010 sales statistics, reporting not only a gain in adult hardcover & paperback sales (insert publishing industry breath of relief here), but also more good news for eBook writers and purveyors: “E-book sales jumped up 127.4 percent for the month ($27.4 million), reflecting an [...]
The word ‘revenge’ is readily hearkened — even by the most compassionate and understanding of writers — upon finding their hard-earned prose copied and posted on a file-sharing site. In the last year or so, I’d heard of such literary tragedies happening to well-known, best-selling authors but thought that self-published independent eBook writers would likely [...]
Book Expo America is North America’s largest book convention. This year it was held in New York City at the Jacob K. Javits Center. Unable to attend this year, I did sit in the first annual Arm Chair BEA and I found the gaggle of book-bloggers hashtagging on Tweetchat to be a lively and informed [...]
“A book can take you anywhere…” Growing up, I often heard this statement in school, at the library and read it in cards and books given as gifts. It wasn’t until much later that I realized that the ‘journey’ one embarks upon via prose-on-page depends entirely upon the book. Like many of my fellow consumers [...]
I spent an interesting week reviewing You Tube videos of keynote speakers at the O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) 2010 publishers’ conference, held in New York City at the end of February. During a conversation on stage with Ray Kurzweil (who was at TOC to showcase the fantastic capabilities of his new eReading software Blio) [...]
As spring progresses unrelentingly towards summer, more and more families take to the backyard spaces—or balconies–to sit in the cooling air colored with sunset hues. Back from their wintery travels, birds both please and annoy with their twittering calls and nests of younglings. What better time or place to sit, reading in the last of [...]
A few months ago, after uploading a few more eBooks and paper titles into Lulu, I was suddenly hounded with London Book Fair email advertisements, urging me to order a few copies of my books and send them to the LBF, for only $4,000 a title. After blinking several times, I wondered what a self-published [...]
