SFWA Guest Post on E-books
Earlier this month, I was invited to do a guest post for SFWA about my e-book experiment. The post went up yesterday at http://www.sfwa.org/2010/12/guest-post-experiments-with-e-books/ If you’ve been following the blog, you’ve already read some of what I have to say. But I expanded the article to incorporate experiences from other authors, and to try to come up with broader conclusions. I’m hoping the comments will offer some interesting info as well.
JABberwocky (my agent) has also been dipping into the e-book pool. They’ve prepared and published an e-book of Simon Green’s Beyond the Blue Moon. Joshua blogs about the process and the thinking behind it here, and is pretty up-front about it all:
There are conflict issues. We don’t intend to be the originating publishers for things, at least as we’re thinking of it right now, but we are still now the publisher for this book as well as the literary agent for it … I think the business of actually being an agent selling all kinds of rights throughout the world is still too critical and important to want to have an entire huge side business.
A lot of the things he talks about matches the things I ran into as well, both in terms of the work it takes to prepare a file and the next step of “How the heck do we promote this thing?”
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liz
December 30, 2010 @ 4:18 pm
I have a slight opening here to excuse me asking a fantasy author a question that has long been haunting me. Sometimes dogs in fantasy are done well and sometimes not, like everything else I suppose. But why are cats more predominantly featured, and in such important positions, when dogs are just there to annoy? Maybe the answer is as simple as most authors are cat lovers. Thoughts?
Jim C. Hines
December 30, 2010 @ 8:04 pm
Liz — short answer, I have no idea. It’s not a universal rule. For example, see my comments on Dog Days at http://www.jimchines.com/2010/11/open-book-thread/ But cats do seem to be a lot more popular. Why? Your guess is as good as mine … I mean, the most popular pet I’ve written has been a flaming spider!