I don’t see Kindles (or the like) as an either/or for real books. I will never, ever, stop buying and/or reading paper books. After spending the best part of the back end of last year reading more or less exclusively on my Kindle, I’m really enjoying reading two *real* books at the moment (a novel, and a book of essays by my favourite author). I really don’t think that the Kindle is going to change my book-buying habits.

Industry pundits seem to be predicting that even the days of the relatively newcomver of the traditional eReader are numbered. I’m really not so sure. I own a second generation Kindle which is brilliant for reading on as its really comfortable. It’s what I get The Grauniad downloaded to every day. Recently I also acquired a Kindle Fire, which is to all intents and purposes an iPad Mini but cheaper. One of my first surprises is that it is pretty comfortable to read even though it has a backlit screen, but has a battery life of only hours (about a day), rather than weeks (or even a month) of my second generation Kindle.

Thus, for me, the Kindle Fire could never replace the traditional eInk Kindle, just as it will never replace the paper book. I love them all, and use them all, each according to their purpose and my need.

I would like to apologise for the unahamedly geeky nature of this post, but its what’s going through my mind at the moment. Normal, festive, joy will resume shortly.

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #11,654 Paid in Kindle Store
#49 in Kindle Store > Books > Fiction > Fairy Tales
#76 in Books > Fiction > Myths & Fairy Tales

Heading over to the reports I can see I’ve sold two more copies overnight, and I’m fairly sure that these are to people I don’t know.

I’m also pretty stoked by an email I had last night from a reviewer I sent my book to. I’ve not seen the review yet, but I’m told its coming soon. In the email they said that they ‘loved it. It was a fantastic read, and you’re a very wonderful writer. If you get any other books ready, send them my way, I’d love to do more reviews for you. Also if you’re interested, I’d love to do an author interview with you when you have time’. I can’t help it but be pretty high and chipper that my little story might be starting to go places.

Might…

Maybe…

When I first visited Iceland in the summer of 2001 I fell in love with the landscape, the people, the history, the folklore – everything about the country, and I knew that I had to write a story set there. I didn’t know what the story would be. Then in August 2001 there was a story in the news about a girl who was lost whilst hiking in the Peruvian mountains. I can’t remember what happened now, and I fear to find out, but the idea got lodged in my brain and together with ideas surrounding Iceland, the seeds of the story was born.

So, it was conceived in August 2001. 110,000 words; 430 pages; 250 days in the writing; 5 years in the making. Blood & Fire, as it then was called, was finished on Tuesday 19 September 2006. Another three years of revising later, and I started subbing it to agents and editors but, as is so often, these days I only got the classic ‘our lists are full’ or ‘we like your writing but you as a writer are not quite right’…

I got married, and started writing Mr Tumnal and left The End Of All Worlds as its now called on the shelf for two more years. In that time technology changed and self-publication – Indie publishing – became something that actually worked. With the the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010 other events since then, some of the themes of The End Of All Worlds have become increasingly topical. I decided that ten years is a long time to live with a novel. I needed to let it go free and for other people to read it.

I will write about the process of getting the novel to this point, today in future articles, but it has been a journey these last few months. But today I have reached it. I have published a novel out there, to the world and I will wait, if nervously and with large amounts of trepidation, to see what the world will think (if indeed they notice).

All day, friends have been posting messages of congratulations on my facebook and twitter accounts. I feel a bit of a fraud about it really because yes my book is published, but I published it. Surely congratulations would best be saved for when a publisher decides to publish my book… And then I thought, no. Lots of people can claim to be writing a book, still more to wanting to write a book, but only the few actually complete the book, and then work to make it in some shape or form half-decent. To publish a book, even by the self, is still no mean feet. It’s still something to be congratulated.

And so to those who have congratulated, I thank you, if humbly and diffidently…

This got me thinking that I do still dream of and desire that feeling. That precise feeling is once that I won’t get from self-publishing and from publishing as an eBook…

Half an hour later and I pressed publish to my Mum’s book, The Underhill Buttons, and a short while later it appeared in Amazon. I bought it myself and downloaded it to my own Kindle and it did feel different to when I had copied (an identical) version onto to it through the back door. This was a book sitting here in front of me that literally anyone else in the world could buy and download.

I searched for the ISBN on LibraryThing and added it to my library and did feel some weird feeling. I saw the listing on Amazon.com and amazon.fr – there was definitely some magic to be had from this feeling.

I also created the ebook version of my Mum’s children’s book, The Underhill Buttons, and sent off a proof copy of it to be checked. But it’s sitting there in Amazon, just waiting to be published.

There are a couple of little niggles. Whilst I do have chapter markings in it, for some reason they are showing twice when you click through. And last time I exported to epub from InDesign I managed to suppress the default TOC in favour of what they are actually called but I don’t seem to have managed that this time…

Still, at least I quite enjoy tweeking!

Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.

Does it work for you?

Reading it back on the Kindle for the first time in several years, and with the benefit of having been writing in the past tense whilst working on Mr Tumnal, I am struck with how much better The End Of All Worlds could be if I was to convert it to past tense. I have attempted a few pages and it seems okay, but the prospect of converting 299 further pages of present tense pages, does somewhat fill me with horror. A major revision in the history of this particular novel if there was one!

Once again, I found myself caught in a position somewhere between the author/publisher and the reader; between copyright protection and open access. Whilst I can see why publishers are suggesting imposing lending limits on eBooks to mimic the shelf-life of the physical edition, only 24 loans seems a bit extreme, and you have to question where you place that limit. A large factor when it comes to the shelf-life of a physical book before it falls apart is down, not to the number of loans, but the quality of the printing and binding, and if you were to say that eBook had the highest quality to its binding then it would be reasonable to say that it could be lent out an infinite number of times.

What I think would be more reasonable is the suggestion that if you buy 1 copy of an eBook then it can be read by just one person, or at least on one device (no reason to suggest that a device can’t have multiple readers), at a time. So libraries would still have to purchase multiple copies of an eBook just as they copy multiple copies of the latest bestsellers now, but they can continue to loan them out for years to come without fear of expiration.