Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Don't forget Emma!
  

    
You'll be months finding mine via ranking! Try the URL I posted above.
  

    
LOL, oday, oday....(JH) and Jacques come up in their rankings...Ed, I
guess if you post privately we just have to know you....you'd think
that as your sales increase they would put you in their rankings...I'll
follow your link. 

Looking for Emma.

And this is interesting, Amazon released a browser available from
their cloud, so you can read from the Web itself (herself?):

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-quietly-releases-a-web-based-kindle-read
er-2011-8?utm_source=Triggermail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=SAI%20Select&utm_ca
mpaign=SAI_Select_081011
  

    
The Amazon Cloud Reader https://read.amazon.com/

Oh, this is very cool....lets me have all my books in the Cloud (well,
Amazon's Cloud) and you can save them to read off-line as well. What a
joy to see my collection on my laptop in easy to read, large screen.
Woohoo!
  

    
Well, just at the moment I'm 67,526 in paid Kindle Store offerings, so
you'd have to be equipped with a strong thumb and a lot of patience
just to scroll down and find me. 

I'm at
<http://www.amazon.com/Bar-End-Regime-ebook/dp/B005DYLXXG/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qi
d=1311376462&sr=8-1>
for those of you following at home, and it makes a great birthday
present!
  

    
Amazon sent out a blast email today touting Kindle Singles.  Jane and
Jacques were displayed near the top.  Sorry Ed, your article didn't
come up.
  

    
I'm *not* a Kindle Single! I'm a self-published guy doing that format.
I didn't get editorial treatment and art direction from Amazon's
Kindle Singles program. They turned the article down. Read back in the
topic, because I explained that. 
  

    
I read the Amazon cloud announcement and I guess I'm missing something
-- how does it differ from the plain old Kindle app? I thought that
with Kindle books they were always synced with the cloud, e.g. I can
read up to page 200 of a book on my iPad, and then pick up my iPhone
and it will sync and go to page 200 of the same book. And the Kindle
and mobile device Kindle apps have always permitted off-line reading,
that's the whole point.  Or is this just something for PCs and Macs? 
  

    
I'm thinking that Amazon is struggling with their need to communicate
that Kindle is not just a device.
  

    
You can access the 'Kindle cloud' from any device, w/o having any
Kindle app on your device, so as long as you have an account all your
material is accessible and readable. I think that's the difference???
  

    
Thanks for the link and clarification, again, Ed;)
  

    
> You can access the 'Kindle cloud' from any device, w/o having any
> Kindle app on your device, so as long as you have an account all your
> material is accessible and readable. I think that's the difference???

Ah, OK, it's a browser thing, then.  Thanks. 
  

    
Once the format problems are solved (and they will be), ebooks will be
a great way to publish photo and art books.  Paper versions require
special paper and a painstaking print process.  They're big.  They're
heavy.  Ever hauled an art book on the subway?
  

    
Some comments on pricing from an avid consumer - my take on the
Singles and the similarly sized 'articles' (or whatever we should call
the smaller-than-a-book ebook format) is that I think of what a
magazine would cost that I would expect that content in.  So the cost
of one issue of The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, *but* with
a magazine, there is more than just one article. 

I see the authors here talking about word count, but from the
amazon.com webpages, there isn't much indication what size document
will show up to read.  I suppose there is some correlation with the KB
size but I certainly haven't figured it out as a purchasing tactic.  So
if you publish something that is five times the size of an average
magazine article, there's nothing to clue me in as a consumer that's
what will come down the tube and pay more for it in return.
  

    
I think that was also discussed above.
  

    
I saw discussion on the author's side of setting price but not really
so much on the consumer's side of assessing what scope of work will
appear for the $.99/1.99/2.99 etc.  With Kindle eBooks there is usually
a parallel hardcopy edition that you can see has 250 pages or
whatever.

A little of my hesitation is also that the initial Kindle
you-publish-it! days there was a rush of self-published material that
wasn't that great.  Luckily getting the sample was usually sufficient
of a heads-up that the work wasn't worth pursuing but the experience of
plowing through a mass of it left a nasty taste.
  

    
I'm real scared of Teddy's Trouble, or whatever the self-published
novel by an "Ed Ward" is that you can find by clicking my name on my
listing. It has a clumsy summary that makes it sound like the most
depressing book ever. Again: not mine! 

>>So the cost of one issue of The New Yorker, Harper's, Atlantic
Monthly, *but* with a magazine, there is more than just one article. 

My initial justification was that when you buy a magazine and there's
an article worth keeping you rarely remember the others in it,
especially if it's a New Yorker/Vanity Fair kind of mag. So I'm priced
lower than one issue of one of them, and the article is bigger. 
  

    
Ed, what changes would you want in these programs?  Do you have a
wish-list for reforms and changes?
  

    
Re #114, Elaine, I think that's a legitimate complaint-- it's annoyed me,
too. Amazon doesn't run page length because that depends on the format, but
it could and shhould run word length as an alternative. The KB number just
doesn't convey the length, and that's something a potential buyer ought to
know.
  

    
Some authors include word length in their blurb. I think that's a
convention that should become more common.
  

    
Sometimes a page count is given - see
<http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Tracks-Kindle-Single-ebook/dp/B0056B0P8U/>
for an example - but it's not clear to me what 79 pages means here.
  

    
There's the old typewriter rule-of-thumb that 4 pp double-spaced =
1000 words, and I've found that works okay with the Word setting I use,
but yeah, when it's Kindle-ized it's harder to tell. 
  

    
A couple more thoughts and questions.  

I assume that the Kindle Singles program will do formatting for you
since it has editorial selection in the relationship.  For the
self-published Kindle Edition, are people laying it out yourself?  Does
the Amazon site help in any way with that side of things?

Secondly, shifting from production to publication, does anybody do a
simple web site for a short e-book?   It seems like it would be easier
to plug an ebook by saying "It's available at [articletitle] dot com"
on a radio or podcast or even tv show. Then if it were also published
in other formats like the "nook," or even read aloud and for sale in a
spoken word format, those links could be there, too.
  

    
I certainly didn't do any formatting. It's a nebulous concept anyway, since
an ebook will have one format on a Kindle and another on an iPad. And on an
iPad, readers can change the format themselves, so they can see two pages at
once or just one.

It's for that reason that a page count is useless. I just read a book on an
iPad that was 200-something pages in one format and 400-soemthing on the
other. Only a word count would give an accurate idea of how long an ebook
is.
  

    
I ended last night reading a couple of chapters of the Judge Dee
mystery I'd downloaded from the University of Chicago e-book of the
month club. This requires the Adobe Digital Editions e-reader, so I
read it on the laptop. Very painless interface, the brown color is easy
on the eyes, which was an unexpected benefit, and the typeface was
pretty good. If only someone had done some copy-editing. I doubt anyone
drew his knive.