Saturday, December 12, 2009

Talk About Your Ideas

Ironic photo by Wonderlane. Used with permission.

I am haunting myself. This morning I received my normal email list, which includes Google Alerts. This is a service where you tell Google what terms you want them to search for, and when they find the term, an email with the link shows up in your inbox.

It's handy for finding out where your name pops up, or your business name, or keywords featured in your book, for example. Today, my own name popped up, from a blog comment I made about ebooks. This comment was left in April, 2008. Since that time, I have begun publishing in earnest, exclusively ebooks, and I was pleased to see the word "revolution" come up in my blog comment from 'way back when:

Publishers are floundering with the old model, and need to make money. Eliminating the advance is a big thing, and I believe it will be better for everyone involved.

Yes, the writer will have to write more on spec. However, like other self-publishers, all of my writing is on spec, and I have to do all the marketing, etc. to sell my books. Marketing and advertising and all of that is expensive. Many big publishers don’t want to pay for the marketing, either. Authors are left to do it.

So, if we are doing most of the work, anyway, and doing it on our own dime, anyway, why not publish ourselves?

I’m glad to see someone mention cookbooks as ebooks–I am waiting for this revolution. Both of my books are ebooks right now, and as yet may or may not make it to print. Ebooks are very profitable, on a small scale. All of a person’s recipes can be in a central location, and can also be printed out as necessary. Slopped sauce all over your recipe? No problem. People still want to hold, pore over, and caress a huge, heavily-photographed cookbook. I know I do.

But aren’t ebooks the practical side?

It seems that I was thinking about the Craft e-Revolution over a year ago. Have your blog comments ever come back to haunt you?

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