Last weekend's Dark & Stormy writing workshop in Manzanita, Oregon lived up to its name. Despite the temporary wet weather, the event was filled with terrific energy. The audience especially came alive discussing ebooks and their multi-faceted role in publishing:
1. augmenting print sales of your book.
2. creating visibility for your work in multiple online retail channels.
3. converting your book to Kindle, Nook and Sony formats, and uploading to Smashwords.com, where you can earn 85 percent of the ebook price on each sale.
4. providing a way to print excerpts, chapters, small books for a limited audience.
5. using the free digital printing services such as lulu.com and createspace.com to print one or two copies of your book to see how it will look when published in softcover.
The great energy over potential of ebooks shows the vast potential of this untapped publishing outlet. Here's an excerpt written by Adam Hanft on Huffington Post on exactly this topic:
(you can read full article here:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/adam-hanft/brave-new-chapter-the-sim_b_347585.html
"Beyond the publishers, this is a great forward step for consumers, too. Being able to quickly and cheaply download a range of book chapters will expose readers to the potential of more great books, give them the chance to discover new writers, themes and subjects, on an affordable, low-dose, chapter-by-chapter basis. It's the highest and best use of impulse selling.
Writers win, too. Big time. Because more authors will get the chance to get introduced to new readers, and open up new markets - which they desperately need. At it's most basic, it's sampling, like Whole Foods Market giving away tasting cubes of aged gouda. And it works.
So if the idea of a book being sold as piece-goods upsets you - remember that it didn't trouble Charles Dickens, who serialized his novels in newspapers.
In fact, all in all, this is one time where the much-abused cliché "a new chapter in publishing" may turn out to be just that."
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