A List Of Blog Novels

Blog Novels: the definitive list

New Writing International is aiming to compile a definitive list of blog novels.

At the time of this post, there are forty-five listed.

That link might be hinky. It’s not for the post, but the top level. The post doesn’t have a permalink (yet?). Look to the Top Posts on the right side to possibly find it later.

New Writing International has also undergone a redesign.

Hey, Stupid: eBooks Don’t Have Returns

Returned Inventory Fees Shutter Impetus Press

“We have been hit with a procession of distribution-related problems which have put us into a financial situation that is forcing us to close our doors,” they explain. “For the better part of the year, we have been paying very high return fees to our distributor — many generated by books being sent back by the currently less-than-stable Borders — fees which have slowly been bleeding us dry… Try as we might, we have been unable to figure a way out of this situation as we have never been long on capital and with the economy being in such a disastrous state, there is no hope of finding any money from an outside source.”

I wonder what this venture was capitalized at?

I wonder how much frikkin Internet advertising they could have paid for instead of wasting it on print, paper, and shipping?

I wonder how many eBooks they would have been able to sell if they’d put some hardcore effort behind such a plan?

One more dying dinosaur of print drops dead.

Death by self-inflicted cluelessness.

The Great Book Bank Robbery

At last, there is someone else on the Internet who understands the implications of the Google Book Search settlement!

His punctuation is all hell in this post. I expect he wrote it while holding back.

The Morning After the Great Book Bank Robbery

What will be the relationship between authors and publishers as they become tethered for life with no divorces?

Emphasis added by me.

And:

Forget right reversals Google has wiped that of the agenda in one swoop and some major publishers have got their way, albeit with Google’s considerable help. There is now no ‘reprint under consideration’ only a notice saying ‘Go get it from Google’.

Emphasis added by me.

Oh we’ll soon see how hard rights reversals are going to get.

I’m seeking them right now.

And my ex-publisher better recall what a mad son of a bitch I am.

Many other writers might have to turn into mad sons of bitches too.

Reference: Shrink PDFs

WOiP Tip – Reduce PDFs For Quicker Access

Over the past year I have been moving toward a “paperless” work-style. Most of my important documents and text are now in electronic format – most of the time PDF. As a result, I can literally have an entire reference library with me at all times on either my iPhone or iPod Touch. Unfortunately, PDFs can be huge, and that is where the problem begins.

The handhelds seem to be able to handle rather large files but, unfortunately, they can take a long time to load. Try to resize them and you end up waiting a long time. Moreover, flipping from one page to the next is at best, a slow process.

That’s where the tip comes in…

Shrink PDFs!

Most PDF programs offer the option to shrink PDFs. Unfortunately, the quality is often rather poor. Apago’s PDFShrink for the Mac, however, offers a huge degree of control over the compression and quality. After a bit of experimenting I found a setting that provided excellent compression but maintained the high degree of image quality that I want when reading documents. A 7MB PFD files was reduced to just 1MB. The result? It loads super fast on my iPhone and, once loaded, is much easier, faster and stable when resizing or flipping pages.

I still haven’t gotten around to reading the Sony guidelines for optimized Sony Reader PDFs. I wonder if this added step could make them even better?

Quote: Writer Ann Somerville

In a Comment over at Dear Author:

If your site looks like someone threw up in HTML all over it, your visitors might expect your writing is similarly chaotic (and in my experience, truly lousy websites almost always go with truly lousy writing, just as truly lousy publisher sites are the mark of a business with a less than professional attitude.)

FTW!

Writer Nick Belardes Get MSM Press

The novel by tweet

Nick Belardes believes in brevity. He hews close to that hallowed maxim, beloved by middle school English teachers and old-fashioned newsmen alike: Keep it simple, stupid.

“People need to be educated to be more concise,” says Mr. Belardes, a journalist and novelist based in Bakersfield, Calif. “Every day, we get these super-long-winded e-mails. You can communicate more if you say a little less.”

Earlier this year, Belardes was cleaning out his desk drawer when he came across an unfinished manuscript for a workplace novel called “Small Places.”

He briefly considered shipping the thing off to publishers for consideration. Instead, he decided to serialize “Small Places” on Twitter, a popular microblogging site.

You can get this novel by Following smallplaces.

Free eBook: Digital Magic

Apologies and freebies

And the freebie? Well I wouldn’t want to leave my WATE listeners out, so here… Digital Magic, the sequel to Chasing the Bard, free and complete. Enjoy and spread the word about it and Double Trouble.

Go there for the PDF file.

Free Book Chapter: Financial Armageddon

Financial Armageddon: Korea and Japan Sign On

I’ve just learned that my publisher, Kaplan, has sold the rights to the Korean and Japanese versions of Financial Armageddon.

In celebration (or, perhaps, as a final inducement to those English-speaking readers who’ve not yet gone out and bought a copy of their own), I’ve just uploaded a PDF version of Chapter One, entitled “Debt,” from the hardcover version of Financial Armageddon.

Go there for the link.

The Final Sony Reader Revolution Video?

Day 28: Reader Revolution

Hey, where’s Day 29 and Day 30?!

At least now I know what the allusion to the “Chuck Norris signs” was about earlier today.

Dave Farrow Has Left The Window!

Dave Farrow — speed reader and memory expert — started a read-a-thon thirty days ago in the window of DataVision in New York City at the behest of Sony to promote the Sony Reader and to donate as many eBooks as possible to schools across the country.

Today, around 4:45PM EDST, that mission was accomplished.

Dave Farrow is gone. What remains is a commemorative sign in his former seat.

44,097 pages were turned.

Over 100 eBooks were read.

Sony will donate 4.4 million eBooks to schools.

I have a ginormous number of screensnaps for the final day to sort through to produce the final post for the Sony Reader Revolution cam posts here.