I gave the very same advice to her that I’ve given to former writing students and friends.

Sometimes, when the realities of the publishing business get too hard to deal with, you have to leave because it isn’t worth it, otherwise.

I think reading being fun is more a matter of the books that get published. of course, now that everyone can be published via Smashwords et al, it is again difficult to get eyeballs on specific titles, publishers are again trying to bully their way to the top etc.

I think the fun in reading is more about the books avb to read, and making them easy to access and read on machines that are easy to use.

And Ms. Cabot, I thoroughly enjoy your work on this blog and hope you do not stop working here. I especially enjoy your personal use reviews and your posts abt dealing with seniors and getting them comfortable with ereaders.

I am also really enjoying the set of newer bloggers here on teleread.

Print books are fun. I can create a book whose contents and appearance I like and turn it into a cover and interior PDF that I send to Lightning Source. Within about two weeks it is available just as I intended it, all around the world. That’s fun.

Digital isn’t that way. Only recently have I found a way (InDesign 6) that lets me take my completed content and create ebooks for Kindles (.mobi) and Apple (ePub). I thought I could reach most of the rest of the market with Smashwords, but it turns out that their ePub submissions are still riven with headaches. Note that’s two submission to just reach two vendors and a third, still in beta, to reach some of the others. No one-stop for global distribution.

Nor do my woes end there. The ebooks I create are going to look different on different devices and apps. The iBook version won’t look the same as that for Kindles. The version on my Kindle 3 won’t look as good as that on the Kindle app on my iPad. Some things I can do on one platform can’t be done on another and, even it it can be done, my ability to control anything is blocked by export routines, plug-ins and obscure HTML-like code. It’s a bit like doing webpages in the mid-nineties when no browser quite worked like any other.

And that’s only touching on a fraction of the problems digital has created. There are also a host of contracts to contend with, pricing issues, and constantly changing corporate policies. Both Amazon and Apple seem to think I should have a lawyer on call.

I’d like publishing to be fun and it is getting to be more fun as the digital market settles down and those who hoped to bully their way to the top become more realistic. But it’s still about two years away from being fun rather than riddled with headaches and hassles.

–Michael W. Perry, author of Hospital Gowns and Other Embarrassments

Anyway, at the Kindleboards there was (is) a game were you signed up to play by saying what genres you normally liked to read (Comfort Zone) and what you wouldn’t read (Deal Breakers). Then you were randomly assigned a player who would pick a book (often three choices) that was outside the Comfort Zone but not a Deal Breaker. The whole idea was to find things to read you’d otherwise never discover. I played for a year or so and got a wide range of books, some not really my thing, others pretty good. It was fun, but players had to be willing to experiment a bit.

I don’t think there is a copyright on the game, so other groups could play a variation.

I’m going to have to give this some serious thought. Thank you for making me think!

And if anyone wants to give me a hand, what, as a reader, would you like to see an author do to make things fun? I’m not averse to getting some help.

If you want to make it fun again, the first thing you need to do is leave this job where you have to deal with the business facts of this business.

Stop reading this site, too.

Those of us who have to live in this war zone have no choice, but you do.