Here is the first ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the other two parts in days to come. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how...

Something about being off for March break brings out the nesting/cleaning instinct in me, and after almost a week off, my home is now sparkling---and my digital home is too! Among other spring cleaning chores was the purchase of a new backup drive, the deletion of a bunch of digital clutter so I wouldn't over-fill said drive, and a virtual pruning of the digital bookshelf. Lessons learned this time around? Keep reading! 1) LESSON LEARNED: NO SAMPLE, NO PURCHASE Before there was Smashwords, the big indie goldmine was the Fictionwise multiformat book, and I used to get suckered in to spending on...

I’ve been distracted for the last few days. A story idea got into my head for one of the Internet fiction series I contribute to occasionally, and it’s been hard to concentrate on anything else until I could get it out of my head. Unfortunately, I’m still not happy with the end results. It’s one of the most frustrating things in the world, as a writer, when the idea that seemed so awesome in your head comes out on the page like, well, a steaming pile of words. Perhaps in a few days I’ll have a better perspective and can...

In a blog post on its own website, backlist e-publisher E-Reads points out that it is now paying advances for e-book rights (and actually has been for several months). It notes that in a Publishers Weekly article looking at e-book publisher royalties, of all the publishers surveyed only E-Reads was paying advances. The PW article notes that E-Reads founder Richard Curtis found a lot of agents were reluctant to offer rights to backlist titles without any money offered up front—it simply wasn’t a publishing model they were familiar with. Most of Curtis’s advances are fairly small, just in the...

So says an article by Richard Curtis at e-reads. According to Richard: These are store-fronts hosted by Fictionwise enabling customers to view only the publishers’ own titles rather than the comprehensive list of all books retailed by Fictionwise. The dedicated publisher pages will be terminated at the end of September, and publishers have been invited to redirect customer visits and purchases to the main Fictionwise website www.fictionwise.com. Richard says that, other than this, Fictionwise will continue as normal. Thanks to Marilynn Byerly for the link....

I received the following email from Clytie Siddall, from Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia. Is anyone else having similar problems with Fictionwise? Email begins: My purchasing at Fictionwise has dwindled from a flood to a trickle since the imposition of "geographic limitations", but I still prefer to buy ebooks there if I can. I also signed up last year (before the imposition) for another 5 years of the Buywise club. Under the current publishing conditions, we customers are told that we will still be eligible for Buywise discounts for the life of our already-paid subscription, and that we can...

According to iTunes: Wattpad: IOS4, enhanced part navigation, add My Profile tab eReader: fixed a book deletion problem for the on-device bookshelf. Changed the background on the iPad for the Find and Color Picker dialogs so that the controls can be seen easeir Kobo: choose from left or fully justified text layout from reading settings. Enjoy an improved animated page turn effect. Performance and stability improvements....

Well, right now it’s snowing down below and the devil is skiing to work. I was convinced that there was no way a version of Fictionwise’s eReader would come out for iPad, now that Barnes & Noble was busy trying to push the Nook and its own tied-in eReader at all costs. In April, Fictionwise’s customer service outright said there were then “no plans to update the iPhone eReader app for iPad.” But in the last couple of weeks, surprise surprise, out came a new iPad-compatible eReader. I’m still not entirely sure why. Are Barnes & Noble still...

The real secret weapon for authors these days has nothing to do with self-publishing versus Big Publishing, or posting the book here versus posting it there. The real secret weapon? Treat your book like any other product and provide superior customer service! Here is a brief example of an author who went the extra mile and made such a positive impression on me that he'll have my eyeballs---for the duration of the free sample, anyway---for any book he ever puts out again. Joe Haldeman, I salute you and you have won me as a fan. THE CRISIS The short version is, I lost...

Engadget reports that Verizon is getting a pair of e-book reading devices—one 7”, one 10”—in September, and the name “Entourage” has been thrown around in connection with them. Are they going to be made by the company Entourage, currently known for the dual-screened Edge? Are they going to be dual-screened like the Edge, or just tablets? Nobody knows at this point. On the other hand, our sister blog Gadgetell reports that Sharp is releasing 5.5” and 10.8” color LCD tablets through Verizon later this year (see also this TeleRead story), with 3G enabled. Is this something entirely different...

eReader has been updated to 2.1.2. According to the App Store it has been updated for iOS 4 and now natively supports the iPad....

How many hours do you spend sitting at your computer for work and pleasure? How many hours are you willing to spend reading an ebook on your work computer? How many additional hours are you willing to spend to search through ebook websites to find an ebook to read? I find these latter two questions to be the ones that haunt me as I try to find an ebook to buy and read. I broached this topic in an earlier article, Finding the Needle in a Haystack of Needles (II): eBooksellers, but didn’t really delve into the problem of reading on...