The my poetry chapbook's first birthday is coming up!

[capri0mni]

The Monsters' Rhapsody: Disability, Culture, & Identity entered the world as an ink-and-paper bundle of joy on August 4, 2016.

In that time, 17 copies have sold: 3 to me (for technical reasons) and 14 to other people.

Somewhere on YouTube, I watched a vid of a panel of authors talking about self publishing, and one of them said that even when you get published via the traditional route (unless you're a Big Name Author that the publishing house is actively promoting), selling 200 copies a year is par for the course.

Considering that she was talking about prose books, and (if I recall correctly) her own work was of a traditional fiction sub-genre, and my book is poetry and it has an esoteric focus (unlike, say love poetry, or straight-up autobiography/confessional/abuse survival), I'm rather pleased to be within sight of 10% of that.*

Anyway, yesterday, I got it into head to try and convert my book from ink-and-paper to pixel-and-silicon by August 4, this year. ...

And this was after the computer I composed the book on died, so I had to re-download the PDF Lulu.com has on file, and go through the whole thing and rework the format to make it ebook compatible. ... My Inner Critic is fretting and chewing her fingernails, 'cause whoever first composed ebook algorithms didn't take the requirements of poetry into account at all (like allowing extra lines between stanzas).

So wish me luck.

---

*(shameless plug) If you'd like to help me get to a full 10% of Par For the Course, you can buy the book either at Lulu.com (where there's a 20% discount, and I earn $1.69):



or on Amazon (where there is no discount, and I earn $0.03 from the U.S., and $0.33 from the UK [no, I have no idea why I get more money from a foreign-to-me seller])
(/shameless plug)

Comments

[quarryquest]

My book is The Big Scary book of Fandom. I think I set it up as DRM free but if I haven't next time I go in there to edit it I will do my best.

I'm a big fan of Calibre (open source ebook maanagement sofware) which has DRM stripping tools galore. I don't strip to pirate, I do it so I can put it on the reader I prefer. Kindles annoy me and I wish I still had a Sony Reader as that was even able to play mp3s.

[capri0mni]

*Nod*

Lulu recommends Calibre -- and I had it on my machine before it died, but I didn't have it long enough to figure out the learning curve of how to tweak ebook formatting.

I want my final product to be DRM free for the same reason -- specifically for accessibility/disability reasons.

I don't have either a kindle or a kobo reader, but I do have both apps on my desktop.

[quarryquest]

I like the Kindle cloud app for reading books on a computer screen. Amazon does play a little dirty on this though as you can't copy and paste text. It's not much good if you are trying to quote something in an article / book chapter. Kindles are better as if you highlight they keep a text file you can download (and so do Kobo for that matter actually). The really sneaky thing about Kindles is the way the books download onto your desktop - they have changed the file so it's not readable by Calibre and therefore not convertable (or movable). That can be fixed (for now) but backtracking on the software but it's all not about the user, more about the big corporate giants who want to lock you into their product and make it difficult to use any other.

[capri0mni]

Yeah.

And I have a feeling that they're actually making it worse for themselves, even though they think they're "winning."

That's one reason why I don't think print books will ever go completely extinct. For one thing, you can lend them to friends (a thing often forbidden with ebooks). And for another, you can give them as presents (always my favorite ones, as a kid).

[quarryquest]

That's the only other reason I will de-DRM a book - to lend it to someone on the understanding that they delete it on finishing it. Or buy their own copy of the want to keep it.