I never intended to buy a Kindle; In fact, I swore I would never do that. I hated the idea of reading the whole book on the screen; I did not see an excuse for replacing an object I loved as soft and soulless as the reader. The gadget looked like a close relative of Alan Sagar, who was recently seen in the old house of Alan Partridge. on the outskirts of Norwich. Alan, I suspected, must have a Kindle.
It was all a bit naive. I deliberately blinded myself with a process that by now must be terribly familiar, with technology — a digital camera, a microwave, a mobile phone — going from a trick to something that seems essential to civilized life. Shortly before Christmas, looking at Amazon, I got into the Kindle section and eventually read unanimously rave reviews about what the company said was its bestseller. Some powerful subconscious pressure was at work, and, of course, it worked. Before I found out about this, I clicked the Buy button. and the car was on the way.
No doubt you know what the Kindle looks like: a bit like an iPad, only smaller, lighter and very gray, even when it is turned on. Compared to the iPad or any other tablet in this regard, it is very limited in what it can do. For some reason, I was expecting a touchscreen, while the main Kindle navigation tool is a small square button with combs on all four sides, as well as a rather fluffy keyboard of tiny round keys that requires a good set of nails if you are going to control it with any degree of accuracy. Navigating the screen is jerk and unreliable: it’s too easy to click on the wrong link. For reading you get a choice of two fonts, an ugly serif and a simple sans serif that you can view in different sizes. Each page is black and white. You turn the page, squeezing the right or left edge; each time you do this, the reverse image of the text flashes at you with distraction, interrupting the reading, which, in my opinion, should be as smooth as possible. The Kindle may access the Internet, but it is slow and clumsy, and prone to crashing if you ask it to do something in a hurry. The worst thing he does (the object is reasonably included under the label "experimental") should read you in a mid-Atlantic robotic voice with a wooden phrase that makes it quite clear that it does not understand a word that he says.
However, as soon as you start using the Kindle, most of your resistance to it disappears. It has two great advantages over a book: it can store as many names as an average library in a space smaller than a sandwich; and it is served by an impressively efficient support system that allows you to download a huge number of items more or less instantly wherever you have access to the Internet. And some of what it provides is ridiculously good value. Virtually every important classic can be downloaded for less than two pounds, many of them (for example, the assembled Balzac) in bundles of up to one hundred and thirty books in one file. Hundreds of individual volumes are completely free. If you use these books, the Kindle will pay for itself within a week. The disadvantage is that many of them are cheaper downloads, in particular, are very poorly formatted. Poetry, in particular, is a disaster zone, most of it is a solid block of words without interruptions. A paragraph is often random, as is italicized text. Larger and cheaper collections are especially bad: often the source code seems to have been scanned into an OCR program and downloaded to Kindle, without any problems with verifying the authenticity of a single page. (Organizations responsible for many of these sets of classic books for some reason tend to have ominous names — for example, Golgotha Press.)
All of the above may sound like a niggle, but the fact is that many of these shortcomings occur quite often, even with more expensive items. Everyone loves a deal, but it's a pity that you need to read the classics without deaths (or a thriller, for that matter) in a form that constantly interferes with reading.
My grunts (a Kindle fan called them “when I published them as an Amazon review) rather disappeared into insignificance, when, by chance, I discovered what you can do with Kindle, that very few people seem to know, and yet that promises to open a terrible new area of opportunity for writers who have not yet been able to penetrate the press. For Kindle, you can use to publish your own books, very easily and absolutely nothing. As if that were not enough, Amazon will pay you from 35% to 70% of every sale you make (without VAT) on your Kindle website.
Looking through the Kindle's bestsellers, I accidentally downloaded a novel called “Switched”. (It’s very easy to push the wrong button on the Kindle, especially if your hands are a bit clumsy.) The book was about teenage trolls; its author was a young American, Amanda Hawking, and it cost me only 49 pence. Despite the rather blatant awkwardness of the letter, was ranked first among the fifty best-selling Kindle. In fact, Amanda Hawking has a total of nine books on the Kindle, all of them in the top hundred, which is pretty good, considering that the entire Kindle list now includes about 639,000 items. She clearly found herself a loyal audience and sells many books. In part, this may be due to the fact that she writes in the trilogy and evaluates the first volume of each below £ 1.00, but people don’t buy books by a particular author simply because they are cheap. Her marketing strategy works because people who read her books want more.
I visited the name of Amanda Hawking and came up with more than a million results. According to Wikipedia, she is 26 years old, she wrote 17 novels in her spare time, and in less than a year she became a millionaire e-book. She began publishing her novels as e-books in April 2010. By March 2011, she had sold about a million copies and earned more than two million dollars.
The most remarkable thing is that all these books were published independently. This is a fact that is well known to its Kindle reviewers; and, apparently, explains the clumsiness of most of the writing. Interestingly, it does not seem to distract its readers. In fact, many of them may well like the fact that the book was published more or less, as she wrote, without any editor or proofreader (that is, an authoritative figure), which prevents the boring removal of things. This is the Internet for you: this is nothing, if not libertarian.
On the eve of Amanda was rejected by a large number of publishers, before becoming a separate publication. I was particularly interested in her story that, like many people, I have a number of unpublished manuscripts collecting dust in drawers and cabinets. Some of them are books that were not found by the publisher, but among them was published and is now coming out of print: a novel for children, called Musclemen.
The Thinkers was published by Oxford University Press in 1991. When I wrote this, I was referring to the same audience as Roald Dahl’s books, which my own children used for a very long time from a very early age and continued to be read by their teenagers. I mean, this is a rather complicated, even controversial story: the total attack on commercialism and, in particular, the commercialism of modern toys, with which I watched with horror from an early age as a parent - my eldest son was born in 1973. In many ways the plot of "Musclemen" recalls "Toy Story". films, although they were actually written and published about four or five years ago. (I do not accuse Pixar of plagiarism, it is rather a case that Jung would call synchronicity.) Musclemen & It has a fairly simple plot - hated toy robots damage the traditional middle-class household, only to defeat an alliance of more ordinary characters in the game rooms led by a teddy bear named Hodge. The last spell of villainous muscularists, as the robots are called, is perceived by their own means and ability to violence. The book relates to the subject of toys thematically, as well as the plot, in which she selects technology-dependent toys (Buzz Lightyear / Musclemen) from toys that encourage a child to use his imagination (Woody / Hodge). I always thought it would make a great movie, especially if it was made by Pixar.
The “Thinkers” was originally well received and was made on Sunday on Sunday. "Christmas books for children", but sales were disappointing, and he soon remained. Looking back, it was predictable. I was at some point in my life when I was attacked by shame and embarrassment, when everything I wrote fell into the public arena - it was like one of those dreams in which you find yourself at a dinner party without your pants. As a result, I did nothing to promote the book, and, unfortunately, did not do an OUP. The jacket was beautifully painted, but tasteless, and all the products looked cheap and boring, like a simple reader. I need illustrations - Quentin Blake would have done very well, but my editor at Oxford warned about this: she thought that the pictures with toys would connect the book with the readers. minds with Noddy and his friends. Probably, I should have indicated that this may depend on the illustrator, but I was the author for the first time and am very glad that you are generally published.
As soon as the rights came back to me, I could publish the publication on my own, but for this, it would be right to cost more money than I would like to risk, and its history of publications with Oxford did not encourage me to think that I would be very much on the way to return my investment. In any case, self-publishing has brought me the stigma of the vain press. If the publisher was not going to invest his money, then sometimes he does not deserve to come to life.
Kindle has changed all that.
Reading about the success of Amanda Hawking immediately bought "Muscleman". to mind. How easy would it be, I was surprised, to give the book a new life by publishing it on the Kindle? The copyright was returned to me, and I still had the text in the file in the Word version. I published my own posting on Kindle & # 39; and immediately went to the Amazon.com page, which shows how to add a book to the Kindle list. The process is extremely simple and amazing, it is completely free. To begin with, everything looks rather complicated - there are several websites that give you tips on formatting, but if you don’t insist on setting up each page on your own, it’s really surprisingly simple. First download Mobipocket Creator. Then compile your workbook into a continuous Word document, save the section string as a single HTML file (select “Filter Web Pages”) and create it in a Kindle document using Mobipocket Creator. After that, all you have to do is open an account for Kindle on amazon.com (you cannot do it on amazon.co.uk for some reason) and follow the instructions for self-publishing. You set the price, your book can be downloaded to anyone who has a Kindle, and you get 70% of revenue (if any). Brilliant.
The whole process took me about two weeks. I could have done it before, but I wanted to revise the book and give it a new title - “New Toys”. My son Henry designed a very professional-looking (and rather scary) cover for me. I downloaded the cover and the book in the Kindle, and by the next morning I could already find it on amazon.co.uk and on my Kindle.
The main task now is marketing. The book sells for $ 1.71 per copy without VAT (you must pay VAT for Kindle purchases, unlike books), and if you want to watch the first chapter, there is a feature in the Kindle system that allows you to download a sample for nothing. By the way, you really don't need a Kindle to access the Kindle store; If you switch to Amazon, you can download a simple Kindle book reader on your computer or laptop.
If you want to see how your book looks on Kindle, by the way, there is an easy way to download it to your e-reader without putting yourself in front of the public. Amazon gives you a Kindle email address; all you need to do is format the book as stated above and send it to your Kindle email address as an attachment. And there are thirty seconds later. This is actually a great help for proofreading: the fact that the text appears on the Kindle screen creates a short distance that allows you to read, rate and edit it almost as if it were another person’s work, you can even comment on the file. as you read.
I do not believe that “New Toys” will make me a millionaire from an e-book, like Amanda Hawking - I do not have her energy or her connection with “Young Adult”; the market, but publishing it on the Kindle does, at a minimum, the ability to return a book to the market, in the hope that some will at least read and enjoy it. It does not end there. Currently, I have a new novel, “The Scully Boy,” part one of the Children Engineers trilogy, to make publishers rounds. This book is aimed at adults and is a country similar to England, which for four centuries has been divided into closed communities by gender. The story is told by a seventeen-year-old boy named William Scully, who has just been expelled from an exclusive public school and taken into custody, where he should be interrogated in connection with some unspecified crime his father should have committed, This is part of a teenage novel twist) and a partial novel of ideas. What effect does social conditioning have on individual sexuality? And if you do not have the opportunity to be direct, does this necessarily make you gay? Interesting questions, but not those to which this or any book can give a definitive answer.
As a teaser, I put the first volume on the Kindle at a low price: just to find out if he buys it. (I published it under a pseudonym, but you can hack it by performing a search in the title). Three sales today in a couple of days. Is this a start?
Of course, if this happens, I should still be able to, if my sales are delayed, take the traditional route. Interestingly, Amanda Hawking herself is going to leave an independent publication, having a subscription for $ 2 million and a deal with St. Louis for 4 books last month. Martin. Press for the young paranormal series, which will be called "Watersong". “I don’t want to spend 40 hours a week processing emails, formatting covers, searching editors, etc.,” she explains.
Fair enough, and I wish her health. She and all the other successes of self-publishing in an e-book made me and all novice writers an excellent service, showing us the way that anyone who cannot find a publisher can publish their work with almost nothing. Oddly enough, I don’t see Amanda’s books succeeding in paper and money. Some things just do not translate.
