julesjones (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
julesjones) wrote2012-10-14 08:40 am
julesjones) wrote2012-10-14 08:40 am
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Dipping a tentative toe back into the ocean of publishing
I'm contemplating dusting off my publishing skills and applying them to the brave new world of self-published ebooks. This is because a couple of my short stories were published on websites that have gone 404, and I doubt I'd get a letter confirming that the rights have reverted. There are a couple more that are on free websites, or otherwise don't have unencumbered rights to re-sell to a publisher, but would make useful fodder for practice in creating a free-standing ebook.
I thought about starting with "A Trifling Affair", which has been around on the web for so long I don't think anyone would take it even if I got it pulled from the various sites where it's still available. It's on my website as a free sample piece, and I'd put it out as a free ebook. But it's one of the first things I ever wrote, and although it's been lightly revised since then, I did wonder whether it was really good enough to put out there as the first thing a potential new reader is going to find on Smashwords.
A spot of ego-Googling later, I find that even though it's never been available as anything other than a freebie on websites, a) it's all over the book pirating torrents, b) 3 people have bothered to rate it at GoodReads and they all liked it. And of course it was good enough for an editor at an about-to-open epublisher called Loose Id to read it on one of those websites and email to ask if there was any more where that came from...
I might bounce it off the crit group first. But I think I need to go and download the test file of that cheap stock photo of black leather boots I found on Dreamstime...
It can't actually go to Smashwords, since the original fanfic version is also still around, and would trip the Smashwords anti-piracy measures. But I've been considering buying Scrivener anyway, and this would be a good way to test Scrivener's epub file output.
I thought about starting with "A Trifling Affair", which has been around on the web for so long I don't think anyone would take it even if I got it pulled from the various sites where it's still available. It's on my website as a free sample piece, and I'd put it out as a free ebook. But it's one of the first things I ever wrote, and although it's been lightly revised since then, I did wonder whether it was really good enough to put out there as the first thing a potential new reader is going to find on Smashwords.
A spot of ego-Googling later, I find that even though it's never been available as anything other than a freebie on websites, a) it's all over the book pirating torrents, b) 3 people have bothered to rate it at GoodReads and they all liked it. And of course it was good enough for an editor at an about-to-open epublisher called Loose Id to read it on one of those websites and email to ask if there was any more where that came from...
I might bounce it off the crit group first. But I think I need to go and download the test file of that cheap stock photo of black leather boots I found on Dreamstime...
It can't actually go to Smashwords, since the original fanfic version is also still around, and would trip the Smashwords anti-piracy measures. But I've been considering buying Scrivener anyway, and this would be a good way to test Scrivener's epub file output.
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