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Karen Casey Fitzjerrell

San Antonio Book Lovers: January 2014

By Jan
 on January 12, 2014

San Antonio Book Lovers Book Meet & Swap

We had a great start today when author and club member Karen Casey Fitzjerrell spoke to us about her two historical novels, EPIC-Award-winning The Dividing Season and Forgiving Effie Beck.

The Dividing Season cover   Forgiving Effie Beck cover

Karen explained how she began writing (“by accident” while journalling) and how that led her to write the first book. She self-published both books and learned some hard lessons along the way. Marketing is the most difficult thing for her, as it is for many authors. But the research trips she took and the people she met were fascinating. She read an excerpt from Forgiving Effie Beck and answered questions. After the swap, she sold and signed books. Thank you, Karen!

Karen Casey Fitzjerrell2

Here is the list of books discussed and swapped today:

The Garden of Last Days – Andre Dubus III
Full House – Janet Evanovich
Aunt Dimity and the Next of Kin – Nancy Atherton
Snow White and the Seven Samurai – Tom Holt
A Storm of Swords (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book Three) – George Martin
Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time – Phyllis Rose
Bring Yoga to Life: The Everyday Practice of Enlightened Living – Donna Farhi
YES! Magazine (and the food poster that Ken liked!)
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism – Naomi Klein
The Cancer Stage of Capitalism: From Crisis to Cure – John McMurtry
The Edge of Normal – Carla Norton (Bill says the “police-to-killer narrative ratio is more interesting than most”)
Dead Mountain: The True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident – Donnie Icar
Telegraph Days – Larry McMurtry
Brilliance – Marcus Sakey
Touched by Fire – Irene N. Watts
Victoria’s Daughters – Jerrold M. Packard
Breathless – Dean Koontz
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Wicked: Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West – Gregory Maguire
Aquamarine – Carol Anshaw
No Generation – Ryan Melsom
Heaven’s Wager – Ted Dekker
The Reluctant Empress: A Biography of Empress Elizabeth of Austria – Brigitte Hamann
The First Rule of Ten (Tenzing Norbu Mysteries)– Gay Hendricks and Tinker Lindsay
The Skull Mantra – Eliot Pattison
Common Nonsense – Andy Rooney
The Green Smoothies Diet – Robyn Openshaw* – the green smoothy girl blog
Vegan with a Vengeance: Over 150 Delicious, Cheap, Animal-free Recipes That Rock – Isa Chandra Moskowitz
Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris
The Absence of Mercy – John Burley
And When She Was Good – Laura Lippman
Saving Max – Antoinette Van Heugten
The Patron Saint of Liars – Ann Patchett
The Thief (An Isaac Bell Adventure) – Clive Cussler
Rainwater – Sandra Brown
Bright Shiny Morning – James Frey
America’s Dream – Esmeralda Santiago
Defending Jacob – William Landay
S. – J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
Seventh Son – Orson Scott Card
The Unlikely Pilgramage of Harold Fry – Rachel Joyce
The Bite in the Apple: A Memoir of My Life with Steve Jobs – Chrisann Brennan

VictoriasDaughters_coverJazzCleopatra_coverAuntDimityNextOfKin_coverThe Cancer Stage of Capitalism

In categories Book Club Tagged with amazon.com, author, publishing
Ereader photo

Ebooks: Quality and Price

By Jan
 on February 17, 2013

I felt I had to reply to a comment I saw on Amazon.com recently. The situation was this: a new, non-fiction book was being “reviewed” and one of the commenters gave it one star. It’s impossible to give anything lower on Amazon.com. The reasoning was that the price of the Kindle version of the book was too high.

Most commenters probably agreed that it was overpriced. However, the commenter hadn’t even purchased the book, and it was agreed that it was poor form to slight the price in that case, as the bad rating went against the overall quality of the book using Amazon’s rating system. The star rating — as it applies to books — is usually reserved for rating the contents and whether the reader liked or disliked the  publication.

One commenter wrote the following while discussing this issue: “It costs very little to make an ebook. For amazon’s Kindle, one need only to upload the book in Microsoft Word format and upload a picture of the cover of the book, and perform a few odds and ends and you are set to go – no production costs after that, no worry about printing too many copies, etc.”

My answer to at least this statement follows:

“In reply to [reviewer’s name], it’s not as easy as “perform(ing) a few odds and ends” to prepare a book to be published in the correct format for the Kindle — or any other ebook. I’m an editor and I create ebooks for clients, so I know of what I speak.

If you are a regular reader of ebooks, you’ve seen books which have poor ‘translation’ from the original version, or perhaps were done without proper preparation. Those ebooks have strange paragraph returns, unexplained spacing, remaining page numbers, and countless other anomalies. (That doesn’t count the poor editing that many exhibit!)

Each major distributor of ebooks demands a different format, as well. If ebooks were offered in a standard format across the board, it would be much easier (and less expensive) to publish them. Unfortunately, that is unlikely to happen, as we know in the computer world.

I do agree that prices of ebooks should be lower than that of print books. However, major publishers like Harper still need to make a profit, as do the many, many entities down the line who get a cut of the price, including Amazon and of course, the author (who makes very little from this, I’m sure). BTW, authors have little to do with setting the price if a publisher is distributing the book.

Big publishers are in trouble because of the self-publishing industry, no doubt about it. If buyers — that’s YOU — insist on quality and agree to pay a fair price, then the market will follow, however slowly that happens.”

So, how much are YOU willing to pay for a good-quality ebook? And do you tell other potential buyers when you find one that has very poor editing or formatting?

© Jan McClintock of We Need More Shelves

In categories Uncategorized Tagged with e-book, publishing