Tuesday, October 5, 2010

To go E-book or in the printed format?

During the past year, I've been writing more and more horror fiction in both the novella and short story format. A short short story that I co-wrote with writer, Ellen Shaw, "Givers & Takers," is due to be published in the new edition of Festive Fear this December by Tasmaniac Publications. I still have a number of other stories out to various magazines in the United States and England. A new path I've decided to pursue, however, is to post some of my fiction up on Amazon's U.S. Kindle store and their U.K. Kindle store. I've discovered that more money can be made, if the stories are promoted right and the readers become aware of them, than by going the magazine route where I might make twenty-five dollars or less on a piece of fiction and then wait six-to-twelve months to see the publication of it in a magazine. As an avid reader and book hound, I write the type of fiction I enjoy reading--horror, suspense, action & adventure, thrillers, drama, and erotica. The story has to satisfy me first before anything is done with it. Lately, with all the news surrounding a number of publishers who are switching over to Print-on-Demand and e-books, it seemed like a smart move on my part to finally go the e-book route. The strange thing is that I don't read e-books. I come from the old school and love novels and short stories in hardcover and paperback format. I have bookshelves of hardcovers and paperbacks crammed into a small bedroom where I now live. My bed is five feet from my computer and desk. There isn't much room to turn around (I rent a bedroom in an old friend's house), but I continue to buy books, not knowing where I'm going to put them, or find time to read all of them. The articles I read on the new trends in publishing say that in the next ten years, e-books will dominate the market and that there will be more readers of e-books than of novels in the old format. That may be true. I do know that as I long as I live, I will continue to buy my books in hardcover and paperback whenever possible, while selling my own fiction in e-book. I love being able to hold a book in my hands and to flip through the pages and to examine the dust jacket. It's just not the same with an e-book. Still, I'm going the e-book route in an effort to get my fiction out there to a reading audience and to hopefully make some money for a change.

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