Here’s an example of how quickly my brain pan cooks an egg. The Kindle has been out, what, three years now? And the iPad about a year?
Hmmm, nice little platforms, I’ve been musing. Electronic books might become a market for me sometime in the future, when I get a little footing again among the NY publishers. Then maybe, when I convince someone in NY to come out with a 20h anniversary edition of Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, we can talk about how to use this platform to deliver more of my writing.
Only, publishers aren’t going to go for a 20th anniversary edition of PCBS, not unless I’ve got another book or three in the pipeline. And when you consider that the NY pipeline has been pretty uninterested in what I’ve been writing for the past decade (with one exception), it would look like the publishing establishment is not going to be much help in me getting my books to people more directly and instantaneously.
In other words, the middleman was not going to be much help in cutting out the middleman.
Oh.
(Time passes, as I attach a drill to the mechanism of a large wall clock and make the hands spin in rapid comic fashion.)
Maybe I should do it myself.
Ding.
Actually, I can’t even really take credit for this notion of releasing my out-of-print books as ebooks. After seeing his name in a story in TimeOut Chicago, I started browsing the website of Chicago writer JA Konrath, author of the “Jack Daniels” series of mystery novels. Konrath is a complete convert to the idea of selling ebooks at the same time as real tree carcasses. Hell, he’s a convert to giving the stories away free on his website. Go ahead, read his site and his blog, and see if you don’t become convinced that the new publishing paradigm is already here.
Konrath is a very prolific writer. I’m not, to my shame and chagrin. Because my output isn’t monumental, it’s always eaten away at me that my most popular books have been out of print since 1998. What a waste, and not just monetarily. I’m a Midwestern boy, Detroit-bred, and I like the idea of being productive and being thrifty. So why should I let my old books go to waste, just because a decade ago they needed more shelf space in the warehouse?
This ebook idea has charged me up like nothing in the past year. I don’t expect much in revenue from them, I just want the people who want to read them to be able to do so, and for me to get my vig. Getting credit for the stories that spawned a hundred imitators is also a big motivator. “Little Red Riding Hood” and the rest of them often pop up on people’s websites, usually intact and credited. (“Red” is also by far the story most reprinted in Literature textbooks, FWIW.) Why people do that, I don’t know. It used to bug me a little, but now I’m grateful, for the following reason.
The original electronic files for Politically Correct Bedtime Stories, Once Upon a More Enlightened Time, and Politically Correct Holiday Stories are nowhere to be found. For all I know, they’re still on some 5″ floppy disk somewhere, but I can’t find them. I can find reams and reams of paper and floppies for book ideas that never panned out, let alone got published, but the ur-files for PCBS are missing.
I was faced with a long boring session of retyping the stories so they could be transferred to the proper types of files, until I realized that other people had already done much of this for me. Fans out there through the years have been posting the stories around the web — all I have to do is collect them and compare them to the printed versions. Howzy! No scanning, OCR, or voice software to wrestle with!
So this is a thank-you to those folks who took the time to type up my stories for me, with the intent of sharing them with the world. I intend to share them too, with a little fee added on. I’m not QUITE there yet with the idea of giving them all away. But we’ll see what the future brings.