As you know if you've been following along My E-Book Road, I'm wanting to provide lots of info regarding several specific topics on which I get quizzed regularly by email and which involves much too much to thrown into my Everyday Simplicity blog. I've decided a small book, maybe even a couple of hundred pages, would help a lot of folk and now the hurdle for me is: how best to accomplish this goal, cheaply, efficiently, with a quality product, and maybe a bit of a profit for all my time, effort, and lost opportunity costs?
I'm not investigating where to publish my Great American Novel, or even a single poem. I did stumble across two opposing views this week -- the first, as I learned that Murderati is up for a major blogging award, and the second, as I read in Media Bistro that an author is choosing to write an ebook, available online as a pdf, and if his sales are strong enough, then his publishing house will take his book into a paperback version. So, I went surfing around to learn about Canterabooks (which has a blog but no separate website).
I learned a lot just from this limited surfing. Check out the perspectives being advanced online by Peri Noskin Taichert over at Murderati (such a great blog, by the way) in her post, "What is An Author?" and an interview by a blogger at Subtletea of Cantera Christopher:
You read them both and see what you think ... excerpts:
Peri: "I want something that more accurately reflects the difference in the two processes of publishing. I don't want the term to be loaded with judgment or arguments about quality; after all, there's a need for both opthalmologists and optometrists in this world. A person could make the same argument about self-publishing and traditional publishing. But they're not the same. I've never paid to have my work in print. I DO want potential readers to know that. ...."
Cantera: "As for our motto ["Beating Our Tiny Fists on the Big Hairy Chest of the Corporate Literary World"](which came to me one evening over drinks with my partner Michael upstairs at Sardi’s), it puts one in mind of a voluptuous but virtuous art maiden on the brink of being seduced/raped by the testosterone-driven commercial establishment. I like the eroticism of that fantasy. It gives me the juice to keep plugging away. Eros is the main component of my artistic makeup and philosophy, and by Eros I mean the creative, generative spirit at its primal."
I don't know about you, but wouldn't want to spend any time with Cantera but I'd like to have a conversation or two with Peri. I've even put Peri's name on my Barnes & Noble Buy list.