Midweek Smattering

So Barnes and Noble is for sale as a franchise.  This is no shock.  You can’t run a business by sticking your head in the sand, pretending things aren’t changing, and THEN decide 5 years after the fact that you should try what Amazon has ALREADY done and attempt to corner the market share with your ereader, while being hideously oblique about your ebook format, and having a generally crappy ebook shopping set up.  Newflash BN, Amazon already did it.  You can’t play catch up that way.

If they were smart, they would not only put out a competitively priced ereader (which they’re doing), but they would be transparent about the fact that they sell EPUB, which is an industry standard that SHOULD work with most other readers besides Kindle.  Open up your ebookstore to others.  THAT’S something Amazon hasn’t done and where they are going wrong, IMO.  And for God’s sake, get some people who are educated about digital fare, organize your site better, and GET PUBIT UP AND RUNNING!

Yesterday I put together the final PDF of my CP’s first book Hush Money. She’s registered for copyright, uploaded to Smashwords, Amazon, Scribd, etc.  She’s just waiting on things to process, at which point I will do a more formal Squee and hit you with obsessive linkage and orders to buy.  Which you should.  Because it is made of awesome, just like she is.

I started my freebie this week. So far things are going well–not like it won’t need revisions, but if I can keep up 600 words a day, I should have the first draft completed by the end of August.  Which would be great.  My brain feels like it’s working again, for the first time this year.  There’s some rough, clunky prose coming out, but not the mind-numbing OMG WHAT WORDS SHOULD I WRITE? that was stymieing my productivity earlier in the year.

It would help a lot if I could think of a flipping title. It’s not like I can’t write it without a title.  This is actually the norm for me.  But it would make me happy if I could get a title.  If I had a title, I could go ahead and be getting a cover, which would just be that much more impetus to hurry my butt up and finish it.  And I’ve totally got cover envy for Pot.  Lookit.  Isn’t her cover pretty?

Anyway, if anybody has any genius ideas about what I should call this thing about a wolf shifter and a demi-goddess who hook up to rescue their loved ones from a big baddie who plans to sacrifice them to gain crazy cosmic power and shift the balance of the universe, all before a hurricane flattens New Orleans–again–feel free to offer them up in comments.

4 thoughts on “Midweek Smattering

  1. I dunno if it helps but you mentioned a hurricane flattening New Orleans again so I thought of Katrina and looked up the name. It means Pure, it’s greek, it’s a variant of Katherine. I means pure and it’s styled as name that means Everlasting. So can you do anything with the cues: everlasting or pure?

  2. Thanks for pimping me out to your friends.
    I’m having title fail, but then, I don’t think clever titles are my thing.

    I don’t know what’s up with the bookstores’ ebook divisions. None of them is satisfactory. Borders makes this huge deal about their !apps! And really, the deal over there is just that you need to use Adobe Digital Editions to open the file you bought. (At least that’s how it works for my device.) I don’t think of ADE as an app, so their whole website was really confusing to me.

    The indie ebookstores, which are being ass-kicked by Agency pricing, did a good job of educating customers about different devices and file formats, and were very clear about what they had available and what you were buying. The big-box stores think they’re setting themselves up for a public too stupid to understand what they’ve bought, and end up just being vague. They also think everyone’s got a smartphone and wants to read on it. The ebook departments of the big chains that have come out this year have been really disappointing.

    Oh, and don’t you love how you can’t apply a coupon, which you should be able to apply to any book in the store, to an ebook because of Agency pricing? Bastards.

    One bright note, Books-A-Million, which I thought had mostly PDFs last time I browsed, seems to have EPUBs now, and the format is clearly written in the product description. Bravo.

  3. That cover is amazing. I’m jealous! 🙂

    Ref: titles
    I love brainstorming titles. It’s hit or miss given just a blurb, but here are some ideas to kick around.

    –Primal Shift
    –Storm Warning
    –Devil’s Eye

    1. Ooo, Devil’s Eye. It has potential…and it would actually fit with the big bad I have in mind…I think I officially have at least a working title! Thanks Maria!

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