Tuesday, May 08, 2012
The
Art of Writing No. 33
I was reading blogs yesterday about the
art of writing for ebooks. There were many interesting asides in them, comparing
ebooks to traditional paper based literature.
The first one was the splendid (for the
author) notion that a book is never out of print once it has been fired into
the stratosphere. It hovers
forever to be discovered by generation after generation whereas books go out of
print and an author is very lucky indeed for resurrection to occur once the
publisher has disposed of the last copy. It also means that as fads and
fashions come and go, a novel can come into its own at a time the zeitgeist
chooses. Since one of the lines of argument in these blogs is that we authors
are satisfying a desire for some kind of legacy through our writing, ebooks may
be our eternal children, or our virtual tombstones with extraordinarily long
epitaphs written upon them!
The second is the malleability of an ebook
when compared with the traditional form. I spent so many months with illustrators
and printers producing Azimuth to get the quality of cover image, paper and a
layout that does justice to the complex multi-leaved essence of the story, but with
an ebook this final form is never reached. I know that subsequent editions of a
successful paper based book usually bring with them changes in art and format,
yet the process is still static once these decisions have been made. With an
ebook that does not sell, you can change its appeal. You can write a new, more
dynamic synopsis, add a new front cover and even change the label (this being
the way the book is pigeon holed; crime, romance, SF, fantasy…). It makes one
think of Paul Valery, the French poet, who said “A poem is never finished,
merely abandoned”. Thus it is with enovels. Indeed, should your reviewers all
point to a passage in your book that that they feel undermines the book’s general
quality, you can re-write it and insert the change.
Third, it is liberating to feel that your
novel is not a hostage to fortune in the shape of the preconceptions and
subjective judgments of agents and publishers, nor, if it leaps those hurdles,
the reviewers in the press. It all comes down to your work and the reactions of
your readers. Will they enjoy it? Will they text their friends and tell them
how good it is? Will the book snowball on the back of a gathering storm of
readership? However, your book is not in a bookshop. It is not a physical
entity. And this classical way of selling stories is the one where currently
the big money is made. Not for much longer, though. To counteract traditional
selling techniques, you have to shepherd your audience to your ebook by equally
effective, but innovative forms of marketing.
I write this blog and hope it directs
readers to Azimuth. If they like what I say and how I say it, it can help
persuade them I am genuine and the book should be a great read. I tweet
aphorisms every day to a similar end: @profjacksanger. Today’s first one is:
Religions are insurance companies offering a single
policy, life after death, asking you to take it on trust that there will be a
payout
Then there’s Facebook and Linkedin. But
marketing is hard work. Are you prepared for the daily grind and will your
imagination’s well never run dry?
Azimuth (the paperback trilogy) by Jack
Sanger at www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Azimuth by Jack Sanger in ebook in 3
separate volumes Amazon Kindle
Jack Sanger also writes under the nom de
plume Eric le Sange and his work appears on Amazon Kindle
Labels: Writing: ebooks
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