The FastPencil Marketplace brings authors, editors, illustrators, marketing professionals, and other experts together as part of a new approach to writing, publishing, and distributing books and eBooks.
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NY Times tech writer Eric A. Taub gives FastPencil a spin:
Cleverly, FastPencil offers its writing services for free. You don’t anything unless and until you want other services, like professional design, editing, proofing and publishing.
FastPencil is easy to use. Navigation is a breeze and costs for various services are easy to find, with examples as to what you can expect to pay for different ones.
Taking a nontraditional publishing route? Tell us what you need.
This post makes the case that the Kindle is doomed, not because of the iPad per se, but because the iPad is just the first of many devices that will provide more than the Kindle, making the Kindle’s price unsustainable.
Kindle owners, do you agree?
If you want to not just write your book, but also have control over distribution, the Apple iPad will be a bonanza for you and your readers. You can sell your book in ePub (the format used by the iPad and many other eBook readers) through the FastPencil Marketplace (taking advantage of our BookBuy widget), and through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online retailers.
As this NY Times article makes clear, there will be all kinds of options for iPad owners seeking to buy eBooks. Take advantage of the flexibility of ePub and FastPencil. If you haven’t thought of producing in eBook format, now is the time to rethink your position.
wordjournal:
noun • inability to remember the correct word
from Lethe, a river of Hades that caused forgetfulness + logikos, the Greek word for word.
Excellent! Thousands of public domain books made available by Project Gutenberg will work on Apple’s soon-to-be-released iPad. This isn’t really a surprise, but it’s good to hear.
We’re launching an exciting new collaborative book project today. If you’ve served in Iraq or Afghanistan and have a story to tell about a hero you served with, you can contribute to this book. Check it out at http://www.fastpencil.com/militaryheroes and spread the word.
Authors are between a rock and a hard place, as today’s TechCrunch piece by Paul Carr illustrates. He describes how Amazon customers expressed their displeasure at the lack of a Kindle version of Michael Lewis bestseller The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine, by giving 1-star reviews of the book, even though they hadn’t read it. They were so upset that W.W. Norton, the publisher, had elected to “embargo” the Kindle version, milking sales of the hardcover version as long as possible.
For Carr, this sort of customer activism is problematic. He understands customer annoyance at W.W. Norton’s antiquated belief that denying customers what they want is actually good business strategy. But as a published author, he feels for authors whose books are impugned because of these business decisions:
I speak from pained experience as an author when I say that we have absolutely no say on when our books are released, in what format and at what price.
As an author you are beholden to a big publisher like W.W. Norton. You place your hard work in their care and hope that they’ll understand your audience. You hope that they will stop thinking of themselves as publishers of printed books, and start thinking of themselves as purveyors of your work, in whatever printed or digital form it might appear.
You’re also beholden to Amazon. You’re almost asking to get stepped on as the online goliath battles the titans of old world publishing. You are in the middle. They fight over pricing and distribution, while you hope that somehow, miraculously you will emerge from their duel unscathed.
If you’re an author, published or not, it’s time to realize that business as usual doesn’t favor you. It’s not about you. It’s about big publishers trying to stave off the future, and Amazon trying to control it. Meanwhile, they’re both pissing off your customers.
So try something different.
The latest from the people who operate FastPencil, an online book publishing company headquartered in Campbell, CA.
Expectations in the publishing industry for an iPod-powered resurgence have given rise to all kinds of demos. The latest, from VIVmag, shows a melding of newspaper and cinematic form.
Do all of these demos mean the end of good old-fashioned paper magazines? Or is a lot of money being thrown down a hole? Would you pay $6 for an interactive magazine you could access from an iPad or other tablet device?
