Poet Ponders the Digital

Visalia Direct: Virtual Valley February 6, 2012 Deadline March 2012 Issue The Publishing Revolution: Create Your Own E-Book Publish your book this year! Only a few years ago, “vanity presses” used such pitches to appeal to aspiring writers. For a fee, the vanity publishers would convert your manuscript into a reasonably nice book. Vanity publishers are nothing more than print brokers. Using a vanity publisher was expensive, but for some aspiring writers it was their last option. Many writers ended up with boxes of books in their garages and attics. Yet, I am writing this column to tell you that it is time to publish your book. Forget the vanity publishers and the small publishers that pass along many of the costs to writers. Publish your book as an e-book. It will cost you little (or nothing) and if you discover the book is popular, then you can consider an old-fashioned paper and ink book. Even writers with proven track records are leaving the traditional New York publ...

The future is digital, no matter how much we might resist. My wife and I will always be "book" readers. You know, those things that collect a bit of dust, take up space, and weigh a lot. There is and always will be something nice about the tactile act of reading a book. But, I've created ebooks and will publish many more in the years ahead. Lately, small groups have been asking if I would present on how to create an ebook. I can offer whatever training is needed for those interested, but the training isn't that involved. In fact, the new, easy-to-use tools are why so many of my colleagues in book and magazine design are losing their jobs. Too many of my friends and colleagues didn't make the transition to online publishing because the skills differ from those we needed in print. The publishing world is definitely changing. I posted an ebook with a very narrow audience on Amazon and sold over 1000 copies last year. For those of us with decades of experience i...

I have been working on various ebook projects and am frustrated by the amount of "hand coding" required to make an ePub book work well with several reader applications. When a book looks just right on one reader, it looks odd on another. Yet, we know the future is digital. Most computer users are familiar with Adobe's ubiquitous Portable Document Format (PDF). The benefit of using PDF files is that a file includes all graphics, fonts, and layout information. A file appears nearly identical on every computer, tablet, handheld device, et cetera. A magazine in PDF looks like the designer intended — and design is the emphasis of the entire Adobe product line. Adobe's Creative Suite applications are for designers, not writers. ePubs take a different approach, closer to the original intentions of HTML and similar document "markup" formats. Yes, you can put words in bold or change a few colors, but the intent of ePub is to allow the reader, the computer user, t...