The Romance Of Reading
January 2, 2008
Dear ePublishers,
I don’t mean to pick on any one of you because let’s face it, you all do this, but why is the eBook format at least for the setup parts of the eBook you guys print always so minimal and bland? I remember the golden days of TOR. The Title Page was full of flourishes sometimes even drawings and the back of the book… Oh hell, the back of the book had a complete catalog listing of everything that company had published with that author and sometimes even more great information like the series the author had, the order of the series, any planned titles coming out, sometimes excerpts from past books and always always always an order page to mail in that you could order books directly from their distributer.
Books should be treated as an event and to me it is a chance to reconnect to the author and find out what it going on from the publisher. It is also a chance for you the publisher to get more money if I see something I missed. So why not throw in a series chronology listing and order links and more information specifically to keep me better informed about that author? Why not throw a few flourishes back in to make things special? You have such a chance here to bring the feel of an event and the Romance back to reading.
With Love, Teddypig
Tags: eAuthors, eBooks, ePublishers
I can answer this for Samhain. Time, Teddy, time. Formatting a book takes time, it’s not just convert and be done. So whoever is doing the formatting needs to have some things streamlined. Like the copyright page where it can be more copy and paste.
We do provide some of the things you asked for at the back of the book, though, with a list of the author’s work, links to their website, etc. I know you have dreams of the perfect TeddyPig book, but sometimes, some things just need to be done easily, in the interest of time, so we have more of it to bring you more great books.
Sorry to have to disappoint you this time around. At least you didn’t call my ass fat though.
I was just kidding Angela. I swear I was!
I don’t even want to put this all on you pubs. Why not harass your authors to provide the series listing then? It does not have to be linked but just having the information on the series provided would be great.
We have a list in the back of each book with has the author’s Coming Soon and Now Available books (with Samhain). Do you think it should be done differently? We’re always willing to entertain new ways for doing things!
Series information in particular. If it is in a series then just a chronology listing would rock.
Well TOR would do the same thing but format the series together in order for you and attribute the coming soon to it if that was the case.
Make the series more prominent and noted since you are gonna get them all if you are reading the series.
Ha. FINALLY the comments section arrived on my screen– don’t ask.
As I said before (in the wrong section) it’s kind of a pain but we also had readers accuse us of trying to pad stories and charge more by the page when we added things. That was actually not our intention. But we’ve kind of given up doing as much.
Yeah I had to quick find a plugin that allowed me to use the more tag with out messing the RSS feeds up.
But I gots it now!
I do not think reasonable people would have issue with a listing. I mean it is information that authors are asked to include on their web pages constantly so being in the actual book is a bonus.