I haven’t posted for a while, so why not post on a Friday the 13th? I’ve had my head down writing, but a few whispers from the blogosphere and elsewhere caught my attention.
Digital Pubbing has a nice roundup article summarizing Ebook Formatting Options for Indie Authors. I use Jutoh, a reasonably-priced software program that can generate Kindle and EPUB files (in addition to many other formats). It’s a snap to use. I first format my Word file for Smashwords, and then I feed that file into Jutoh. It converts the Word file into the formats I want at a click of a button. It can also take a Word file and generate one formatted for Smashwords, but I still do that step manually.
November is NaNoWriMo month. Social Media Just for Writers has an article about how you can use NaNoWriMo to promote your next novel to your readers. I don’t participate in NaNoWriMo, because I don’t write fast enough and I’m always in the middle of writing something. If you’re NaNo’ing it this month, the article is a great read.
Not from a blog, but from Smashwords: In one of Mark Coker’s updates to publishers (found on the “Site Updates” tab within the Smashwords publisher dashboard), Coker told authors that on November 16, Scribd will discontinue its retail single copy sales store to focus on its subscription service. When Oyster announced that it was folding, some people thought that it indicated the subscription model was in trouble, but perhaps not. Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited is going strong (though we don’t know how much Amazon is propping the service up with injections of cash), and now Scribd will throw 100% of its effort into its subscription service. There are also smaller subscription services in other countries that are doing well. We’ll see how it all shakes out.
There have been many articles lately about how ebook sales are flatlining (or declining), and many articles that say they’re not. Maybe the two sides arguing this point are ignoring the forest for the trees. An article over at Marketing Christian Books reports that reading continues to decline in the U.S. In addition to telling us that only 72% of Americans have read a book this year (down from 79% in 2011), the article contains other interesting statistics. I’m more concerned about this statistic than I am about how many people read in print vs. ebook. It’ll be a moot point if the number of readers continues to decline.
I hope you found this news roundup valuable. If you’d like me to do more of them, let me know in the comments.
Have a good weekend! 🙂
