John Passarella OnBoard at MobileRead

[jpassarella]

Hi, this is John Passarella. I am the (Bram Stoker Award-Winning) co-author of WITHER; I'm also the author of WITHER'S RAIN, WITHER'S LEGACY, KINDRED SPIRIT and several books set in the Buffy-verse (Buffy: Ghoul Trouble, Angel: Avatar & Monolith)...I found out about this forum by reading an article on eBook creation by Jeffrey Carver in SFWA's bulletin.

I am releasing my latest novel, SHIMMER (a supernatural thriller) as a FREE serialized eBook (a weekly eSerial) through my Website (2 chapters are out already), so I thought this would be a good place to announce it. Originally, I was going to convert the chapters only into regular PDF format. After reading the Carver article, I decided to also release it as HTML, RTF, tagged PDF, Mobipocket and eReader. He gave enough instructions to get me started on those formats, six in all counting desktop PDF.

The only eReader I have is the Mobipocket reader on my Blackberry, so I can't test/check all these formats. I do have the desktop readers for Mobi & eReader so I can view them there.

Anyway, I'm hoping some ereaders will check it out and let me know what they think. SHIMMER had some brief, intense Hollywood interest, first considered for a tent-pole summer movie franchise, then later in brief pre-development for a weekly TV series, but various circumstances conspired against it... finally, I decided to get the book out to my readers (old and new) via the eBook format, so that I could retain print rights. This book was also part of my contest to have readers' names used for characters in the book. I picked several winners. They'll finally see who their characters are and what happens to them.

You can find the various download formats at http://www.passarella.com/shimmer.htm and I'll be announcing the release of each chapter on Twitter (free & easy), at http://twitter.com/JohnPassarella - until the end of March, I'm giving away a free PDF of my never-before-seen, humorous/horror story "Red Friday" about Christmas shoppers and rampaging zombies to those who "follow me" on Twitter and send me their email requesting the PDF.

The format I seem to have the most trouble with is the eReader format. I'm not sure if you can specify small text (for copyright & legalese stuff) or if you can specify a cover, which you can clearly do in Mobipocket.

Okay, I've rambled on long enough about myself.

Keep reading,
John Passarella
http://www.passarella.com

[Moejoe]

Welcome John, and great to hear about your serialisation Now following you on Twitter, and good luck with the realease. Also, have you considered ePub as a format? I know I, and a lot of the people here, are gung-ho for the open format.

[DixieGal]

Welcome! I'm sure that members with more know-how than I will certainly be willing to help you figure out the formatting. Meantime, help yourself to our wiki (link at top of page).

[jpassarella]

Thanks, Moejoe! I saw ePub listed on Tor's site today. I might have considered it, but don't know anything about the format. Is there free creator & reader software? Is it difficult to do conversions? What's the best base format to start with for the conversion? HTML? DOC? etc.?

As you can tell, I'm fairly new to this stuff. At some point, I'd like to get a Kindle... but I may have to wait until version 3!

@DixieGal: Thanks for the welcome!

-John Passarella

[desertgrandma]

How did I miss this one? Must be slipping.....


Welcome to MobileRead, John.

Might as well give up writing now....we're pretty addictive........

[Moejoe]

Originally Posted by desertgrandma

How did I miss this one? Must be slipping.....


Welcome to MobileRead, John.

Might as well give up writing now....we're pretty addictive........

Don't you just know it! Curse you Mobileread for making me addicted

To John,

ePub is the open standard for ebooks (think the One Ring that Rules them All, only it won't possess your soul or anything ) Lots of publishers are on board with it, many, especially in Europe, standardizing on the format. As a format it can be converted to many others and is a fantastic base for conversion with the excellent Calbre E-Book Management Software (by the very talented Kovid Goyal, who'll you find here on Mobile read in the Calibre forum) HTML > EPUB, .MOBI (Kindle compatible) and Sony Reader formats are easy enough with Calibre, YMMV.

Have a look in the ePub books section for downloadable books by the talented people of Mobile read, and also Feedbooks.com for free and creative commons licensed material. Actually, Feedbooks or Manybooks might be the way to go, depending on your copyright requirements. Hadrien is on here (the co-founder of Feedbooks) and they offer a Stanza feed, so there's lots of visibility on there with the iTouch users.

There's a lot of people around here who are more knowledgable than me on the subject, and they're all glad to help. Ask and ye shall recieve, good friend

Oh, and you might want to get in touch with Teleread.org, a brilliant e-book blog, to let them know you're serialising your novel. They might put it up as an article

[jpassarella]

I finally got around to getting Calibre - after I saw that it could convert TO ePub and not just from ePub to other formats. I got some weird/wonky errors (espec. when using HTML as my input) but it looks like I was able to get it to convert to ePub when I used my mobi files as the input/source files. I used Adobe Digital Editions to view the ePub formatted files after Stanza seemed to show "junk" in the read window. Anyway... I converted all my chapters-released-to-date of my SHIMMER eSerial to ePub and added those download links to the grid on my SHIMMER page, which is here:

http://www.passarella.com/shimmer.htm

(Chapters 1 through 6 are now available.)

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction!

-John "Jack" Passarella

[jpassarella]

Hi,

Been a while since I checked in. I've been producing multi-chapter installments of the SHIMMER eSerial for a couple months now in 7 eBook formats. I've passed the halfway point in the manuscript. The eSerial could be done by the end of June. (??) If you haven't started reading yet, you have 34 chapters available.

To help spread the word, I'm going to have prize drawings. No purchase necessary, however to be eligible, you need to (a) sign up for my newsletter [the sign-up box is on every page of my website, passarella.com and (b) post a SHIMMER banner on your site, blog, MySpace page, etc., with a link back to my Shimmer page (see link below).

That's it. Do those two things, then get back to me with your email address at author[at]passarella[dot]com with a link to where you've posted the banner. Banners (animated, non-animated, horizontal & vertical) are also available on the Shimmer page.

http://www.passarella.com/shimmer.htm

Thanks,
John "Jack" Passarella

[dreams]

Hi John and welcome to MR.

I went to your site (I missed your previous posts) and tried to download epub for my Sony 505. It opens to a page of... well, I don't know what.... it is a page of symbols and numbers.

I don't know what tagged pdf is. I tried one download of that and it opened on my computer. Before I try it on my 505 do you know if it would work without freezing my Reader?

Also, if you need help in converting, offering other formats, or just need someone to test the formats, just ask and one of the members will jump in to help.

P.S. You might want to post in the Writers Corner and / or the Deals, Freebies, and Resources forums. You would be able to attract more attention in those forums for your work. (It took me a bit to locate your post again as I assumed I saw it in the other 2 forums..)

Thank you for offering your work to us. We are always appreciative of writers who are willing to learn about ebook formatting.

[jpassarella]

Hi, Dreamsdeb -

I thought I remember reading that the eReader (not ePub) works for Sony readers. I test the ePub versions in Adobe Digital Editions, I believe, unless I have my formats mixed up. I don't think I checked the last one (I may have) but I've checked almost all after conversion. I think I check eReader in the free eReader app.

I'll copy my last post to one of the threads you suggest. Probably tomorrow. Just got back from a trip to the Statue of Liberty today.

Thanks,
_John Passarella
http://www.passarella.com/shimmer.htm

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by jpassarella

Hi, Dreamsdeb -

I thought I remember reading that the eReader (not ePub) works for Sony readers. I test the ePub versions in Adobe Digital Editions, I believe, unless I have my formats mixed up. I don't think I checked the last one (I may have) but I've checked almost all after conversion. I think I check eReader in the free eReader app.

I'll copy my last post to one of the threads you suggest. Probably tomorrow. Just got back from a trip to the Statue of Liberty today.

Thanks,
_John Passarella
http://www.passarella.com/shimmer.htm

The Sony Reader line does not support eReader. They do support LRF and the 505 and 700 supports ePub. So for the 500, LRF is needed and for the 505 and 700, LRF or ePub will be fine. But I highly suggest ePub as well as LRF because there are going to be more devices coming out that do have ePub support.

[Dr. Drib]

Hello and welcome!

I taught Wither, along with a few Stephen King titles, at Miami University a few years back when I was teaching English Literature.

Don't be a stranger around here.


Don

[jpassarella]

To JSWolf - Thanks for the Sony tips. I Sony user was asking me on another list about this and I thought eReader worked on Sony. But now I see it's ePub, but only on some models. He mentioned LRF. Is there a free way to conver to that format...?

To Dr Drib - Cool to hear you talk WITHER. I knew of a prof who taught Wither at a Kansas University a while ago. Hope it was a good experience for your students.

-John "Jack" Passarella
http://twitter.com/JohnPassarella
http://www.passarella.com