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Hi Paul:
The deal at all the major stores means that a publisher must have an 'official' US presence. For independent 'foreign' authors, this means jumping through hoops or giving up on the major marketplace.
We decided to go the whole hog and hired a US lawyer to register BeWrite Bools Lcc in the USA. It took over six months of hard work and no little expense, but our registration is rubber-stamped this month.
It allows us now to provide our entire catalogue and all new releases with the major players: Amazon for Kindle, Barnes & Noble for Nook, Apple for iPad, etc, etc, etc. It'll make a huge difference.
We still have a lot of hard technical work ahead, though, even as we sign contracts with these etailers. Not our entire catalogue is as yet converted to ePub and Mobi. We're about half way there -- carefully working title by title -- and hope to have everything done and dusted by the end of November.
My tech partner is working 17-hour days 7 X 7 to make sure the conversions are perfect and I editorially reproof everything before it goes. Full conversion of a title (tech and ed) takes around twenty hours. Auto conversions does NOT produce a good result.
And don't forget that all our titles have been through a rigorous editing period of sometimes over a year before the final edited draft itself was fully proofed and cleared for original release in paperback.
Cheers. Neil
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