Quote:
Originally Posted by John F
[Sarcasm]
How can Fictionwise stay in business? Multiple formats of ebooks? I thought that Ebook production costs were similar to pbooks?
[/Sarcasm]
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To enlarge a bit on what Xeno said, and to affirm it:
I just finished an extensive proofing of nine of my books, in preparation for distribution through fictionwise and other outlets. (E-reads is the publisher.) It required many, many,
many hours of close work--and truthfully, I couldn't have justified that on the basis of expected income if I hadn't had an enthusiastic volunteer helper. And that was just to produce clean RTFs that I
hope will survive the formatting. Note that five of these books will be reissues of books presently on sale, and in some of those the formatting indeed got hosed by the previous ebook conversion.
I suspect Xeno is right that there will be cursory inspection, if any, of the converted files. There's no mechanism for the author to get copies of the ebooks, unless he/she wants to buy copies for quality control purposes. I never saw the current versions of my ebooks until a kind person gave me copies of the books she had bought. (Which was the first time I saw the formatting problems.)
And while everyone thinks it should be simple to fix errors once they're found--and really, ideally, it should be--in practice, at present, it's not. How I wish it were! I wouldn't have had ghastly first-draft covers attached to my ebooks on Amazon for the last four years, if it were.
So I am waiting with fingers crossed, to see what comes out of the pipeline.
Oh--and I hope all the good folk who passionately argue for lower prices will prove the economic validity of that argument by snapping up my books once they're on sale!
