... And now Vanity Press for eBooks ... Yuck!

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by Penforhire

It is LESS than a couple of hours work to change the oil in your car, one of our typical most valued possessions. How many of us could do it but take it to someone else? Most of us. Same reasoning applies if you substitute mental effort or minor anguish for a little grubby oil and grease getting on you.

I used to have a cartoon showing some empty oil bottles, with a couple of feet and some asterisks sticking out from under a car with the caption "I skinned my knuckles, I burned my nose, and I got hot oil in my ear, but I saved five bucks!" That's how I tend to go. I can change the oil in my car, and I have on a number of occasions, but when possible, I'll pay the extra five bucks and let some other poor schmuck do it, and get hot oil in his ear. Except he won't, because he's down in a nice comfy pit instead of lying in a broiling parking lot discovering there's a bit of gravel right under him. It's a matter of how much my time is worth, and at what uses, and I'd rather spend an hour of my time doing just about anything else than buying oil and a filter, changing the oil, bottling it up, taking it over to the oil place (and hoping they're actually accepting it, instead of shut down to clean out the antifreeze some moron dumped in the oil tank), etc.

Publishing is a different matter. There are some things you can't do for yourself (proofreading), some things you might be able to do for yourself (formatting), and some nobody else can do for you (personal promotion). Out of those people able to sell their books to mainstream publishers, very few will get much more publicity than a listing. So one way or another, you're probably going to do at least some of the work yourself. The question becomes simply what percentage, and what work, you want to do, and what you want to delegate. That's different for different people.

[altworld]

The BookBrewer program is a copy and paste job, not a direct loading of a word doc. So all formating, styles, indents, images, breaks are lost. It creates a bare bones ePub file, slaps an ISBN on it (Which would cost an Author $25 if he did it himself) and them promises to put it in the Borders store... Oh, and on Amazon as well... All for the bargain price of $90 and allows you to take 70% commission on your sale too.

This is while, Pubit, Smashwords and DTP all allow the Indie author to directly load there formatted word doc and convert it with all formating intact. Although I do recommend reading through the Smashwords style guide to a get an optimised eBook format. And they do all this for... Free!!! (with a back end commission payment)

Smashwords will even assign you a ISBN for FREE if you put published by Smashwords in your eBook version. Pubit gives you a B&N numbers and Amazon is ASIN (I think) at no charge.

So, what is an indie author getting out of this arrangement with Borders/BookBrewer? An ePub file? And placement in the Borders eBook store that has been demonstrating limited traction in the marketplace. Another new and exciting way for an Indie Author to be parted from his money.