Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Do you Ebook?


I read Konrath's take on the new self-published ebooks and I'm curious, a little afraid of it, but curious just the same.
I have one story about a woman reincarnated as a dog and it's told from the dog's perspective...how would I ever sell this to an agent??? I don't know how to put a positive marketing spin on it so I was thinking of Amazon. (Actually it's a lot more complicated than a reincarnated dog, but it's hard to blurb)
I really like this story. It's based on the fact that a soul mate doesn't have to be a romantic interest but just a higher connection.
However what holds me back is the fact that to go up as an ebook it would have to be perfect...beyond perfect. Every word, punctuation mark, paragraph would have to be absolutely perfect.
I'm not sure if I'm up to that much perfection.
Anyone got any ebooks they did themselves? Where did you publish? How did it work out?

3 comments:

Spy Scribbler said...

That's a pretty big hook you've got there. I would try to use it to see if I could get an agent and/or publisher first, most likely. If that didn't work, I certainly wouldn't let it collect dust.

Some of my older, small-press published books are put together worse than some self-published books. (They were online magazines, so they ventured into print and ebooks much like the self-published did.) They still find an audience and sell.

I'm not saying perfection isn't important--believe me, I wholeheartedly believe it is and that one should strive for it. (Why else did I spend five years obsessing about teaching myself to copyedit?)

I'm just saying... why not find it a home? Some of my worst stuff, oldest, sloppiest, just EMBARRASSINGLY bad stuff is my most popular. (I mentioned I sold my first thing, right? *cringe*)

But that's just me. Stories are meant to be told. They become something else out there, and you never know who needs to read it. If you need to hire someone to edit and someone to copyedit, no biggie. Go for it.

Charles Gramlich said...

I did Killing Trail through Kindle and Smashwords and I like how it came out. It wasn't quite "perfect" for sure, but it was actually better than some of the professionally published items I've seen available as ebook.

Janna Leadbetter said...

I agree with Natasha, it's a very strong hook. What a premise! Don't give up on your more traditional routes of publication; maybe you can stew more on how to present it to agents and/or publishers.

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