Hm. Sorry for being *extra* late. Not only am I late getting out this morning, but I got back and forgot to publish it.
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1) Epubs are for those who’d really prefer not to support Amazon, or who want to keep their files on multiple machines, backed up, without worrying that Amazon is going to pull a 1984 on them.
2) The problem with the epub display is most likely in the default CSS applied by the viewer – and as that varies from viewer to viewer… I hate to break it to you, but you’re *screwed*. And just why the heck do you seriously want that much control over how the book is displayed? When I get it, I’ve got my viewer set up to over-ride your settings for paragraph indents, line spacing, font, and likely most everything else. I *hate* this modern thing HTML/XHTML/PDF/FLASH/CSS/etc has evolved into where the graphics designers do their damnedest to control every blippin’ pixel on your screen. It’s *MY DAMNED SCREEN!*. IIRC, you have default CSS, then the file’s CSS gets applied, and then the user’s CSS overlays.
Yeah. And I don’t really care if you override the display. I’m not worried about people who understand what’s going on.
What bugs me is an ebook formatted with paragraph indents AND a blank line between paragraphs. I don’t like seeing that on the page myself and I can’t fix it without spending too much time fiddling about in a file that should have been correctly handled to begin with.
What pisses me off about it is that I then get nasty-grams about “improperly formatted ebooks.”
Altho, on the grand scheme of things, I’m getting complaints about valid grammar being wrong so this shouldn’t be that big a deal.
Oh, and yes, I know many people think the Oxford comma — that final comma in a list just before the “and”) — is generally construed as unnecessary. I’m not one of those people. 🙂
I was taught it was optional – neither with or without is wrong. Grammar nazis get on my nerves. There is a level of stupidity up with which I will not put, but in a novel of 100,000 words, I’m not going to whine & moan over a couple of dozen typos (error rate – less than 1/10th of a percent!) and/or stylistic points of grammar. Sure, consistent misuse of to/too/two or their/there/they’re, I’ll say something, but nitpicky like comma or no comma before the and in a sentence? They should get stuffed.
Re #1: What some authors do is say “please buy my book on Amazon; if you want a different format, e-mail me a copy of the receipt”. That way, they can centralize all their sales on Amazon, and thus get higher in the charts, but the reader still gets an epub/whatever. I guess this isn’t what Nathan’s doing because he isn’t going the Amazon Select or whatever it’s called route, but it’s a valid strategy. I guess it works better, mind you, on your existing fan-base. Non-Amazon-using not-yet-fans won’t see your book, so you might lose out on a few sales that way.
If you don’t want to support Amazon, I don’t know. That’s harder to resolve. Then you probably just have to resign yourself to missing out on a lot of titles not available anywhere else.
Re #2: If you can and do override formatting, Tara, you are not the audience for Nathan getting the formatting looking good. Your settings will override, so it doesn’t matter to you. It matters to the (presumably?) majority who will just use their e-reader as it comes out of the box, without customization.
That said, I thought Nathan meant that it was double-spaced (a blank line between each line of text). If it’s really just a blank line between paragraphs, I say let them live with it. 🙂
Listening to this episode this morning, I have a couple of comments/ideas:
* South Coast: Point of view shifts and major “problems”: In my opinion … you should not try to make all your books read as if you wrote them today. South Coast is a great yarn, and I think it’s highly enjoyable as it is now. I think if you perform surgery on it until you’ve got rid of all the “problems”, it might lose what makes it shine. It’s possible I’m wrong (Scott Sigler’s done major re-writes and then re-podcast the new version on a couple of books, and they’ve come out as good or better). Then again, it’s a lot of work you could save yourself if you can make your peace with the existing text. 🙂
* Omnibus editions: Sounds good! 🙂 I strongly suggest letting the (re)published individual works be in the market at least 6 months, maybe a year, before publishing them as part of an omnibus edition, though. That way the omnibus editions might pick up some customers who passed on the individual titles, but won’t take away (many) customers from the individual titles.
It’s been a long time since I listened to South Coast, but I remember some really good POV shifts.
I had no problems at all with the shifts, and liked the extra perspective they gave. Then again, on ebooks, I also like blank likes between my paragraphs. 😉