Back in 2010 I wrote a piece for this blog on The Evolution of E-Books , and it amazes me how much has changed since. New publishers. New technology. New outlets for sales. I was an early pioneer in the e-book evolution. My first e-book was published in 1997 with The Fiction Works , just one of a handful of companies doing e-books at the time. The publisher was sure that there would soon be kiosks in shopping malls where people would be able to buy electronic or print-on-demand copies of books and we would all get rich. That did not happen. There wasn't even a dedicated reading device until a year later when The Rocket eBook came out in 1998, so orders were fulfilled by sending disks to customers so they could read the book on a computer. Not a convenient or pleasant way to read a book. Now that handful of publishers has grown to hundreds, and I have had good business relationships with  Books We Love , Uncial Press , Venture Galleries, and now Untreed Reads.   ...

… and Other Life Lessons . Today we talk to Jodi Carmichael, the newest author at Little Pickle Press about her first publication, a middle grade novel about a young boy with Asperger’s Syndrome. Dani:   Jodi, how did you come to write Spaghetti? Jodi: It’s a funny story. I was asleep and Connor, the 8-year-old main character in Spaghetti , woke me up chatting about his day. He wouldn’t stop talking until I typed out everything he had to say. It was like I was channeling him. It was the single coolest experience I’ve had as a writer. Dani: Did you submit it to various publishers? Jodi: Only to a few. Connor feels like my third child and holds a special place in my heart, so I was careful about which publisher I contacted. Plus receiving rejections on his story felt more personal, like my own child was being rejected. Dani: What were your expectations around getting the book published? Jodi: I’d read a lot about how greatly publishing has changed over ...

By Dani Greer, Chief Red Pencil When I first heard about Peg Brantley’s new novel, The Missings , I wanted to know the Gore Meter Rating. Most of you know my weak heart can’t handle much more than a good cozy mystery when it comes to spine-tingling reads. It turns out the first chapter was about as gory as it got. The thrill level was definitely alive and well in this fast-paced novel though. But what thrilled me most of all is something we don’t see all that often in a plot-driven read: great character development. All of us feel fear, but I recently read in Psychology Today that we are born with only a few, such as fear of falling and fear of starvation. That means humans have acquired a lot of other fears through learned behavior. Some of the most common ones include fear of insects; fear of water or fire; fear of public speaking; fear of rejection; fear of nuclear war; fear of success or failure. In The Missings , Brantley plays on common fears many of us ha...

In the case of e-books, Digital Rights Management (DRM) is a type of technology, also known as a digital lock, employed by publishers to control how an e-book is used after it has been purchased. But digital copy protection has been around in software and gaming circles for much longer than in the publishing industry, and it is from these sectors that the greatest criticisms, and lessons learnt, can be found. Firstly, the point of DRM (and the benefits of using it) is to protect your e-book from unauthorised sharing, copying, or resale – in other words, it protects your copyright. Or does it? According to critics who have been through the same issue in the gaming and other software industries, DRM is ridiculously easy to crack (i.e. hacking for negative purposes), and is also a target for crackers who enjoy the (albeit apparently slight) challenge of disabling a digital lock . The worse news, however, is that once the digital lock on your book has been cracked the file is usually ...

This week the Blood-Red Pencil is launching a series of posts about e-books. What do you know about this emerging segment of the publishing market? Take this quiz to see if you're up to speed! True or False? 1. Kobo, Ectaco, Nook, and Aluratek are all names of Native American tribes. 2. E-books still haven’t quite caught on. 3. E-books will replace print books. 4. E-books are cheaper to produce. 5. E-books are mostly bought by young techies. 6. All digital readers can read all e-books. 7. Authors make less money from e-books. 8. Digital reading technology will evolve and render currently owned e-books unreadable. 9. E-publishing is only for book-length material. 10. Self-publishing, subsidy, non-subsidy, vanity, royalties, reseller: the age of e-books will simplify the publishing process and negate the need to learn all these terms. Answers: 1. False. Okay, I was trying to throw a bone to all the rank beginners out there. (Like me, before I researched the...