New experiment: Amazon Kindle Wiki

Now that I am starting to get a hang of the Kindle, and my friends are slowly embracing it, I decided it was time to put together some kind of online reference.

The obvious candidate for this is some kind of wiki. I have setup a Google wiki at http://wiki.pedrovera.com to see how that goes. Right now the wiki only holds general information about the device, but it also has a section where you can download my two novels in the Kindle format, plus plain text and PDF.

The Kindle version is far from perfect, mostly because the conversion tool that I used is still in beta. I would really like for Amazon to release the full specification of their digital publishing platform, for example, the proper way to tag for title and author.

Don't tell me it is free and then ask me to pay for a different thing as a condition

Lulu.com is advertising a "limited offer" for a distribution package that includes a free ISBN. ISBNs are usually $125 when you buy them one at a time, and you can only buy them in batches of powers of ten. I thought that it sounded too good to be true, after all, I had to buy my first two ISBNs.

Well, the reason that it sounded too good to be true is that there is no way to get this free ISBN unless you purchase a hardcopy of your book from Lulu.com. If you don't buy the hardcopy, you don't get to move to the final step, where the ISBN is submitted to bowker.com.

No free ISBN for you.

Why not just advertise the package for whatever it costs to print one book? Th end result is the same, but you are not lying to people.

Now available in the Amazon Kindle Store

Both of my novels are now available at Amazon's Kindle Store:

Book #1: Shining Star, first published July 2004

Book #2: Pulling Strings, first published January 2006

If you are either published, or self published, and you are interested in publishing your books through the Kindle, all you need to do is join the Amazon Digital Text Platform. It is free, you retain full ownership of your work, and the royalties are no worse than what you can get elsewhere. I did it because I can't turn down the opportunity to open one more sales channel for my books.

From the technical standpoint, the process is very simple. For each of your books you do the following:

1. Fill a section with the ISBN (as far as I can tell, it isn't mandatory) and a few more details about the book, including five categories plus a list of keywords. You also upload a cover image.

2. Upload your final copy of the book, they accept most common formats. I tried with MS Word, HTML and PDF. I got more control by using PDF. Amazon provides plenty of documentation for those that would like more control of the formatting.

3. Use the book preview utility to verify that the book is rendered the way you want it to.

4. Enter your sale price.

5. Hit publish.

You are done. From the moment that you hit publish, to your book first showing in search results you can expect anywhere from 12 to 72 hours. One of my two books made it to the search results in ess than 24 hours, the second one is up and running but it is not showing up in searches yet.

A cool thing I noticed is that since HTML gives you the most control, you don't really have to waste time agonizing over your layout and then generate the perfect PDF. I was using Open Office 2.4 (had to downgrade from 3.0, it ran like shit even on this Mac Book Pro 2.33) and I remember how much trouble it was to get the stupid formatting of the headers, footers, pagination, etc. done right. Now I know this is trivial, so I can go back to writing and not having to worry about formatting.

Things I did not like:

1. Some things are done with AJAX functionality that actually works better in Safari than in Firefox, a first for me. Uploads in Firefox worked maybe half of the time.

2. The cover upload failed about half of the time.

3. I did not see a way to buy an ISBN. ISBNs can be bought directly from Bowker for $125. You can get them as cheap as $50 from other sources, but then you won't have control over the publisher name listed with the ISBN. I got my two ISBNs through Lulu.com, it was less than $100 each.

Except for those three things, it is pretty nifty.

Shoot Him if He Runs, by Stuart Woods

Stuart Woods is one of those great writers that somehow you just never hear enough about. Maybe he gets looked down at because he writes a lot, or because he writes detective novels. It doesn't matter, he always delivers a good read.

Usually my problem with his books is that I read them too quickly. Shoot Him if He Runs is the first Stuart Woods book in ages that took me more than a day to read, and this was because of work. The book sat on my desk for months and I just could not find time to sit down and just read.

This book is a crossover of the Stone Barrington and Holly Barker series. Somebody that they had expected to be dead is back, and he must be dealt with before he has a chance to screw with the sitting president's bid for reelection. It is the usual Woods, a very easy read and extremely entertaining. I try to make a point of not trying to overanalyze whatever it is that I am reading, so I can enjoy the plot twists better. In this case, even if I couldn't help myself but to guess a little bit, I still got caught with the plot twists at the end. Pretty damn good book.