Writing My First Ebook, A Work In Progress

WORLD HEADQUARTERS OF ‘CONSTERNATION,’ THE BLOGGING, WRITING, AND EBOOK PUBLISHING CONGLOMERATE. Note the unfinished manuscript and miscellaneous research piled on the desk at the bottom left; various diabetes testing stuff on the top shelf, with the dictionary; a bunch of unpaid bills in envelopes on the shelf at top center; a few reference books and family photos on the same shelf to the right; and last but not least, my trusty but obsolete Apple laptop, sitting on a pile of phone books.

Hello again, patient readers. Yes, I’m guilty of neglecting this poor blog. My other blog is a virtual orphan.

My excuse: I started writing an Ebook around the first of November, and the project is about to consume me. Progress has been slower than my unrealistic expectations. I’ve been working almost constantly, sometimes forgetting to eat. Living and working in the same one-room apartment is not the ideal situation. It’s easy to lose perspective and hard to self-regulate. On the other hand, it helps me keep focused on the book.

To answer the obvious question: It’s a work of fiction, approaching novel length. It doesn’t fall into any particular genre. I’m hoping it will be a fast-moving, suspenseful story of political and economic crisis. That’s all I’m going to say about that for now.

Writing a book is more daunting than I thought.

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Ebook and Indie Book Revolution Is Reflected in Blogs

English: Latest Kindle (2011) showing Esperant...

Image via Wikipedia

Greetings, patient readers and friends. Yes, I’ve been neglecting ConsterNation while I work on writing an e-book. Thankfully, the end is in sight.

E-books might be the new blogging. Writers flocked to blogging when it became popular about six years ago, and now writers are flocking to e-books. I’m not suggesting that e-books will replace blogging. I’m sure that won’t happen. However, I think e-books have already affected the evolution of the blogosphere. At the height of the blogging craze, many of the most successful and popular blogs were blogs about blogging. Many gurus offered advice on blogging, and some even suggested that a lot of money could be made in blogging, if one followed their advice.

Something similar is happening now with blogs about e-book publishing.  Continue reading

eBooks and Indie Books Might Be the Greatest Revolution Since Printing

Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type and the printing press, in the 15th Century, was the most revolutionary development (my opinion) in the history of technology, the history of communication, the history of everything.

Using moveable type, a printer created lines of words and sentences. Wikimedia Commons photo

Mr. Gutenberg could never have imagined offset printing, the printing revolution of the 20th Century, so he definitely would not understand or believe the advent of the eBook, which could be a defining revolution of the 21st Century.

After all the technological revolutions of my lifetime (** See “A Personal Perspective,” below), I do not understand — and can hardly believe — the sudden rise of the eBook. Nonetheless, this week I purchased my first eBook.

Just another stack of books. Wikimedia Commons photo

I had associated eBooks with the development of digital book readers, starting with Amazon’s Kindle. (The price of the Kindle has dropped like a rock as competitors emerged, putting the technology within reach of even frugal folks like me.) With a Kindle or one of its imitators, you can download books, newspapers, magazines, etc., and carry them around in a small, handheld device, to be read at will. Amazon boasts that the Kindle could hold a small library of books.     Continue reading