anyone here actually read ebooks?
i run a lit mag and i'm trying to determine if it's worth the significant extra effort to put epub & kindle out there.
they barely sell. i do much better with the print editions. i'm just not sure if the audience is small but loyal, or if digital feels like a bonus addon that people take but never actually read.
please give me your insights!!! i need perspective outside my own. :)
boost too, if you'd be so kind.
@pixelpaperyarn That's surprising. All the other indie authors I follow have reported the opposite, with their print sales being dwarfed by digital sales.
What about your production process requires extra effort for digital releases?
@jaycie i think people just like reading our stuff in print for some reason. we do have the stories up on the website as well (which is changing next year, so we'll see).
i start with print files, reformat for pdf, export that to epub (which has to get manually cleaned up because InDesign does weird formatting), and finally to kindle (which is a simple conversion).
i get clean html from the epub and that goes to the website, so i wouldn't be saving tons by dropping digital.
@pixelpaperyarn Yeah, it's not a universal rule.
I am surprised by the workflow. That sounds like the reverse order of what I usually see, including my own. But it works for you!
@jaycie it's graceful degradation in a publishing paradigm. 😆
it partly comes from my previous life as a print designer. i make it look really good in print first, and then slowly strip my pretty styling back down until i'm at raw text again.
in the process, i clean the text up so at the end, it's super clean.
@pixelpaperyarn Playing to your strengths! Conversely, I'm someone who drafts everything in Markdown and writes Ruby scripts to auto-generate PDFs. %D