Incipient eBooks

I have started seriously tackling the work of turning my old novels into ebooks. Spent all day on Dad’s Nuke, and got far enough along that I carried on in the first pass of reformatting Kalifornia in the evening. My only plans at the moment are to do Kindle editions. One format has enough headaches, considering how many devices run the app. I might consider doing other versions at some point, depending on how fast I get at the work and how much interest there is in the Kindle versions. If there is little to no interest in the Kindle editions, then I probably won’t be spending a lot of time on versions that reach even fewer people.

The biggest headache I’m having at this point is around any kind of novel formatting. This will strongly discourage me from doing any adventurous type or layout experimentation in future self-publishing endeavors. On the other hand, when I’ve left this sort of thing to actual type professional, I’ve sometimes been disappointed in their work as well. Done well, typographic experiments are thrilling. They are rarely done well. (See my story “Roguelike” for an example of graphic designers doing the absolute minimum amount of work necessary to bring a typographic idea to life, so that something intended to be fun and funny just…lies there. (I have definitely been spoiled by my years of working in close collaboration with visual artists at Valve.))