1) I've received some good advice on how to get M-Brane formatted for display on the Kindle. Unfortunately, all the PDF-to-Kindle methods are kinda shaky when there's much formatting involved. I got a somewhat readable result by using an iPhone/Mac app called Stanza. It was still too messed up to actually use it, though it was much better than what I got just by running it through Amazon's converter. If I had liked the way it displayed in Stanza, then it would have been an easy thing to make it display on Kindle (though it wasn't clear to me if I could upload the Stanza version to Amazon for publication or not). I also tried to simply save the original .docx file that contains M-Brane #1 as an .htm file. That worked, sort of, but it also screwed up the page layout too much to use it that way. I think that to get it onto Kindle, I am going to have to create a separate Kindle edition with much simpler formatting. Just what I needed: another new project.
2) I've been slowly reading Ian McDonald's Terminal Cafe lately. Slowly because I keep getting pulled away from it by other things, and its language demands close reading. I dig how McDonald frequently deals with non-Euro, non-American kinds of cultures in his stories. It's always kind of bugged me a little bit when I read about an inhabited planet in the far future that has somehow been colonized and dominated by Scandinavians (like Trondheim in Card's Speaker for the Dead, or Freiland in Dickson's Dorsai!). No offense to Scandinavians, but let's face it: right now in the present day, Europeans and Anglo-Euro-type North Americans are the smallest piece of the population pie, and getting smaller all of the time. Of that small wedge, Scandinavians are the thinnest sliver (total population of barely twenty million, about the number of Chinese in Shanghai). I do not see a future of human-colonized planets named Trondheim and Stockholm and Valhalla and New Sweden and Kobenhavn 2. Also, it beggars the imagination to think that by the time humans can colonize other planets, that we're going to do it along old Terran ethnic lines--Nords on this planet, Latinos on that one, etc. I sure hope that wouldn't happen.
Related Articles :
2 comments:
I haven't looked that far into it, but maybe Fictionwise is another outlet worth checking into.
http://www.fictionwise.com/publisherinfo.htm
Oh, and consider adding the Google Friend Connect to your site (I just added it to mine... in theory you get people to join your site, but right now it's just a way to show how few regular readers I have) :)
I wish you and your partner all the best in your endeavours. I'm a new writer who is currently employed, but not liking what I see happening in industry. Writing is something that I've always been able to do but was too brainwashed to assimilate into the corporate scene to follow up on.
Carl Wiley
http://www.eloquentbooks.com/TheRingOfKnowledge.html
Post a Comment