Over the past three months, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 143 Kindle books. Over the past month, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.com has sold, it has sold 180 Kindle books. This is across Amazon.com’s entire U.S. book business and includes sales of hardcover books where there is no Kindle edition. Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.

- source: amazon press release

Let me sum it up:  Amazon has sold 143% as much digital books as hardcover books.  Can you imagine if they had included free Kindle books?  If you went out and picked up a $189 book reader, you certainly aren’t a cheapskate, but who doesn’t like free?  It seems that Amazon has become for books what iTunes was/is for music.  You can finally put all of your eggs in one big Amazon basket and not have to worry about your devices and data becoming obsolete anytime soon.

However, there is still one big, undeniably annoying difference, and that is DRM (Digital Rights Management) and its firm clutch on your copy of the book.  Now, before you check out on me for being a digital rights freak, hear me out.  When you first got your hands on a copy of The Hobbit or Pride and Prejudice, how did you do it?  Did you borrow it from a friend, or a relative?  I know I did.  What if your friend couldn’t loan you their copy because they had to keep it on their bookshelf in order to read Harry Potter?  If that were the case, you probably never would have gone on to buy the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or found out that you liked Sense and Sensibility way better.

With the Kindle, you buy a book, read it on your device, and keep it there forever.  You probably won’t lend your friend the Kindle, since you’ve had your nose buried in the latest Twilight book and you can’t let go.  When you find a book or an author that you like, how are you going to share it with a friend?  I personally hate to tell my friends to go out and gamble their hard-earned money on something they might or might not like, knowing that they probably won’t unless I beg them to.  The portability just isn’t there like it is with hardcover books.

Please, don’t read this as “Kindle is evil, down with Amazon!”  That is not the message I am trying to get across.  I just want you to think before you go down a road you might regret.  As an aspiring author, I can’t help but wonder what this will mean for me if I ever try to publish.  Sure, I could self-publish on the Kindle, but what will happen when my readers want to share my book with someone else?  I can only hope that Amazon will have come up with a solution by then and you will be spreading your favorite author’s works to everyone you meet.

These ideas are not original.  I practically stole them from a favorite author of mine, Cory Doctorow.  Please read more about the other side of the anti-copyright movement in the download page for his book Makers.  Heck, you might even want to download the book for free and see what he’s all about!

I find that while I love literature, I don’t have a whole lot of time to read. That means that when I actually do sit down and read, I have to really like the author of the novel/novella/article that I’m reading.  As it turns out, Robin Sloan and his unrefined prose captivates me.  It’s not so much the way he writes, but what he writes about.  Read on and hopefully you will see what makes him so special.

Robin Sloan, in few words, has what I want.  He works for one of the greatest (in my opinion) social media websites of the day (twitter.com).  He writes on a regular basis about some of the coolest ideas.  His blog heralds him as a Writer and Media Inventor, which basically means that he finds new technologies and formats to distribute his creations.  It is so cool to see how he can generate hype for a simple project such as a short story/novella.  He has a loyal following in which people make their own creations based on his works.  He is also currently looking at the iPad as his next format/technology to revolutionize and I am really excited about that.

robinsloan.com

Sloan’s favorite way to grab his reader’s interest is by writing a unique blend of sci-fi/fantasy, using the world we already live in as a springboard.  For instance, he likes to project Google into the future as a superpower, their crystal tower glistening like a beacon to the world.  He extends what we already know into his own twisted world.  Some people may not agree with his projections (if you can call them that), but it sure is entertaining.

One of the unique things about Robin Sloan is that you don’t have to go out and plunk down hard-earned cash to get a sample of his writing.  He is notorious for finding new ways to get people excited about his latest project, and he tends to release his work under the creative commons license so that anyone can get it and enjoy it.  Recently, he wrote a short story from start to finish on a plane ride from SFO to JFK.  He also put on a stunt where he wrote a mini-novella and used Kickstarter to gather a “posse of supporters.”  These stunts step way outside of the bounds of traditional publishing, which brings Sloan’s ideas closer to my heart.

Robin’s style isn’t that of a New York Times Best Seller (yet), but he entertains me with both his imaginative ideas and his creative marketing style.  Here are a few of my favorite works by Robin Sloan:

Mr. Penumbra’s Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store

Annabel Scheme

I hope you enjoy him as much as I do.

I finally did it.  I took the plunge and printed my entire NaNoWriMo novel on good old fashioned tree chunks.  That’s right, I’m going analog, folks!  According to a large amount of people on the NaNo forums, editing on paper is a whole lot easier and more rewarding.  They say that it allows you to read it through without getting your head stuck in the nitty gritty of your sentences.  I sure hope that’s right, because I really need to actually finish the story.  And I know without a doubt that I need to change the order of some scenes to make it flow better.  In short, it’s gonna be a long edit.  Now, all I have to do is find the motivation.

November came and went with a whirlwind of letters churning my brain to a pulp.  I’m glad it’s over.  I can’t wait for next November.

In the 6 months since I finished with my 50,004 word rough draft, I have done nothing with it.  As a matter of fact, I feel like I have only written about half of the story that I intended to write.  That means that I need to write more on top of editing what I have already written.  At this point, I really want to finish the story, but I also want to start planning for the next NaNo… life-permitting (ie work, newborn, etc…).

As with all stories, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens next.

And then there was my one class this semester.  I’m not complaining, since it is only one class, but my professor decided that he wanted to drop a couple of projects on us, since “I haven’t given you enough work”.  My point exactly.  Why didn’t NaNoWriMo come last month?

My story is coming along pretty well.  I will have a TON of editing to do after this is done, since a few people want to read my convoluted fantasy.  There will be a lot of plot twists, I think.  And none of them will make sense.  What matters is that I have been enjoying myself, and I really like my characters so far.

If you want to track my progress, just come back here daily and check out my word count on the top right side of this page.  I am currently far enough behind that I need to write twice as much as I have just to catch up.  But so is everyone else.  It’s the beauty of NaNoWriMo.  Now that this word count is well over 200, bordering 300, I must go and write some more of my novel.  Wish me luck.