1. We’re going through another round of debugging on the BC website. With luck, these tweaks will become visible in another week or so. Those who are checking in may also have noticed more books. There will be more in the coming weeks — quite a few more, actually. Now that the site’s approaching a more lifelike state (Frankenstein analogies come to mind), there’s more reason to keep uploading them.
2. In the meantime, we’ve added about a dozen to Barnes & Noble, and a few more to Amazon. I tried sending a big batch to Kobo (which in turn feeds several others, although two of the latter — Borders and Angus & Robertson — aren’t doing so well at the moment) but the bloody FTP malfunctioned. I fervently wish Kobo would implement something other than a user-unfriendly FTP feed! (Yes, it arguably enables larger batch uploads and metadata uptake, but if it doesn’t work and your rep doesn’t answer your e-mails, then there’s a bit of an issue, isn’t there?)
3. This probably shouldn’t need pointing out, but I’m going to do it anyway: not every BC title is going to be a match for every e-retail website we have access to. The ones I’m going to concentrate on in the near future are these: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Omnilit. (The latter provides our feed to the Apple iBookstore.) Weightless Books is probably more suited for fiction, so I’ll send certain titles their way (both BC and all of our S8P books). It’s all about matching, basically: you wouldn’t shop for porn in a Christian bookstore, to use an extreme example. We’re not pulling back from anything, just being sensible about where the market really is.
4. When the de la Cruz Family Danced is generating a certain amount of advance interest from reviewers, and I’m excited to see what they say about it. I have a good feeling about how this book will do.
5. I’m finished with the production version of the manuscript for Dispatches from the Peninsula: Six Years in South Korea, and what a book it has turned out to be. Chris Tharp, the author (aka
6. We’ve gone to contract with New Ventures, a very interesting independent UK press, to convert their backlist to e-books and distribute them. One of the things I like about this gig is the cool books that I learn about, that I might otherwise never have found on my own. Look for these to begin appearing in the coming weeks.
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